RICK AMOR

Tony Palmer Art Dealer, Sydney
Private collection, Melbourne; purchased from the above in 1999

Rick Amor Paintings 1999, Tony Palmer Art Dealer, Sydney, cat. 10, cover illus.
Rick Amor: The Sea, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, 24 September - 27 October 2002, illus.

Framed in a dark timber box frame. Original stretcher and has not been lined. Overall very good original condition. UV inspection reveals minor retouching to very top edge above the telegraph pole.
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Rick Amor and Alfred Hitchcock share in common their powerful use of imagery. Evening by the Sea is a perfect example. Amor engages the enigmatic as much as he employs oil paint to do so. And with Amor and Hitchcock there is always the unexpected, or, the expectation of such. The surreal plays with the super real and the dream sequence, and anything can happen. Threat is in balance with a sense of adventure, of being taken outside oneself in a surrounding that is utterly of the everyday. So it is in Amor's paintings of Frankston, where he grew up - so seaside suburban, and at the same time so extraordinary. Evening is always a good time for that kind of thing. Shadows and fading light let the imagination play, sight moves from its servitude to rational observation, and precise discernment to fantasy and irrational fun. Phantoms, hidden by day, now emerge, caught in the windows of the store to the right - the theme of the Watcher that Amor indulges. As in a Hitchcock, there is a palpable feeling of being observed. Moreover, Evening by the Sea is the set of silent theatre, akin to the art of American Realist, Edward Hopper, especially the buildings and peopled shopfront windows. Memories are evoked and visualised, shadows of past times and recollection.

In late 1989 Amor turned to painting images and memories of his youth in Frankston. The interrelated series began with Town by the Sea, 1989-90, which has an affinity with Evening by the Sea through motifs of isolated figures, the Watcher, and the articulation of the architecture. Perhaps the distant walking figure is his mother, more prominently placed in Town by the Sea. While much of his work is autobiographical, and the Frankston paintings in particular, personal history is held at arm's length in a kind of detached ambivalence, giving an edge to the works enigmatic nature. Amor's handling of lights and darks is spectacular, here surely a metaphorical touch in the darkness of the foreground - the past - contrasted with the lighter landscape and sky beyond. The chiaroscuro, especially the handling of light in Sister Patricia, 1995, another Frankston painting, is superb. But is its stillness invaded by a spectral touch through its long shadows? The Beach at Evening (Expectation), 1995 is filled with the contradictory drama of several levels of expectation, characteristic of so much of the artist's best work. Evening by the Sea resonates with time, past shadows of melancholia and images of solitude giving way to the brightness beyond. Such is the narrative of his splendid paintings.