HOWARD ARKLEY

In their perceptive monograph on Howard Arkley, Ashley Crawford and Ray Edgar referred to the French modernist painter, Fernand Léger's use of 'pure colour incorporated into a geometric design… realized to a maximum', employed by Arkley in his 1990 painting, Shadow Factories.¹ This was one of a number of works on the theme of the same title, painted by Arkley between 1988 and 1994. What is quite remarkable about them, including the present painting, is that Arkley was able to transform the architectural ugliness and choking smoke and fumes of factories into something quite wondrous in colour and inventive form. However, his inspiration was not one of environmental concern, rather the line from a short story by Peter Carey and the 'shadow factories' he saw cluttering the perimeter of Melbourne – '[Others] point to the advantages of the smoke: the beautifully coloured patterns in the clouds which serve as a reminder of the happiness to be obtained from a fully realized shadow'.² Arkley was captivated: 'The words just latched onto my brain and they wouldn't let go.. They were just poetry, they were beautiful and said so much. I did a dozen paintings out of the inspiration of that one sentence.' ³ From pollution to the colours of the rainbow is an enormous jump, and Arkley made it in harmony with the monumentality of forms that touches on grandeur. Of immaculate surfaces and definition, this and other paintings in the series have an inner glow – they almost fluoresce.

1. Leger F., 'Modern Architecture and Colour' [1946], in his Functions of Painting, Edward Fry (ed.), London, 1973; quoted in Crawford A., and Edgar R., Spray: The Work of Howard Arkley, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1995, p. 97.
2. Carey P., 'Report on the Shadow Industry', The Fat Man in History, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1987, pp. 91-92; quoted in Crawford and Edgar, op. cit., p. 97.
3. Arkley, quoted ibid.