JOHN COBURN

Corporate collection, Sydney

(possibly) Kim Bonython's Hungry Horse Gallery, Sydney, 12 - 13 September 1966

Alan Rozen, The Art of John Coburn, Ure Smith, Sydney, 1979 p. 18 (ill. p. 51, plate 17)
Nadine Amadio, John Coburn: Paintings, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1988, p. 64

This work is not lined and has it's original stretcher. There is a scratch mark approximately 3cm in length in the lower grey section of the painting. Some minor scuff marks lower left - would recommend a light surface clean.
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Throughout his long career, John Coburn's work swung backwards and forwards between formal extremes of elaborate, decorative complexity and pared-back, meditative simplicity.  However, both approaches involved a most sensitive and refined approach to colour, and both sought in some way to express the artist's faith, his sense of the ineffable, the spiritual. 

During the early 1960s Coburn employed a baroque vocabulary of multiple flame, palm-leaf and bird-wing shapes, but 1966 saw a severe reduction.  Paintings such as Dark Descent, Desert Ritual and Cardinal employ only a handful of individual shapes, disposed across burnt orange grounds.  Also in this more minimal Canberra group (Coburn was teaching at the Canberra Technical College at the time) are the two versions of Africa from 1967 and 1968. 

Writing of the slightly earlier Temple II, Alan Rozen has described how 'the radiant sun disc shimmers in its incandescent sky and the whole painting becomes symbolic of some deep-rooted ancient and primal religiousness.'  He continues: 'Africa I is less religiously universal but posseses a similar innate ability to stir some deep-seated primordial instinct within us.  In both works the power of Coburn's colour is harnessed to large simple shapes and seems fitting to resolve the combination of quieter colours and symbolic shapes.  In these exquisitely coloured compositions the slightest change in colour, tone or shape, would bring the subtlety of the compositions to an end by destroying the clarity between colour and form.'¹

Typically, the artist himself was a little more blunt and matter-of-fact, explaining the works' design as 'very simple, direct shapes with the sun dominating.  I feel that they are based to some degree on primitive art shapes.  They could be Aboriginal but I saw them in this case as African art and I called the painting Africa...'²

The second version of the work, Africa II (Private collection, Melbourne), employs exactly the same forms but arranged in a slightly different sequence and within a different tonal and chromatic structure. 

1. Alan Rozen, The Art of John Coburn, Ure Smith, Sydney, 1979 p. 18
2. John Coburn, quoted in Nadine Amadio, John Coburn: Paintings, Craftsman House, Sydney, 1988, p. 64