The works in Ian Grant’s exhibition ‘Figure and Landscape’ depict a recognizable world without showing a specific reality.
The figure and landscape paintings in this show can be extended into the notion of 'tronie', a 17th Century Dutch term categorising paintings of human images, often showing a specific activity, such as reading or washing. They offered a potentially open narrative for the viewer without connection to the specific subject identity. Well-known examples would include Vermeer's 'Girl with a Pearl Earring' and 'Girl in a Red Hat'.
When walking through the Australian landscape it’s easy to see a plethora of artist's poetic responses to its phenomenal enveloping grandeur, but there are very few that have truly mastered the evocation of stillness in a holistic sense. Ian Grants landscape’s remind us of the fundamental beauty in nature which lure and inspire, he cleverly draws us into a meditative field to witness a hill or a single tree dissolve into a violet twilight. Ian Grant is simply a true master of painting.
- Steven Harvey
Grant extends the concept of tronie beyond images of people to include images of still-life and landscape. The archetypes and scenes of these images become uncanny in that they are both familiar but different. This opens a narrative space which the viewer can complete.
Ian Grant
Dark Field, 2018
acrylic on linen
91.5 x 91.5 cm
Ian Grant
Grassland Pattern, 2018
acrylic on linen
92 x 92 cm
My fifteen paintings in this exhibition are about something other than site-specific landscape or person- specific figure imaging, where those specifics guide our response. I've removed these defining factors of recognition to develop an evocative and contemplative stillness across images of both figure and landscape.
I've been painting non site-specific landscapes for some years, attempting to find the silence, the stillness of a place, rather than the specific details of it. But it wasn't until I began working with figure imaging that I became fully aware of the connection between this approach to landscape and a similar approach to figuration. I had, for some time, been very much aware of the 17th century Dutch ‘tronie’ tradition of non- specific referencing and, in these paintings, I have applied this tradition to both landscape and figure.
I've stripped back, I've blurred, to encourage these paintings to leave space for that which can't be clearly defined, but, hopefully, is felt in our experience with them.
- Ian Grant