SADDLE, 1982
TIM STORRIER
mixed media and watercolour on board
84.0 x 84.0 cm
signed and dated lower right: Storrier 82
Private collection, Queensland, acquired directly from the artist c.1982
Addressing Storrier’s series of Saddle constructions and paintings, Catharine Lumby wrote in 2000:
‘The artist uses mixed- media constructions to illustrate the rudimentary tools dangling from a surveyor’s saddle. The compositions are laid out over faint numbered and gridded squares which might equally be the ground for an artistic sketch or map. From a distance, it is often unclear which elements of the work are pieces of collage and which are sketched or painted directly on to the canvas. At the heart of these works is a tension between illusionism and expression – between painted object and painting, between artefact and artwork. This friction between the empirical and the romantic eye, made explicit in these works, is one that, more subtly, structures the composition of Storrier’s entire oeuvre. On one level, all Storrier’s paintings are tightly structured, highly designed compositions. On another, however, they are always aspiring to capture more elusive, emotive and even spiritual, aspects of the artist’s relationship to his subject.’1
1. Lumby, C., Tim Storrier. The Art of the Outsider, Craftsman House, Sydney, 2000, pp. 38 – 39