Patrick Grieve: Reparation and Adrift

OPENING NIGHT: FRIDAY the 17th of JANUARY, 2025, 5.30-7PM

GUEST SPEAKER: BRENDON GALE, inaugural CEO of the Tasmania Football Club

"Patrick’s paintings are exquisitely articulated, more simply Pat is a master craftsman who appreciates colour, texture, light, shade and possesses a lifetime professional knowledge of paint and brush and charcoal and graphite."

 

"I enjoy these paintings as they speak to me of Tasmania, our seasons and landscape with a ravishing brilliance and refreshing truth. The openness of land, the brutal harshness of compressed island space, the simple splendour of our nature with its wonderful variance of warmth and cold. It is this wonderfully attuned combination between vista and abstraction, between land, sky and meadow, and the absolute painterly energy on the canvas, that the creative magic, as if the poet wielding a mesmerising brush, conveys a humanistic narrative."

-  Dr Malcolm Bywaters, Academic Director , UTAS

In one way these works had their origin in the year I was born.

My cousin Ian, drowned at the mouth of the Cam River at Somerset in 1969. He was a much-loved nephew of my mother. My mother, Alice, cherished an old guitar that was given to her as a keepsake to remember her nephew.

As a child I tried to play this guitar, but it always felt foreign in my hands and somehow my capacity to make music was always out of reach, just beyond my understanding and skill.

Without knowing what I was doing or the consequences of my actions, I wound the strings so tight that the sound board split and popped away from the main body of the instrument.

When my mother found the guitar, she never said a word to me or ever discussed it. But I knew that it upset her deeply.

My mother died many years ago and the broken guitar came into my possession again. It sat in our house as a useless reminder of the past, until my wife convinced me to have it repaired. Our two children both have a fantastic quality to make music from nothing. Both are now young adults, and the guitar was to be theirs, to play and remember their grandmother.

Repairing the guitar started me thinking about my childhood in Somerset on the beautiful northwest coast and the beach at the Cam River. The beach that bordered the unpredictable Bass Strait. The same Bass Strait that claimed my cousin’s life and that always made me feel like an unwelcome visitor.

When I was four, we moved away from the water’s edge to a farm in the coastal hinterland. Up until now my work has always been about depicting the coastal farmland of the North-West. The patterns and colours of the crops and fields from Flowerdale to Sassafras are comforting to me. The body of water that is Bass Strait has always been just beyond reach, pushed into the background or at my back.
As a child at the water’s edge at Somerset I was always struck with an uneasy feeling of dread, unsure of what to make of that seemingly endless moving mass.

This show is perhaps about redressing the balance between the land and the sea. Some of these paintings are my first full scale depiction of the sea. A sea that is a constant northern borderline, a boundary marker to the beautiful landscape.

It could signify a turning point in my work, and I feel the same sense of unease, of being alone, adrift, perhaps lost without a lifeline just as that child did in the shallows at Somerset beach.

 - Patrick Grieve, 2024

Patrick Grieve, one of Tasmania’s most notable and highly sought after landscape painters is renowned for richly coloured renditions of his home of the North-West Coast of Tamania.  His work is held in numerous private and public collections within Australia and overseas including Parliament House Canberra, The Macquarie Group, Artbank, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, University of Tasmania, Devonport Gallery and the Burnie Regional Art Gallery. 

view past exhibitions by Patrick Grieve