Port Phillip Points of View - Julian Twigg
Ships on water, not usually something to get a person excited, however Julian Twigg manages to take the “ordinaire” and bring it to life. Solid textural water renditions and skies almost abstract in nature. To top it off a great selection of images, many small and larger works.
Occasionally I looked and wondered if some were too simplistic in approach, but then again seeing so many together can do that. Of note a few had what would normally be (to me) awkward colour combinations (Pink crests of texture with green water colour…) but it works.
A quick search on the net found this review…
3-22 Feb ‘09
Australian Galleries
35 Derby Street Collingwood“If we look out onto Port Phillip Bay”, says Robert Hollingworth, artist and former lecturer at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, “there is something we will never see - it is an image”. He is talking specifically with an ex-pupil in mind: Julian Twigg, who commenced a Diploma of Visual Art there in 2000.
Twigg’s paintings of ships and cargo vessels are increasingly becoming rather iconic in art circles: blocky vessels chug along the ports of Melbourne, Geelong and New South Wales, integrating into their environment, becoming part of the sea, sky or city horizon around them.
Perspective and detail are not part of Twigg’s repertoire. As Hollingworth explains, such valued devices in Western art only eliminate any semblance of reality, denying objects from the natural process of “becoming” with their surroundings - the very basis of reality. “[Twigg] doesn’t paint ships and ocean” he declares, “… He paints shipness and oceanity“
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