Nordic Rainbow

Nordic Rainbow: from the Diamond Valley Shire Collection catalogue 1991

“Nordic Rainbow” which was acquired in 1987 from special funding made available for the purchase of work by local artists. It is a large canvas of light and colour in which impact of the work is not so much from the single image of the rainbow as from the way the paint has been applied in dramatic, broad and gestural brush strokes. The luminous fluorescent colours which sweep across a light infused and atmospheric ground of subtly glazed underpainting, evoke a sense of infinity, of boundlessness. In spite of its apparent simplicity, the work contains subtle variations such as the broad painterly veils of colour which soften the vibrant blues, yellows and greens, thus dissolving the iridescent rainbow into delicate mists of colour and integrating the image with the ground. It is undoubtedly a seductive work in which the artist has expressed a sensuous delight in the painted surface and provided the viewer with a lyrical and poetic form of abstraction.