Evening Embers, 1995, Tim Storrier
Acrylic on canvas, 183cm x 305cm
Provenance: Philip Bacon Gallery, Brisbane. Corporate Collection, Melbourne. Joel Fine Art, Melbourne. Private Collection, Sydney. Menzies Fine Art, Melbourne.
Exhibited: Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane 1997.
One of Australia’s most prominent symbolic landscape painters, Tim Storrier was the winner of the 2012 Archibald Prize and the 2014 Packing Room Prize. Study tours to both the Middle East and Central Australia inspired Storrier’s passion for expansive panoramas and isolated townships, triggering his most vital works. Camping out amongst the scenes he sets to reproduce, he paints symbolic and deeply evocative pieces of the remote environments he experiences firsthand. His work is held by the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; most state galleries, several regional and tertiary collections and internationally by MOMA, New York (1).
Evening Embers, part of the Burning Log collection, unifies the fascination Storrier has for the prime forces of fire, water and air. In Evening Embers, as in other works of the series, Storrier's depictions of burning logs and fiery ropes offer a metaphoric and symbolic vehicle for the artist. The vast panorama and complex arrangement of the burning logs, almost anthropomorphic in their snaking forms and fracturing bark, form the vehicle for Storrier's study of fire in the Australian interior as an eternal symbol of both life and temporality, passion and purification, guilt and redemption. (L van Nunen, Point to Point, Sydney, 1987, p.77)