Collection leads: John Scurry—small paintings

John Scurry is acclaimed as a painter of quietly composed interiors and enigmatic landscapes. This exhibition of recent, and to date unseen small paintings, took its lead from a major painting of 1981 by Scurry in the Geelong collection. 

Scurry stated that these small works developed initially from the process of an end-of-day cleaning up of his palette to arrive at an unexpected accumulated dense tone of oil colour—‘the remains of the day as it were’. The small works began as a playful and non-directed application of paint to postcards in Scurry’s studio.

While initially there was no conscious intention of forming a particular image, over subsequent paintings a more considered engagement took over as innately atmospheric landscape images presented themselves to Scurry’s eye, and became the dominant direction in each work.

This exhibition brought into the public realm what to this point had been a private work; separate but related visual territory to Scurry’s usual practice.