Art2Muse

Artworks available to view in Sydney

Into white

“I don’t like bright colours. The Chinese manage to do their finest paintings with no colour at all… To me there’s something vulgar about coloured things”. - Ian Fairweather 1973

Into white is a collection of landscape paintings. The works depict my disparate sense of home: the Finger Wharf on Sydney’s iconic harbour, my studio in the Southern Tablelands of NSW, and mountains covered in snow. They are a collection of spatial, or landscaped, self-portraits.

Stylistically, this collection borrows from, treads broadly among, and pays tribute to, many of my favourite Australian artists. A walk through the 20th century Australian section of the Art Gallery of New South Wales reveals the painterly exuberance of Boyd’s shrubbery, the collapsed depth and abstracted forms of Passmore and Fairweather, the subtle naivety of Williams’ mark-making, the calligraphic touch of Upward, the drawn paintings and voluminous texture of Tomescu, and of course, the affected treatment of Whiteley’s Sydney harbour.

While informed by these varied artists and styles, my paintings are bound by their common suppression of colour. They privilege the undercoat. They resurrect the provocative early 20th century idea that a painting is, at its core, a blank plane, upon which the principles of abstraction and minimalism continue to rest. The works comment on what it means to create a pristine, unmediated contemporary landscape, whether natural or man-made. They exalt line, resist form, push colour back and move into white.

- John Sheehy 2010

John Sheehy does not own a paintbrush.

For this Sydney-based landscape painter, pigment moves from tin to hand to canvas in his unique screwdriver drawings. Sheehy's works are a composite of gestural, semi-figurative base coats, translucent top coats, and subtle, exploratory carvings. These drawn paintings engage the services of varied inanimate objects (within reach from the easel) which bear pointed tips or blades. The resultant combination of structural abstraction and delicate, naive figuration addresses issues of space, depth, line and scale in contemporary landscape painting. Many of his works reverse the art-making process (both figuratively and literally) by finishing with the undercoat. This typically primary, concealed layer of paint is privileged in Sheehy's works as a motif for the modern, unmediated and untouched landscape: ethereal, depthless planes conceal the underlying forms, which are only suggested through gentle, fluid carvings. His works are often calm and understated and speak directly to the homogenous relationship between artwork and wall through the tactile substances that are common to both artist and builder: render and paint.

In recent works, Sheehy's residence, studio and persistent theme - the Wharf at Woolloomooloo - has provided a springboard to a specialised interest; the mechanics of harbour architecture and activity. Many of these works employ imposing, intersecting geometric forms which frame harbourside industry between the competing forces of the vertical and horizontal.

John Sheehy is also a practising conceptual artist and has recently been acknowledged on a national scale with his selection at as finalist in the inaugural BSG Art Prize 09, Melbourne. He credits his conceptual interest in art making to his secondary and tertiary art education in contemporary art theory and his Honours dictation in the Department of English at the University of Sydney which focussed on visual rhetoric in coffee table books. John also holds First Class Honours in Law and is a professional ski instructor.

In 2003, John was acknowledged as one of the top 5 visual arts students in New South Wales.

In 2008, he was commissioned as one of 33 young and emerging Australian artists to create a public artwork for World Youth Day '08.
John's first group exhibition, Three (3) locals, held at Studio W in Woolloomooloo in July 2009 was a sell-out.

He has received great recognition for his first solo commercial show which was held at Harrison Galleries, Paddington, from November to December 2009.

He intends to continue painting with his hands from his new residence in London, from August 2010.

Commissions considered

Contact Katrina Hampton 0424809849 / +61 2 9697 3299