David Jolly, 2013, trains, grafitti, Melbourne
Summary
David Jolly has been honing his considerable skills as a painter for more than two decades. His meticulous and detailed paintings have a contagious air of quiet reflection about them, suggesting a certain ease in the artist's relationship to his surroundings. They also demonstrate his talent for incisive observation and his openness to his subject; while he is alive to the visual minutiae of a scene, his paintings depict the quintessence of his subject.
The hyperrealism of a work such as 'Timetravel', painted in oil on the back of glass, locates the work precisely in time and place. Although there is a ubiquity to the urban commuter train's graffiti-marked glassy surfaces, the painting documents a particular travelling space in time, its emptiness signalling both the rhythms of public transport and the impressions of the commuters who have disembarked and moved into their own daily routines. Painted in 2013, David Jolly's 'Timetravel' came into the Art and Heritage Collection in 2015. The collection holds two other works by Jolly: 'Text' and 'Reception', both painted in 2008.
