After hours – Victoria Market 1987

Summary

Melbourne-born painter Greg Allen has established a strong realist style through a career that spans more than 40 years. Primarily a watercolourist, he counts John Singer Sargent, Arthur Streeton and Harold Herbert as chief among those who have influenced his practice, and landscapes incorporating the dynamic play of light key among his subject matter.

His ‘After Hours – Victoria Market’ was made in 1987. Yet 30 years later, the legendary doughnut bus remains a fixture, an anodyne to the hunger pangs that beset queues of starving shoppers. Allen’s considered composition captures none of the rambunctious bustle and cacophony of market days; rather, this painting presents itself as the alter-ego of busy market days. The quiet, twilight scene, with its great expanse of hosed-down bitumen, relays the bathos that descends when the show is over, when the lights are lowered and the performers exit stage left.