Andrew Browne, painting, trees, monochrome, Studley Park, Melbourne, 2006
Summary
Andrew Browne’s monochromatic ‘Untitled (Studley Park)’ is a Gothic evocation of nature in this urban parkland. Against the blackness of a night sky, illuminated branches twist and knot, making strange and dramatic this familiar arboreal companion. Leafless, the gnarled branches suggest a retreat from life; yet while the painting draws us into a grand narrative of mortality, it also describes the seasonal and diurnal cycles that comprise life itself. Abstracting the branch from its bushland setting through the aid of the strong lighting, Browne conveys an uncanny impression of nocturnal nature. Not only does he suggest life through its apparent absence in his subject, but he prefigures the life that is teeming in the darkness beyond the branch and beyond the work’s borders.
The photo-realist aesthetic of the ‘Untitled (Studley Park)’ has its origin in the artist’s use of photography as a mode of observation and a driver for his carefully rendered painting. While Browne is a painter he is also a photographer, and the camera offers him a way of seeing, a very particular way of conceptualising his subject. Accordingly, the series to which this work belongs extends his specific vision of arboreal life.
