Rock Pool

Rock Pool, oil on mdf panel, 62x62cm, 2018.

“This one’s a bit more spontaneous than many of my works. It started off as a landscape of the rock pools at Pearl Beach, but I didn’t like it much, so I cut a bit off and brought something else out: the brightness of a child’s ‘discovery’ of an anemone, and the colour of balls, buckets and bikinis. It’s a childhood memory, and it just sort of came out very quickly.” — Nick Gordon

Littorals are a recurring theme in Nick Gordon’s work. Often, as in The Headland (2017), which speaks to the loss and love of his father, they are sites of personal memories. The spontaneity of the clashing colours in Rock Pool (2018) is counterposed to the order of the inscribed lines, creating a tension between landscape and abstraction, stimulus and memory, that threatens to pull the composition apart as much as constitute it.