Queensland artist Joe Furlonger’s practice is informed by his early years in semi-rural Samford, on the north-west outskirts of Brisbane, which profoundly influenced his career as an artist by instilling in him a love of the outdoors. At 17 years of age, he went to work as a deckhand on commercial fishing boats, periodically returning to that ocean-going life over the subsequent 15 years. It was out there — where sea meets land and sky, forming infinite horizons — that Furlonger first learned to think in paint.
Watch | Joe Furlonger’s story
The sea and beach
The sea and beach are recurring themes that feature in Furlonger’s early work. The figures depicted in a series of Bathers (illustrated) are powerful and monumental in the way they inhabit the composition. Furlonger says of the ‘Bathers’ series:
The Bathers paintings are a part of a series that evolved from a more definite return to life drawing to reinvest observation and realism into my painting… I felt I wanted to counter any reductivist processes by going back to drawing where form and subject matter both play a part. So I have chosen my bathers to combine realism with form and with contemporary things — maintaining a dialectic with history through the common subject of the figure.
Joe Furlonger ‘Bathers’
For his large figurative ‘Bather’ paintings, Furlonger immersed himself in the styles and techniques of Picasso and Matisse, learning from their example and adapting those lessons to his own purpose. The artist is quick to acknowledge them:
I laboured on the Picassoid thing — you are aware of these influences, but there is no use just playing around the perimeters of these things. You may as well just wade in — go through it rather than around it. I was drawn naturally to the major figurative painters so naturally there’s going to be versions of Leger, Picasso and Matisse.
What makes these figurative works unique is that, despite their impressive size (some roughly two and a half by three metres each), they carry a deep sensitivity to the subject, evolving, Furlonger says, ‘from a more definite return to life drawing to reinvest observation and realism into my painting’. Each figure powerfully, monumentally, inhabits their evocative beachscape, with the ever-present sea in the background.
Joe Furlonger ‘Bathers’
Joe Furlonger ‘Beach with lighthouse’
Joe Furlonger ‘Deposition on the beach’
Excerpt text drawn from the QAGOMA exhibition publication Joe Furlonger: Horizons, published with the generous support of the Gordon Darling Foundation.
At art school in the 1970s, a young Joe Furlonger was ‘happy just to be painting’ — an activity enjoyed since childhood and a counterpoint to his work on the family’s market garden farm and stints on fishing trawlers. Now on the cusp of turning 70, the Queensland artist’s urge to paint is undiminished. A new survey exhibition and an accompanying publication from which the following is drawn, reveal the inspiration and mastery behind his works.
In November 2021, preparing for the exhibition ‘Joe Furlonger: Horizons’ and its accompanying publication, QAGOMA conservators Gillian Osmond and Ruby Awburn spent a morning with the artist in his Samford studio, on Brisbane’s outskirts, during which he was generously forthcoming in discussing his approach to painting. The exchange helped Osmond and Awburn to understand his choices in art materials, as well as the evolution of Furlonger’s practice, which has informed both the Gallery’s current and longer-term approaches to the care and presentation of his paintings, but also provided a glimpse of the artist himself.
Joe Furlonger in his Samford studio
Furlonger’s unassuming studio — built on the same Samford Valley property as his grandmother’s family home — is an open-air lean-to abutting a large tin shed, fabricated from recycled timbers, salvaged window frames and sheets of corrugated iron. Entering the studio up a makeshift ramp, the site is reminiscent of Ian Fairweather’s (1891–1974) self-made ‘hut’ on Bribie Island, where the renowned artist lived and worked as a recluse from 1953 until his death. (Unprompted, Furlonger proffered published photographs of Fairweather’s studio, taken in the 1960s, and stated ‘this is the optimum in studio design . . . a really good bit of building . . . You can see what I’m aping in my own’.)
Joe Furlonger; Errol Barnes (potter) ‘Jar (Central Queensland landscape)’
‘Looking around,’ noted Osmond, they saw ‘rolls of canvas haphazardly leaning against stacks of artworks, unstretched paintings in progress pinned to the walls, painted ceramic vessels (collaborations with potter Errol Barnes) (illustrated) holding paintbrushes, and copious piles of art books.’ Small studies painted on paper are scattered on the main table and floor. Open four-litre tins, the insides of which are coated with layers and layers of dried paint, sit next to containers of PVA (polyvinyl acetate) wood glue, dog shampoo, bags of Avista oxide pigment, smaller jars of artist pigment, and casually strewn newspapers. A single industrial fan provides minimal relief from the Queensland humidity. His grandmother’s throne-like chair sits almost in the middle of the room, facing the opening of the studio’s awning. From the chair, the artist’s spot for meditation and conceptual development, you can survey the whole studio.
Joe Furlonger ‘Fisherman’
Joe Furlonger ‘Balancing on a ball (from ‘Circus Paris-Berlin suite’)’
Furlonger has mined the narrative of journey for over 40 years, searching for imagery during immersive travels in Papua New Guinea, Vietnam and China, and from extensive road trips in Australia. On one occasion, he told Simon Wright, Furlonger felt like a drive, packed up the family, and ended up crossing the continent from south-east Queensland to Broome in the far north-west, drawing along the way. For allied research, he has gone to the Gold Coast to surf and watch the ocean (and to live); worked on trawlers; visited the circus with sketchpads; and odd-jobbed as a ‘jungle buster’, charged with taming the bush and bramble along semi-rural roads. He has long admired Chinese brush-and-ink painting, with its hint of narrative within the imagery, its wild swings between obsessive detail and fleeting gesture, and the various formal experiments in verticality and aerial perspective. As Wright notes: ‘Australian landscape painting is seasonal,’ he told me. ‘If you’re not an opportunist, you have not got a hope. If you don’t get out and paint it, it’s gone.’
Joe Furlonger ‘Untitled’
Joe Furlonger ‘Fishermen’
Before he set out to become an artist, studying privately under painter Roy Churcher and then attending art schools in both Brisbane and Sydney, Furlonger toiled in his uncle’s Samford Valley market garden. As a young man, he also worked as a deckhand on fishing boats out of Darwin and along the Queensland coast on his cousin’s trawler — the inspiration for his immense triptych Fishermen 1985 (illustrated). The land and the sea taught him the value and dignity of hard work and gave him the heightened acuity that comes with the practised repetition of any task, which would later manifest itself in Furlonger’s lifelong daily practice of drawing. Perhaps the legacy of endless days spent among sun-drenched rows of vegetables, or on a constantly rolling trawler deck, is the artist’s direct and unpretentious outlook on the complex interconnectedness of the human and natural worlds.
Joe Furlonger ‘Bathers’
As QAGOMA Director Chris Saines notes, ‘reference is often made to Furlonger’s early debt to figurative works by European Modernists like Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso’, but his paintings also disclose a deep interest in the classical tradition and an instinct to draw from the Renaissance. Furlonger’s Bathers 1987 (illustrated) catapulted him to national prominence when it won the prestigious Moët & Chandon Fellowship in 1988. His colossal, black-outlined bathers throwing a ball on the beach, posed as if to catch the rising sun, press against the picture plane in call-and-response to Picasso’s surrealist bathers of the late 1920s. If Picasso was revivifying and modernising Cézanne’s approach to groups of bathers as a traditional subject — ecstatic joie de vivre set against the solemn grand manner — then Furlonger’s bathers step confidently out onto a Gold Coast beach. Vigorous, youthful and self-possessed, they arrive off a path that might reach back to Antiquity. His focus on the figure is not a profound meditation on the human condition but a celebration of its strength, freedom and physicality, elevated into an unyielding Australian light.
Joe Furlonger ‘Mother and child (after Bellini)’
The Moët & Chandon fellowship came with a glorious residency based at...
