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Australian painter Robert Clinch presents Melbourne landmarks to Polish audience
By Annabel Ross
Contemporary realist painter Robert Clinch is giving Poland a taste of urban Melbourne.
Major landmarks of the Melbourne’s skyline such as the State Library dome, the Melbourne Cricket Ground and the old Collingwood brewery will be the centrepiece of an exhibition in Poland by Australian contemporary realist painter Robert Clinch.
Artist Robert Clinch outside the Yorkshire brewery building in Collingwood, depicted in his painting Fanfare for the Common Man.Credit: Jason South
Clinch's Fanfare for the Common Man depicts the Collingwood brew tower that was in the news last week for reasons related to its imminent renovation as part of a new apartment development.
He is about to show it, with 52 of his other paintings, at the National Museum of Szczecin in Poland.
Fanfare for the Common Man, 2003, by Robert Clinch.
The Sounds of Silence exhibition is a truncated version of a mid-career retrospective of Clinch’s work held at the Art Gallery of Ballarat last year.
Sounds of Silence came about after Clinch visited Szczecin at the suggestion of Melbourne-based Polish artist Jarek Wojcik during an exhibition of Australian artists in 2010.
“The director of the National Museum in Szczecin had been shown my work, really liked it and when he met me when I was in Poland, asked if I’d like to do this show,” says Clinch, who will present a floor talk and exhibition tour in in Szczecin next Saturday, with the help of a translator.
Particularly sweet for Clinch is the fact that his daughter, Jean – who lives in Spain where she works as a writer – will be there for the opening.
The Grand Reading Room, 1998, by Robert Clinch.
A young Jean figures in Clinch’s painting The Grand Reading Room of the State Library’s iconic dome. It is a companion piece to Fanfare for the Common Man, which features his eldest son, Allan, playing the trombone. The third piece in what Clinch describes collectively as Sound of Silence’s “main magnum opus” is Spartacus, with his sport-obsessed son Stephen standing in front of the MCG in an Essendon footy jumper.
While much of Clinch’s oeuvre depicts urban landscapes piled high with bricks, mortar and concrete, there is a lightness and warmth to his works, aided by the egg tempera technique he uses (favoured by Renaissance artists like Giotto and Botticelli), where ground pigment is combined with egg yolk and distilled water to form a tempera “paint”.
Spartacus, 2013, by Robert Clinch.
Clinch’s fastidious approach to his paintings – many of which take a year or longer to complete – means that he makes the tempera from scratch himself, choosing the eggs by hand and testing their quality in the same manner that a cook or chef would. Battery-laid eggs won’t make the cut.
“The free range people would love me, because I think that’s more like how eggs probably were in Renaissance times - so I want something that’s essentially going back to what’s going to be fairly natural and organic,” says Clinch.
The level of detail in his paintings suggests that he has worked from photographs, but Clinch insists this is not the case.
“These are capriccios – so I’m working on a picture that I’ve imagined, and then I go to these real locations and I sit there and draw, and that way I can modify things to my own purpose, rather than just having it dictated to me the way it lies in the landscape,” he says.It’s part of a painstaking process that can’t be hurried, says Clinch.
“From my point of view, if you want to do something and it takes that long to do it beautifully, then it takes that long,” he says.
“These things are crafted with every square centimetre having as much love put into it as the next.”
Sounds of Silence is at the National Museum in Szczecin, Poland, from April 24 to June 1.