In Chris O’Doherty’s paintings we find anonymous fibro houses. They seem to represent the people who live in them: suburban and urban ‘Mr and Mrs Australia’. They are the backdrop to the stage on which O’Doherty’s inexhaustible ideas play out. The stage is often a landscape upon which a variety of things strut: manifestations of Jesus, Holden cars, space monsters.
Beneath the humour in the work lies an expression of deeply thoughtful insights and sympathies. As a child he witnessed his father build the fibro houses of his paintings. From this, we infer that his family and environment of his childhood have stolen their way into his work – O’Doherty inserting something of himself into the landscapes he draws and paints.
Watters Gallery
19 June to 6 July, 2013
Sydney
1) Mooning the Moon II, 2012, charcoal, colour pencil on paper, 18 x 24cm
2) Gumscape with animals and spacecraft, 2013, charcoal, colour pencil on paper, 28 x 59cm.
Created for City of Sydney New Year’s Eve 2013
Courtesy the artist and Watters Gallery
