I aim to capture beauty, emotion, and power in an artwork. I strive to master brush, paint, and the interactions of colour, to effectively convey meaning and emotion. My passion is for the impression, the distilled, articulation of the essence of meaning with the pure form of the minimalist line. My creative practice interrogates and challenges the collective populism and parochialism permeating throughout contemporary Australian culture.

I predominantly work with oil paints, however also work in acrylic and photography. I have explored a number of mediums and painting methods including the bold vibrant colours of pointillism, the thick brush strokes of impressionism, and the multiple glazed layers of the classical artists.

My subject matter is wide and varied, with inspiration found across the spectrum. I study life drawing at the Ballarat Art Gallery. My work with the human form has changed my art in all its facets, inspiring my search for the simple, beautiful line. In parallel I am obsessed the interactions of colour and for the natural contrast in shadow and the olive greens and blue hues of the Australia’s eucalyptus covered mountains.

My artwork is both spatial and temporal. As a contemporary artist in Australia who was born in Ireland, notions of space and place, time and history are constantly influencing my work. The interaction of the spatial and the temporal reveals the unique particularities and conflicts inherent in the contemporary Australian cultural landscape. By depicting these contradictions and drawing on Australia’s own art history, my work creates new vantage points from which we can come to understand contemporary Australian culture.

Through my artwork I intend to produce new perspectives and vantage points from which (re)orientations can take place, using art as a vehicle to change the perception of the viewer. In imagining and articulating a critical view on contemporary culture, my work seeks to catalyse, to augment passive modes of thought and to provoke critical thinking.

The potential power of art is derived from the ability to reflect and capture the collective feeling of the times. Should my artwork inspire change and encourage critical dissent, I know I will have been successful.

To aspire to be an exhibiting artist is to embark on a public journey, to accept a mandate to expose your emotion, to discover, learn, and change. In painting I found that which I will continually strive to master.

Jonathan D. Nolan