The work of an Emerald artist who dedicated a lifetime to expression outside of the limelight has been posthumously revealed to the Dandenongs’ ecstatic creatives.
Upwey’s Burrinja Cultural Centre opened its latest exhibition featuring local artists, Stephen Glover and the late Stewart MacInnes (1937-2021), on Sunday 7 September.
Mr MacInnes’ exhibition called “This Private World of Mind,” represents a significant moment as one of the only few collections displayed of the Emerald artist who produced a body of work spanning more than half a century.
Mr MacInnes was told from early in his life that his way of seeing would make a lasting impact on the Australian art scene.
However, no one knew the particular way he would do it as he continued to pursue careers in other matters, such as teaching, gardening, medicine, to law.
His art always continued, but as a private labour unconditioned by the art world.
Mr MacInnes’ wife, Carole MacInnes, said he created “every day.”
“It was a necessary way for him to explore; it took him on a journey,” she said.
“He hated having to go around and sell himself into the galleries, like quite a lot of artists, it doesn’t go with their make-up.”
His many careers would feed his artistic expression, such as his work in health, which inspired his investigation of the human form on the canvas and with a chisel.
The exhibition is but a few of an enormous body of work spanning from the 1950s to the 2010s.
Involving painting, sculpture and illustration, the works play with colour, motion and perspective, exploring subjects ranging from the body to the Iraq War.
Mr MacInnes’ work has only been seen publicly a handful of times since the 1950s, when the National Gallery of Victoria purchased one of his early illustrations that is still within the collective today.
In 1967, he was selected for the Transfield Art Prize in Sydney. Former director of the Heidi Museum of Modern Art, Warwick Reeder, referred to him as the “Australian Picasso.”
Alongside this exhibition was Stephen Glover’s “Soft Geometry.”
The Upwey-based abstract artist endeavoured to create a display of paintings, drawings and prints that free shape from its rigid rules of form.
The works display familiar hues within uncharacteristic soft edges. This process is Glover’s attempt to emancipate geometry from singular identity, from an egoistic, masculine structure, in favour of reveling in imagination beyond the self.
Mr Glover has had his works displayed in Australia, Denmark, Greece, Germany, England, India and the United States. He is an award winner at St Kilda’s Linden New Art Postcard Show in 2018.
“The Private World of Mind” and “Soft Geometry” are on display at Burrinja Cultural Centre until 19 October.
Burrinja is open from 10am to 4pm, Wednesday to Sunday, at 351 Glenfern Road, Upwey.
