Person With Painting #1 – Robin Forster
Highly Commended
Cutler Footway
Person With Painting #1 – Robin Forster [detail] 2024-25
Portrait of Robin Forster
Acrylic on canvas
150 x 100 cm
About the Artwork
My friend and colleague Robin Forster is a noted London-based photo-artist with a long-standing interest in the history, geography and especially the coastal profiles of North Queensland as charted by 18th and 19th century travellers. Despite his several visits to the Burdekin River delta, Forster has never photographed or witnessed the characteristic cane fires of the region. In this portrait, by way of gentle compensation, I have posed him against a representation of one of my own Burdekin cane fire paintings. More significantly, this is an image of a man entering, and reflecting upon, his midlife years. He looks forward, not fearfully, but with a sober awareness of the arc of time and the passing of youth. The fictive flames behind him have the aspect of an aura, possibly a halo, a spiritual connotation that allows the canvas to be viewed as a quasi-religious icon.
About the Artist
Cutler Footway is the painterly persona of Bruce James, former national art critic, historian, and broadcaster. Footway lives and works in his hometown of Ayr in the Burdekin Delta district south of Townsville. Footway has been the subject of three recent solo museum surveys—at Maitland Regional Art Gallery, Perc Tucker Regional Art Gallery and Rockhampton Museum of Art, all of which house examples of his work. He was awarded the Percival Portrait Painting Prize in 2020. His work shows influences of European Mannerism and Post- Impressionism, along with a deep loyalty to Australian mid-century Modernism. The Surrealist compositions of the artist-critic James Gleeson are also echoed in his practice.