Rick Amor
Study for the dry season
Rick Amor spent most of his childhood in Frankston,
which in the 1950's was still a semi rural community. The sky,
sea and wind-shaped trees of this place of his earliest memories
continues to be a profound influence on his painting. Amor
showed prodigious artistic talent from early childhood, and went on
to study painting and drawing formally - first at the Caulfield
Institute of Technology and later at the National Gallery of
Victoria School under John Brack.
In this work Amor has blended landscapes or buildings
from various sources into a new reality. The mound on which
the ruined building rests derives from a pile of concrete rubble
that the artist noticed in a recycling depot in Port
Melbourne. The ruin itself incorporates part of the façade of
the Battersea Power Station in London. The flat ground strewn
with rubble was inspired by a similar landscape in a work by the
20th century English mystic painter Cecil Collins. Amor has
added a solitary human figure, just visible in the gloom of the
foreground, seemingly lost in the vastness of this collapsed
world.
With its title derived from the final line in TS
Elliott's poem "Gerontion" in which the musings of the poet in old
age are referred to as the "Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry
season", Amor's Study for the Dry Season is a visual elegy
on the frailty of all human endeavour.