Who’s Afraid of Yellow, Red & Blue
Who’s Afraid of Yellow, Red & Blue. acrylic on canvas 30” x 40” $1700
The title play’s on Barnett Newman’s Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue. Here a butcher bird has entered the cultural sphere of modernist painting which, for many years, was the focus of my academic work in Canada. Two incompatible and mutually-exclusive realities co-exist to subvert humorously the controlled and didactic language of line and colour that defines the aesthetic of Piet Mondrian’s famous series of paintings that were the basis for Newman’s. In this way Australia’s equivalent of a blue jay invades and repurposes the canon of 20th-century modern art while poking fun at its own inability to overcome the confines and rigidity of a practice from which it cannot free itself.