Wayne Ashton's Ocean Landscapes
By Greg Howlett
Cox Howlett + Bailey Woodland, Architects
Sydney Perth Beijing Dubai
Wayne Ashton's work spans painting, ink drawings and fiction. This includes the highly acclaimed novel Under a Tin-Grey Sari, 12 solo exhibitions, many group shows and three radio dramas. His current paintings explore a deep connection with the landscape using lagoons, gardens and islands to celebrate remembered experiences from many ongoing field trips.
Wayne works using techniques that he honed over the 20 years that I've been privy to his development. He likes to achieve results of easy gesture but, as you'll see in this online gallery when you inspect the works more closely, what seems gestural is the outcome of immaculate precision. Many contemporary painters conduct their practice in this way but Wayne has honed it to a discipline where the outcome has to live and breath, making a lyrical picture of an experience re-configured.
He was born to British and Pakistani parents in Karachi, leaving at five and then brought up in many corners of the world - Chittagong, Paris, Kuala Lumpur, Ipoh, Lagos, London, Perth and Sydney. In 2003 he spent six months reorganising his Perth studio to Sydney, which he documented in the short story A Lagoon Across Australia in a Truck.
Snorkelling experiences in the Maldives, the Straits of Malacca, coastal Nigeria and around remote Australia inform the new series of 40 abstract ocean landscapes, Captain Logic & the Blue-Ringed Octopus (2003-2006). In 2006 he produced a stunning commission, Five Seasons, an oil painting of five gardens on large stand-alone panels of 120x70cm each, for George Kailis of the Kailis Group of companies.
He is working on three new projects at his studio.
Wayne has exhibited in many group exhibitions including Australians in London (Mall Galleries, Trafalgar Square, 1992) and Australians in New York (Gelabeart Gallery, Broadway, 1993). He has had 12 solo shows.
In 2003 and 2004 he toured as a guest of the major writers' festivals for Under a Tin-Grey Sari (Fremantle Arts Centre Press), conducting readings, panel discussions and workshops in Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Byron Bay, the NSW Writers Centre and the prestigious Adelaide Writers' Week. In Adelaide he appeared at the session Text and Image with art historian Bernard Smith. The novel was highly acclaimed in the major press around Australia and gained critical praise in Germany and Bangladesh. In 2006 it was translated into Bengali.
When she launched it, the book's theme was described by Sameena Yasmeen, head of the Department of Political Science at the University of Western Australia, as "a book that is about creativity and language". I found it to be a very enjoyable, rollicking yarn of a story. It was shortlisted for the 2003 WA Premiers Book Awards and was exclusively featured at the ABC on Sandy McCutcheon's national monthly one-hour program, Australia Talks Books.
The story A Vanishing Act was first published in Australian Short Stories (vol. 39, 1992) and then selected for inclusion in the Penguin Summer Collection (2005).
Wayne's radio drama The Aunt won the Artbeat Literary Radio Drama Award and was produced both for the stage and the ABC (1990). In 2005 he was commissioned to write a play for Paul Capsis by ABC Radio National, The Tasman Angel from Hell, broadcast in September that year. Wayne continues to make field trips for paintings with his partner Libby, the most recent to Cape Gloucester and Gloucester Island, a less-known corner that very few visit on the 79-island archipelago, the Whitsundays.
Wayne's paintings are in private collections in London, New Delhi, Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, Brisbane, Perth, Hotham, Canberra, Port Macquarie, Maitland, Monte's Whitsundays and Niagara Falls NY.
Greg Howlett
Cox Howlett + Bailey Woodland
Spring 2007
