Tim Storrier Moments: In Response to Memories and Ideas of Mortality

Tim Storrier, among Australia's most highly regarded and best-selling painters, remains enigmatic. His paintings, which combine the traditional genres of landscape and still-life, executed at a masterly level, are at once beautiful and frightening. It seems he adheres to the eighteenth century European aesthetic of 'The Sublime' wherein artists, like the German Romantic Caspar David Friedrich, selected as subjects the most dramatic and dangerous aspects of nature with the aim of inspiring pleasurable sensations of awe and terror in the spectator who view them at a safe distance-through art. Storrier, the individual, can be abrupt and peppery, and some suggest that his fiery landscapes - for which he is perhaps best known - indicate an artist 'painting out his anger'. However, Storrier's art is more an observation of natural vistas of ocean, sunrise and night-sky with transient themes selected from the banality of modern human survival and communication.