ANGUS MCDONALD

Initially driven by his desire to understand the craft of painting and its particular aesthetic, this artist’s early focus was to develop the traditional technical vocabulary learnt during his training at Sydney’s Julian Ashton School. His disciplined pursuit of visual materiality, and his obvious seduction by its sensuous potential, is apparent in the crystalline arrangements of fruit and flowers and the portraiture for which this three times Archibald nominated artist is noted.

During the last couple of years though, McDonald has sought to reconfigure his practice in a way that moves beyond the limits of representation. In such work, we witness the development of a mature artist, who seeks to create new and complex meanings through a sophisticated interweaving of reality and symbolism in compositions that become much more than the sum of their parts.