Evening shadows, Rorschach after Johnstone

Ben Quilty
Australia
1973

Evening shadows, Rorschach after Johnstone
2011
oil on linen, eight panels

Place made: Southern Highlands, New South Wales
Medium: oil on linen, eight panels
Dimensions: 115.0 x 175.0 cm (each panel)
230.0 x 702.0 cm (overall)
Credit line: Gift of Ben Quilty through the Art Gallery of South Australia Contemporary Collectors to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Contemporary Collectors 2013. Donated through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program
Accession number: 20124P16(a-h)
Signature and date: a,c,d,e & f: Signed verso, top c., black fibre-tipped pen, "ben Quilty". Not dated. b: Signed verso, top c., black fibre-tipped pen, "Ben Quilty"; dated verso u.r. corner, black fibre-tipped pen "2011".
Media category: Painting
Collection area: Australian paintings
Copyright: Courtesy the artist

The inspiration for Ben Quilty’s monumental Rorschach painting is an Australian scene painted in Europe in 1880 by H.J. Johnstone, Evening shadows, backwater of the Murray, South Australia. Read simply, the original painting depicts a tranquil scene at the end of the day: a Ngarrindjeri family camping at a scenic river bend along the River Murray prepare for the evening. Another possible reading sees the painting as a nineteenth-century allegorical meditation on the perceived decline and disappearance of Aboriginal people.
Quilty’s eight-panel painting Evening shadows, Rorschach after Johnstone remakes the original painting to comment on Australia’s history. Inspired by Hermann Rorschach’s eponymous ink blots – an early twentieth-century psychological-testing tool – Quilty loads the canvas with impasto oil paint, only to destroy the surface by pressing a second unpainted canvas directly onto the first. Chance intervenes by creating accidents and abstractions that invite us to reflect on our own perceptions, desires and experiences.
Dr Lisa Slade, Assistant Director, Artistic Programs