Ord River Abstract

“There is a very purposeful sense of passage passing through the images of Grealy’s most recent watercolours. They depict river edges rather than just the rivers themselves and the flows are both horizontal, as an indication of the current relentlessly moving on, and vertical, as a sense of the hanging silence of the moment captured – motion and stillness meeting at the ruffled surface of the water. And capture seems to be what the works are all about, not just the elusive moment of the instance pictured but also of the sense of tenuousness inhabiting the status of the world depicted.” Michael Barnett

Watercolour on 640gsm on Arches paper, 52 x 32cm

Ord River Barrier

“These rivers’ edges are heavily vegetated, indicative of the readily registered persistence of the natural order still prevalent in both locales, the Brisbane Valley here and the Ord River in Western Australia. The dense leafy palisades relate to the state of things before the intercession of a new order being created, here in Brisbane already noticeably progressed but in the Ord still at a point of commencement, with the surveyor’s tape and the floating barrier being harbingers of a process yet to become more fully implemented. And this competition between existing nature and new interventions is a consistent theme charting each river’s passage through increasing graduations of the tussle between the two.” Michael Barnett

Watercolour on 640gsm on Arches paper, 52 x 32cm

Brisbane River Green Bridge

“The accompanying drawings also juxtapose what was there before or still is now with what has replaced it, as in the image-filling construct shown in wire frame in ‘No Title’, or as a sense of what potentially might come next in the more intimate views of ‘Maria’s Garden’. The riverbank at Kurilpa Point has already been assailed many times over before the current incumbent, the Gallery of Modern Art, supplanted its past, whereas the surreptitious consumption of carefully nurtured backyards throughout the suburbs is ongoing and could happen next door to you at anytime….” Michael Barnett

Watercolour on 640gsm on Arches paper, 52 x 32cm

Brisbane River City Gardens

“Progress also has a relentlessness, it would seem, as it follows its own course, and the organic tangles of the water’s verdant border are progressively consumed by the increasing concreteness of urban form or industrial exploitation.” Michael Barnett

Watercolour on 640gsm on Arches paper, 52 x 32cm

Brisbane River New Farm

“And, in this, every picture tells its story, but it is not just the story told in the pictorial narrative. It is the way it is told as well in terms of the artist’s sense of how it should be seen and the thoughts it could provoke. This is the story embellished by the making of the work – the careful consideration and selection of subject topic, the preparation of the surface, the balance and alignments of a composition, the processes of applying and manipulating the media and having an intention about the sensibilities conveyed in the images that result.” Michael Barnett

Watercolour on 640gsm on Arches paper, 52 x 32cm

Brisbane River Lourdes Hill, Bulimba

“In the darkness of the restrained palette and careful tonal evocation of dawn or dusk effects there lingers a sense of nostalgia and, at the same time, a kind of expectation – a reflection of things past and an inkling of the portent of what might promise. There is depth hovering in the shadows and, as much, in the hollows of the water, while the brash redness and angularity of incrementally effected change stand in stark relief and presence as those blasé incursionary elements that become so difficult to ignore once introduced.” Michael Barnett

Watercolour on 640gsm on Arches paper, 52 x 32cm

Brisbane River Portside

“And while all the technical dexterity and patient attention to process builds the images that can be read and the story told, it is the effects achieved in the texture of the surface, the balance between vivid pictorialism and the abstract nature of the medium as marks, the terrain and patterns of application and then the atmosphere evoked in the tonal judgements and density of detail hovering between literal depiction and gestural allusion that gives these works another life as well- as Art.” Michael Barnett

Watercolour on 640gsm on Arches paper, 52 x 32cm

“THE RIVER” LETHBRIDGE GALLERY 19 April – 7 May 2024