New Romantics: Darkness and Light in Australian Art

New Romantics: Darkness and Light in Australian Art is a book for lovers of art, atmosphere, ideas and beauty. I am excited for my work to be included in this new book which will come out in 2011. New Romantics : Darkness and Light in Australian Art is authored by Simon Gregg. 

Simon Gregg has spent a life in art. After a decade as a successful visual artist he turned to art history, and has since established a profile as one of Australia’s leading art curators. He has published widely on Australian art, through exhibition catalogues and national art journals. He is currently curator of the Gippsland Art Gallery. 

"Historians called it Romanticism; a disposition for melancholic yearning, for communion with nature, for the sublime. Australian artists, in countless numbers, are engaging with these themes today. We are witnessing a return to a time in art when truth and the individual experience counted for everything. Art today recognises that we have undergone a spiritual loss in recent times, and is summoning the courage to fill it. Its links to an art of two hundred years ago are profound and undeniable – yet strangely few artists are consciously aware of it.

Set against the dazzling backdrop of the Australian sublime, New Romantics charts the dynasties of Romantic art. From its nascent beginnings in European philosophy to a cause championed by Australian colonialists, this study seeks to understand how it has landed in the hands of a new generation of Australian artists. The swiftness and intensity of its return has been stunning, while the conditions that have heralded its sudden outbreak remain unexamined.

New Romantics surveys the work of thirty-six contemporary Australian artists who have reinvigorated this movement, and traces the influences that led them to this unlikely path. This is the first study that seeks to understand a paradigm shift that is shaping the course of Australian art in the twenty-first century.

This compelling study examines Post-Romanticism through eight primary aesthetic forms: the Grotesque; the Domestic; the Glacial; the Pastoral; the Void; Light; Disquiet and Darkness; and Decline. Lavishly illustrated, New Romantics is a compendium for the twenty-first century – a defining work on the return to beauty in Australian art. " from a synopsis of the book, by Simon Gregg.

Essence, 2002 is one of four works that will be included in the book. Other images include Comfort, Forgiveness and Dreamin'.