Rhymes with Orange

Michael Reid Southern Highlands is thrilled to welcome back to the upper level gallery Thirroul/Dharawal artist Anh Nguyen.  Of this new collection of still life and interiors paintings titled Rhymes with Orange, Nguyen says,  “I am thinking of rhymes that are not in sounds or words, and paintings that feel like something such as ‘orange’, a word famously considered to have no perfect rhyme in English. What does orange feel like? Synergies that are unexpected, pairings that are unusual, a mood that is warm, urgent, a state of change.”

‘Anh Nguyen will paint anything that she can visually engage with. She recalls a quote from another painter, whose name she has long forgotten but whose words have stayed with her: ‘Still life is the thing that is close by, figures and portraits a little farther away, and landscape is in the distance or if you get up and walk a bit, she says. ‘It is all part of the observed world and ready for a curious magpie to eyeball?While Anh will joke that still life is more forgiving than portraiture and more comfortable than plein-air landscape painting, what actually draws her to the genre is that it allows a number of different approaches. ‘It also feels very straightforward, a neutral canvas without pressure to introduce symbolism or narrative, she says.’

extract from Still. Life by Amber Creswell Bell published by Thames & Hudson