This is a large painting in my 'Unpopular Penguins' series. With all of these paintings, I have built the paint up on many layers, to create a rich, impasto surface that also shows glimpses of the earlier layers beneath. That manner of working, of building up an artwork with a history, ties in with the title I have chosen for this particular painting, 'WHAT IS HISTORY?'.
The words are partly washed out and obscured, and they themselves have been painted over earlier, even fainter words. History comes from multiple viewpoints, which often clash and overwrite earlier traditions, and a popular view or understanding today may be forgotten or revised in the future.
Please note that the edges of the canvas are painted, and it will not need framing.
Former director of the Art Gallery of NSW, Edmund Capon, said of the first painting in this series, " an evocative imagining of the familiar Penguin Paperback...it was a painting we all liked very much for its rich texture, its sense of memory and its sort of nostalgic humour"