"Territory Landscape with Bird & Snake" 2002
Oil on Canvas
100x120cm
Signed Lower Right, Titled & Dated verso
Prov: Purchased directly from the artist.
Private Collection Adelaide
$25,000-30,000
The landscapes and imagery of northern and central Australia provided John Coburn with an enduring source of inspiration throughout the later decades of his career. Birds, snakes, desert forms and intense fields of colour became part of a distinctive visual language through which Coburn interpreted the Australian landscape, not as a literal representation of place, but as an arrangement of symbolic natural forms.
Painted in 2002, Territory Landscape with Bird and Snake has a particularly interesting relationship with Coburn’s earlier work. Its composition closely follows his 1990 lithograph Bird and Snake, returning twelve years later to essentially the same arrangement of forms,
but reinterpreting the subject on a considerably larger scale and with the richness and intensity of oil and colour. The relationship between the two works demonstrates Coburn’s willingness to revisit imagery that continued to hold significance for him, transforming an established composition through a different medium and at another stage of his career.
The Territory landscape remained prominent in Coburn’s work at this time. In 2003 he produced the colour etching and aquatint Territory Landscape, which was selected to accompany the deluxe edition of Lou Klepac’s major monograph John Coburn: The Spirit of Colour. Seen within this sequence, the present oil represents a late and highly developed return to imagery first explored more than a decade earlier, bringing together the bird, snake and landscape forms that had become integral to Coburn’s interpretation of the Australian interior.
