FALLING

Saint Cloche is delighted to reveal ‘Falling’, following on from Dale’s previous sold-out solo show, ‘Gaze’ in 2019.

Dale has from a very young age, drawn, painted and also studied the arts at various institutions. Having achieved a distinguished career as a highly collectible artist, Dale’s work is represented in private collections in Australia and overseas, and in the permanent collection of the Tweed Regional Gallery.

FALLING is a series depicting the essence of Australian coastal life and the joyful, carefree moment of hurling one’s self into the glassy ocean.

“I don’t choose my subjects as much as allow them to choose me. The paintings in FALLING were sparked by the iconic Australian spectacle of people jumping off a bridge into sparkling summer waters near the beach. I was drawn to photograph the activity back in 2018 and immediately began a series of paintings but soon abandoned them. I couldn’t get the paintings to work.

I recently came across the abandoned works while moving studios and picked up the theme once again. This time, they came together quickly, aesthetically and with a certain psychological resonance. The subject has allowed me to combine two of my greatest visual obsessions; water and the human figure.

As a lifelong surfer, how water and light interact – on the surface, in the body of water and off the bottom, is deeply ingrained in me. Half a lifetime of drawing and painting the human form is similarly entrenched. The combination of flesh and water lent itself perfectly to my most fundamental concern and that is the application of paint. The paint itself.

As with all of my work, the paintings in FALLING are not an attempt to convey any meaning in particular. They are in fact, attempts to be entirely meaningless, to apprehend a moment of pure perception, the fundamental ‘isness’ of existence – of being, prior to thought.”