Painting by Michael Doherty
There is no doubt the response to the Western Australian artist Michael Doherty's painting in Japan has been very positive and this is unusual because Kobe is within the Japanese Aesthetic Golden Triangle so it's a hard place to impress and this he has done.
Western Australia is Hyogo's Prefecture sister state and in as much as it is far away, it is not that isolated but it is when it comes to viewing artworks, as the Internet doesn't give you the full story, for there is scale, dimensions and the impact of the art object just to name a few. But nonetheless, exhibitions such as Dohertys that are now coming out of Western Australia are giving the Japanese audiences a live chance to experience one artist's idiosyncratic memory, and what interests him paint in that faraway terrain.
Doherty's painting are strange but odd is good that's for sure for nowadays a lot of art appears to a brand label, almost an expected taste when one visits the gallery but when viewing his images that supposed art flavour is usually shattered by the weird accumulations of objects, he desires to render in oils and that's a great system within studio praxis to achieve, being the continued search for new motifs to paint either internally or externally from ones memory.
At times when viewing Michael's painting the memory of the English romantic painter John Martin resonates within one's memory, due to the phantasmagorical subject matter he desired to paint, and it seems not dissimilar at times to some of Doherty's painting as seen below in John Martins illustration Paradise Lost. Book 3, line 365 (The Court of the Gods) London c 1827.
Doherty is fast becoming one of Western Australia's most original painters that is now getting recognised internationally and deservedly so, 2 Dogs Art Space has pleasure in bringing this current series of paintings to Japan.
Link to John Martin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Martin_(painter)
