Mike Barr - Don Rankin - Painting - Friday 8 August - Saturday 30 August 2025

Reflections of a City

After nearly 50 years as a commuter of some sort in Adelaide, I have witnessed a good many notable weather events. From sunny summer days that have cast beautiful, dappled shadows from the plane trees near the Town Hall, to the wonderful reflective qualities in the same place in the rain. A lot of my Adelaide work is based on photos I took on a day in March 2012, in which I got caught in a substantial rainstorm on the way home, and was trapped in the doorway of the Adelaide Post Office for half an hour with others sheltering from the storm. For an hour after the rain, I rushed around the streets taking reference photos that I still use to this day.

I use a few styles and methods in my work, from Impressionism to more abstract palette-knife paintings. Some have a limited palette of mainly indigo (blue-black) and a few highlight colours, which I have found beautifully portrays the atmospherics of rain in the city. Most of my paintings are not photographic records in paint. They present a feeling that rain always creates when it happens in the city. It’s all about the mood, not the detail.

There is hardly anything more comforting than watching the effects of rain from a dry warm place. This is what these paintings are. They capture the drama of the rain in an enjoyable form. One of the biggest draws of paintings can be the echoes of nostalgia which they contain. Many of us have witnessed the wonder of weather near the Town Hall and atmosphere of rain in Adelaide City.

Mike Barr, artist 2025

Positively Blooming

In late 1994 my art practice experienced two revelatory moments. I had taken a long look at the small still-life paintings by Chardin (18th century French) in the Louvre in Paris and was stunned by the power of his images of simple everyday things depicted on a shelf. On the same trip I also had the chance to view the small still-life paintings of Giorgio Morandi (20th century Italian) in Bologna. Prior to this, I had been painting large abstract works influenced by other almost-contemporary practitioners. Both Chardin and Morandi were mavericks; they bucked the prevailing trends of their time and inspired the example which I was thereafter to follow.

On my return to Adelaide, I set up a few similar scenarios in my studio and painted them. From then on, I became hooked on the still-life genre and it has been my subject ever since. Like Matisse and Baselitz, I do not feel the need to paint right up to the edges of a painting and I also like to leave traces of underlying paint visible (pentimenti): one of my aesthetic concerns is to make the viewer aware of the paint and the painter’s touch – it creates a connection between viewer and subject. Figuration and abstraction to me are part of the same process – painting is all about the making of marks.

Don Rankin, artist 2025