26/07/2026
SUNDAY STOCKROOM
JOHN YOUNG
‘Aeneid I (Fairweather Transformation VII)’ 2016
oil on Belgian linen
200 x 200cm
An exceptional large scale painting from the significant series whereby the artist reflects upon the practice of Ian Fairweather ( 1891 - 1974 ), and in tribute reimagines his work with the technical assistance available in the digital age and inherent to Young’s own painting methodology.
“…daily in the studio, I employ a process of transforming by computer software, thousands of photographic and painting images into new abstract images. One abstract image is then selected out of the thousand which is faithfully and affectionately painted up with oil paint. I have called this Human-Computer Friendship paintings!
This way of abstracting images is my way of coping with the exponential growth of choice in this century. In Fairweather’s time, artists may have a thousand abstract drawings they make in a lifetime, we can have apparently this overnight.
Here, Pellets et Melisande by Fairweather is the subject of this process. Fairweather is without doubt the greatest artist from the Antipodes, his trans-national wanderings finally found a home in Bribie Island. The singularity and grandeur of Fairweather’s hermit-wanderer life, and the authenticity and resonance of his work are what is
most vulnerable to extinction. These new transformational works are a hope, a sort of attempted resurrection of what we may hold dear with the spirit of Fairweather’e work - the new paintings faithfully fossick for worthy reminiscence in Fairweathers for this new century.
Albeit the fact that we live amongst the banalities of technology in this century, together with its desensitised noise, these new paintings, mediated by the computer, re-imagine Fairweather’s eyes for us, and proposes a way of making painting by humans, re-thought and re-felt. Re-thought as it’s the Fairweather image that passes through Hade’s underworld - computer imaging, yet re-felt, by the affectionate repainting, by our human hands. Aeneas, the title of these paintings, cites Seamus Heaney’s account of Virgil’s Aeneid, in which Aeneas travels to the underworld to meet the spirit of the father. “
