Sub(urbia): Rick Amor

Rick Amor (b. 1948) was a student of the widely-known Australian figurative painter John Brack in Melbourne in the 1960s. Brack was a member of the so-called 'Antipodeans' group, which protested against the dominance of American abstract impressionism in the late 1950s. Maintaining a commitment to figurative representation, Amor has an altogether darker vision of the urban landscape than Howard Arkley or Jeffrey Smart:





Call me crazy, but sometimes I think if I could paint like this, I would stop with this photography caper.

Rick Amor is represented by Niagara Galleries in Melbourne. See more of his work here.

Sub(urbia): Jeffrey Smart

Australian figurative painter Jeffrey Smart (b. 1921), who has lived in Italy since the 1960s, could easily be dismissed as an Edward Hopper knock-off, although I think there are new and more interesting things going on in his work:





This one, called Turn Off to Dandenong Road, looks uncannily like some of Stephen Shore's 1970s and 80s large-format color work (say, for example, this photograph). I'm not too sure of Smart's references, but I have no doubt that he is more than familiar with that era of American photography.