LAND AND SKY, Peter Griffen's new solo exhibition at James Colman Gallery consists of ten 'arched' landscapes intended to act as a self-deprecating wink to the Australian cultural desert' tag.

Borne from the vast and desolate region of the Kimberley's in North-West Australia,
Griffen's honed version of the aboriginal arch archetype, denoting a welcome, floats in a blue timeless zone, scored with the hieroglyphics and marks of an earlier civilization.

Spots indicatig animal and bird tracks snake aimlessly past arrows and mathematical insignia. The heightened reds, blues and yellows have been, dripped, bled and layered into the canvas to recall the ferocity of the sun and the inescapable harshness of the terrain.

Just as Brett Whiteley and Arthur Boyd looked to Northern European painters to try to make sense of the human condition in their endless surroundings, so Griffen has recently re-assimilated surrealistic tendencies into his painting to form his distinctive dreamscape of the past and the present, the intellectual and the intuitive.

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