Impedimenta

The Impedimenta Paintings and Sculpture

As a boy I imagined romantic figures; cowboys, explorers and princesses. I saw on desks and tables strange heads of horses, tigers and slender women holding lamps. In country town parks there were large bronzes; men in uniform with rifles, sometimes embraced by women with large wings on imaginary beasts. These ink wells, lamps and cenotaphs continue to dance their way into history leaving me with nostalgic affection for the material of their being – warm patinated bronze.

Impedimenta is an old word and simply means an obstacle to walking. Here he is, a personification of legends; Atlas, Sisyphus, “the swagman” or wanderer - always in search of sustenance or enlightenment. He is a surveyor or aesthete savant searching the horizon for unattainable indicators of beauty and tonal harmony. The depicted figures carry the practical tools of a painter; a palette, a case of paints, rolled paper, brushes and a stretched canvas. His water bag to quench thirst and meld colours. These figures are autobiographical and by implication a type of self-portraiture. A figure in the landscape can be imbued with many and subtle nuances; stance, the attitude of the head and equipment carried can indicate purpose, the time of day and the mood, if not his fate. In the end I suppose the dialogue in these works has to do with a lost fool trudging endlessly towards a glistening mirage. I paint such ephemera as it is a poetic reality, possibly even a pessimistic delight for me. And so the musings of the Wayfarer go on as always….. futile. I may be painting pre Modernist pictures, maybe, I hope so.

Tim Storrier