Lot 23: Gavin Hurley Love Sydney II oil on jute canvas

Gavin Hurley Love Sydney II oil on jute canvas signed with the artist's initials GJH and dated '07 verso 460mm x 355m Pictured here, Sydney Parkinson was hired by Joseph Banks to be the artist for Captain Cook's first great voyage of discovery on the Endeavour. Sydney was a botanist and a documenter, a studious type (as the hair suggests). He was a young and talented but fragile character and having trawled his brush around the Pacific, he did not survive the return journey to his native England. Thus, Sydney was a martyr to art and discovery. It is a gentle portrait. Sydney's little rosebud lips and rouged cheeks whisper of his youth whilst his piercing stare makes him appear less of the grand young virile prototype of the historical portrait genre than a boy stunned, a Dorian Gray frozen in time. Hipkins presents cleanly moulded, airbrushed paintings of subjects derived from images throughout history. They are simplified into cut-out forms that reference his use of collage as a drawing tool with his attention to surface and texture referencing the cubist masters of the early 20th Century. He highlights flat areas in emphasising the weave of his hessian ground and introducing a wood grain pattern to the background. His are simply drool-worthy surfaces. It's like different layers of wallpaper or fabric samples in a collage of texture, layered flat to stand in for skin, hair and eye sockets, but all so immaculate, even and smooth. It is indeed hard not to love Sydney. Gavin Hurley is represented by Anna Bibby, Auckland and Mary Newton, Wellington. IK