Patrick Hromas
41 artworks

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(15)
Springwood NSW, Australia, Australia
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Artwork Description

Oil on wood, ready to hang.

Signed on the back.

Like my painting of the dog “Jazz”, my inspiration for this canine portrait was the circular panels and the railway medallion seen at the small museum at Echuca, on the boarder of New South Wales and Victoria, during a trip in 2008. Although in this instance I took the photos of my dog (who incidentally is named after the composer,: Vladimir Ashkenazi) , during a trip to Slow Fox Wines, in the small town of Mudgee, a vineyard owned by a friend of the family, that is 8 hours drive west from Sydney, NSW, Australia.
I wanted a kind of laurel wreath to encircle the head of my beloved English Staffordshire dog, but I considered that trying to make him wear any kind of hand-fashioned wreath and get him to sit still enough in the 30 degree Celsius day would be near impossible! So I decided, that the best thing was to take photos of a nearby olive tree, at a nearby winery that we had stopped by, for lunch.
I was struck by the pale aqua-blue colour of the SUV that was parked beside the dog, when I took the source photograph for the pet portrait. I decided to replace the liver-coloured reflection that appeared in the photograph with this colour. I have always taken delight in drawing trees and my family has owned Newfoundlands and French Briards (sheepdog breed) for as long as I can remember. So I thought it would be a novel idea to pick up this colour as a kind of halo-effect in the lattice like collection of olive leaves surrounding the dog’s head.

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Medium

Oil on pine board.

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Ready to hang

This artwork is ready to hang.

Dog Art, People & Portrait Art, Garden Art
#Dog, #Staffy, #Portrait, #Gift, #Olive, #Blue Mountains, #Mudgee, #Contemporary, #Post Modern, #Surrealism, #Pop, #Canine, #Fun, #Holiday, #Holidays, #Coat, #Hound, #Brown, #Chestnut, #Tree, #Sky, #Car, #Aqua, #Blue, #Green, #Sap, #Pooch, #Bull, #Terrier, #Gifting, #Present, #Ideas, #Flat, #Cicular, #Stately, #Majestic, #Royalty, #Wine, #Vinyard, #Poetry, #Composer, #Composition, #Array, #Warhol, #Amdy, #Francis Picabia, #Photoshop, #Digital, #Oils, #Painting, #Arbor, #Georgeo de Chirico, #Surrealist, #Artist, #Fine, #Art, #Descriptive, #Figurative, #Imagination, #Imaginative, #Greciam, #Greek, #Isles, #Island, #Farmer, #Primary, #Producer, #Viticulture, #Slow Fox Wines, #Peace, #Echuca, #maroon, #white

All art by Patrick Hromas

This oil painting is a cross section of an anatomical study of a horse's brain, painted with fine black lines across a random swathe of a red or orange glaze upon an intense canary yellow background. On the right hand side a similarly pained, diagrammatically represented image of a horse's rib cage can be seen. On the far left hand side, a rearing horse. This horse is an appropriation of Jacques-Louis David's famous oil painting: "Napoleon Crossing The Alps" (1801-05), except what is seen here is the image of the horse without the rider, but also this figure is reversed on the horizontal axis. Couched between these two related elements are two non-mimetic studies: the sinuses of a horse, in-situ, in the scull and a representation of a horse's field of vision. A distorted and simplified diagram of a horse’s thoracic system, illustrates the curvature of the spine, seen on the right hand side. The solid darkened tincture crescents in the upper and lower parts show areas obstructed from vision in both eyes, the single hatched areas seen on the left and right of the diagram represents monocular vision, and the centre mid tone glaze describes the binocular visual field. A Yves Kline style swaith of red or vermillion paint underpins these disparate elements, on a plain gold or canary yellow background, as if this is how the collective soul of all horses, Equus, sees and is aware of these disparate bodily parts.Put quite simply, given that David Bowie almost entirely invented glam rock, together with his bizarre dress style, and his love for women in his life, the artist thinks it only fitting to paste Bowie’s head onto the body of a woman, Frankenstein style. The artist thinks he would be honoured by such a poetic portrait. Given that Hromas is an Australian surrealist, he wanted an image of Bowie to serve as a source image for this highly experimental mixed media drawing, something he thinks Bowie would also take delight in, if he were still alive, given the multi-instrumentalist’s love of experimentation with music and his own unique style of painting! So here is represented Bowie in his Reality Tour of Australia, probably taken when Bowie was in Melbourne, even though Hromas saw him on the Sydney leg of the tour. The arms of Bowie are from a different era, at the time of his Lodger Album, as no one has quite the same slender arms as the Thin White Duke. A fair amount of effort was taken by Hromas to present Bowie in a pleasant manner, carefully aligning the three images on Photoshop. The right side of Bowie’s face can be seen in three quarters pose, slightly from below, his left hand gently holding his mike with this arm bent, whilst his right hand clasps his (in actual fact, the woman’s right hip), his or her body partially reclined, with the delicately stockinged legs bent so the knees almost form a right angle, with the right foot (dressed in patented black three inch stilettos) slightly lower than his left. As well as wearing stockings that end halfway up the thighs, in a pretty black lace edge, s/he also wears a partially see through black lace pair of French knickers. This was quite challenging for Hromas to keep the skin tones uniform and showing through the underwear material. This might explain why at this point of painting, the artwork from the far distance to the head of Bowie, he gave up using the home made vegetable paint (in this case beetroot or carrot juice with a little preservative added). Given that it was difficult to control the consistency of this paint, bright vermilion tissue paper was glued down onto the thick paper, to represent the bright striations of clouds that cushion the figure and holds him, floating above a section of the Great Western Highway, at Warrimoo, New South Wales, Australia. The clouds in the upper half of the artwork is drawn in coloured pencil, in a mid toned cobalt with touches of cobalt and white conté, together with some lemon yellow conté lights streaking through the sky.This fine art drawing is comprised of black split pen and ink on found papers laid on a white gessoed canvas stretched on stretcher bars, with near-black shadows painted in brush and ink directly onto the gesso. The proportions of this postmodern surrealist artwork, that veers towards an anime mode of representation, in parts, are 16 to 9 in a landscape format. The three main groups of figures form an “N” shape, in entirety. On the left side the busts of a pair of horses are carefully drawn in pen (as described above). Both heads, necks seen from the left hand side of the animals, and both have their muzzles half buried in chaff bags, strapped behind their ears. They are drawn on a pale eggshell blue paper. The central figure is that of a stylised Scythian corpse, dressed in a funerary smock, perhaps male but his face is left completely blank. He wears a close fitting fez. He is drawn again in pen and ink on a thin, model airplane paper that has a chestnut hue. A larger, looming figure towers above this diagrammatic figure, in a style reminiscent of sci-fi film “Akira” (1988), popular during 1994 amongst university arts students. Although this figure, that is depicted disconcertingly, upside down, has elements appropriated from the film “RoboCop” (1997), and his hyper-masculine limbs are depicted using a wire-frame construction of facets that depict a hyper masculine robotic nightmare that owes as much to the Transformers Franchise as it does the other two films. However, in a tongue-in-cheek way, this figure sports a triple cupped bra and is drawn in black ink (using the above mentioned technique) on an almost red-pink form hugging silhouette of fragile tissue paper. Notably, his right forearm sprouts a large calibre missile launcher from his elbow, instead of a hand, and his crotch shows an old fashioned stainless steel household tap, instead of a male member. At the juncture of imaginary lines that might extend the upper lines of the two horses necks, the end of the muzzle on the robot gun-arm is at a point at where the funeral figure would have his solar plexus positioned, hovers or is ejected from the gun muzzle a small figure. It is a small man dressed in the height of fashionable fawn 19th Century hose and black coat and tails, wearing a top hat. Although, in this instance, the white of the gesso has been carefully exposed by almost completely cutting out the chestnut paper, to form a negative silhouette of the dapper but equally faceless gentleman. He is also drawn in a cross hatched manner with split nib pen and black ink, but in a more adroit manner, reminiscent of an engraving from that era. This gargantuan, geometric robot, has no discernible knees, and his whole body is angled almost at 45 degrees from the angle of the restful corpse, with which the robot’s upper legs and simple triangular prism of a pelvis overlaps, letting the brown paper of the reposed figure show through. Below the tap like appendage, in the centre of the front of the pelvis-triangular prism, is the French words written “Crois” written next to an arrow that points to a square aperture, translated into the English word “Change”. The robot’s lower legs are wider than his upper legs, giving the figure a somewhat “AstroBoy” appearance, as if his legs shared the same jet propulsion. Only the robots lower left leg has a small hole in it with the words “Cup return” written upside down, below it, like a coffee vending machine. The legs are column-like rectangular blocks, but we cannot see the step that is the recessed facets between them, due to our high viewing angle. This isosceles triangular prism is truncated at its lowest point, emphasising the perspective (seen from below) of this menacing futuristic emblem of malevolence. His lower torso is a slender highly attenuated triangular prism, yet we see only the front face of it, it’s top and bottom severely truncated. In the centre is another, larger, square void, below it written “Le Café”. It is at the centre of this hole, the left hand is positioned, except it has the appearance of a prosthetic claw, holding a tray, horizontally, upon which a miniature tea pot, cup and saucer are proffered, apologetically. Above the level of the hips, the left muzzle-arm has a rectangular prism for an elbow, the claw-arm is fitted to a long cylindrical forearm, terminating in a vertically positioned rectangular prism, it’s lower front and rear edges chamfered, thus enabling the tea tray to move up and down with a barrel joint. He has impossibly large shoulders in rounded bio form prisms, his upper arms are reduced to mere rectilinear stumps. Steampunk, Monty Pythonesque forms connect these oversized shoulders, forming a handsome chest. “Milk no biscuits” is scrawled on an SUV-like grill in the centre. Above this, written on the underside of the chest surface (visible from the viewer’s position) states lettering, indicating the figure’s identity “The Tyrant”, in capitals. In larger capital letters on the front face of the left and right shoulders, respectively, “War is Peace” and “Love is Hate” are written. Linking the two George Orwell quotes, written in the same, but slightly smaller lettering is the third maxim: “Ignorance is Strength”. A RoboCop, cylindrical head surmounts the terrible figure, with a Sydney Nolan/Ned Kelly black slot for unseen eyes. Conversely, the figure of the deceased Scythian, an ancient tribe of horse riding people who lived in present day Syria, who left ornate jewellery at burial sites, is an offshoot of my youthful obsession with horses. The artist believed that they were a kind of “Dr Who” race of sub-humans, and borrowed the term to describe present day horsemen and horsewomen. Hence the faceless figure, has elegant arabesques of whip-like lines that cross his form. The horses on the left hand side of the artwork are a kind of cool, repose, a place for the art viewers eye to rest not only on the upper figure’s vertical, and misty rain-like semaphore line work, but a place to reflect upon life. Similarly, the lower equine figure has her ears drawn back, not in anger but in pleasure, her gentle whorls of her hide, gently creeps across her Morgan-horse-like forms, entirely trusting you to reach out and stroke her beautiful countenance…
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