Paul Maher
Esplanade walk
Manly Cove – Gayamaygal country
77×46cm oil on canvas
$2000
Paul Maher
Harbour Drift
2 – 30 May
opening 3-5pm Saturday 2 May
To discover the secret nooks and crannies of waterfront Sydney through this new series of Paul Maher’s paintings is truly to be transported to the places he’s been. You clamber over hunks of fallen sandstone on the shoreline. You step across tiny rockpools where periwinkles, whelks and black nerites are in a universe of their own. You hear the gentle metronome of tidal wavelets on barnacle-encrusted rocks. You feel the salt tang in your nostrils, and once again inhabit childhood and its enchanted places.
Maher created his Harbour Drift series by direct immersion. Crouching by the water with a sketchbook and pencil, he tuned in to the spaces where the water meets the land, at those quiet bays and inlets that only ever whisper their stories, and you need an ear for poetry to hear them. Returning to his Newcastle studio, he sifted through the day’s drawings, searching for the essence, discarding the peripheral, each composition a distillation.
It’s not just their natural beauty that draws Maher to out-of-the-way harbourside places, but their human additions. Boat sheds hovering above their own shadows cast on the water. Kayaks and dinghies hauled up on the sand. Rusty remains of shipways. Houses perched above the shoreline.
In Tidal Gauge Station, Camp Cove, a quirky shed like a doll’s house anchored a short way off the beach is glimpsed through the branches of a Morton Bay fig tree. The shed once housed an official tide gauge that was in use until 1989. When the structure was built, World War I was just on the horizon.
In Deckchairs on the terrace, a stone-walled modernist house poised above the water quotes intriguing snippets of art history. An odalisque reclined on an outdoor chaise longue echoes Matisse’s Blue Nude II. A boy reaching into the water from the pontoon reflects Caravaggio’s Narcissus. Vuillard and Bonnard, those lovers of pattern, are hinted at in the shallow perspective and myriad striped and stippled areas of the canvas. The stylised blue tree at top left looks to China or Japan for its origins. But a laundry basket in a trolley, top right, anchors the picture firmly in the Sydney suburban vernacular.
The pretty white house in Porcelain shell becomes a luminous presence among the misty blues, greys and greens of Maher’s gentle palette of oil paints. The surrounding bushland shimmers. A ladder and a remnant slipway form diagonals that tether the house to the water.
Sirius Cove – sea scouts locates the Sea Scouts’ clubhouse between the tilted rocks at both ends of the beach, the encroaching bushland and the shallow, verdigris water. The cochineal door of the clubhouse and the yellow kayaks hold the composition in delicate balance.
Sugarloaf Point, Bantry Bay and Manly Skiff Club all feature in Maher’s Harbour Drift suite of paintings – his third exhibition of works inspired by Sydney Harbour. Many of the paintings depict that random accretion of built structures that the artist responds to with such empathy.
“It’s about idiosyncratic structures that people build, like boat sheds,” Maher says.
Grafted on to the shoreline as needs dictate, these buildings are “not self-consciously trying to express their personality”, he says.
Maher’s paintings capture this accidental beauty, the kind that flourishes far away from the turmoil of the city and speaks best to those who are prepared to slow down and converse with it on equal terms.
Elizabeth Fortescue
Paul Maher
Sail leans on light
Darling Point – Eurambie
79×45cm oil on canvas
$2100
Paul Maher
Bridge to tidal gauge
Camp Cove – Gadigal country
44×59cm oil on canvas
$1500
Paul Maher
Boatshed
Barrabru Reserve Castlegrag, Cameraygal country
65×54cm oil on canvas
$2000
Paul Maher
Sirius Cove- Sea scouts
Cammeray country
40×50cm oil on board
$1200
Paul Maher
Sea bath of light
Murray Rose Pool – Gadigal land
55×54cm oil on canvas
$1700
Paul Maher
Boatsheds nestled
Castlecrag, Cameraygal country
68×53cm oil on canvas
$2000
Paul Maher
Porcelain shell
Camaraigal country
81×55cm oil on canvas
$2500
Paul Maher
Manly Cove Launch
Gayamaygal country
59×79cm oil on canvas
$2700
Paul Maher
Tidal Gauge Station
Camp Cove – Gadigal country
68×53cm oil on canvas
$2000
Paul Maher
Port side jetty and yachts
Murray Rose Pool – Gadigal land
78×46cm oil on canvas
$2100
Paul Maher
Deckchairs on the terrace
Northbridge – Cammeraygal country
79×70cm oil on canvas
$3000
Paul Maher
Q Station Wharf
Gayamaygal country
40×50cm oil on board
$1200
Paul Maher
Private residence, Chinamens Beach
Camaraigal country
75×42cm oil on canvas
$1800
Paul Maher
Steps down to Balmain waterfront
Wangal country
85×47cm oil on canvas
$2300
Primarily a painter, Newcastle based artist Paul Maher is best known for his gritty depictions of the urban coastal landscape
Early in his painting career Maher adopted a gestural en plain air practice which is evident in his current work. He spends hours in the landscape drawing – usually between Sydney and Newcastle – before making his completed works back in the studio
Maher has exhibited regularly in Newcastle and Sydney. He has been a finalist in the Kilgour and Lake Macquarie Art Prizes, and his work is held in the Newcastle Art Gallery collection
