“I think that mysterious things happen in familiar places. We don’t always need to run to the other end of the world” – Saul Leiter
In Christopher McVinish’s new body of work, the artist has drawn on the past as well as the present in his quest to find meaning in the mundane.
The paintings provoke a narrative in the imagination of the viewer and in doing so enables them to exist temporarily in someone else’s world – as if suddenly transported to a place where other lives exist and time has been suspended.
Christopher McVinish’s paintings are carefully composed with layers of detail and hold an air of expectancy and strangeness – these are places where something has just happened or is about to happen for the first time.
Christopher McVinish was born in Brisbane in 1952. Exhibiting continuously since 1979, he has held over 30 solo exhibitions and has been selected for numerous group and exhibitions around Australia. Christopher has been a finalist for many awards including the Black Swan Portrait Prize, Mossman Art Prize, Archibald Prize, Tattersall’s Prize and Paddington Landscape Prize. He was awarded the Holding Redlich prize in the 2013 Salon des Refuses for his portrait of the Actor Colin Friels.
Christopher’s work is represented in many public and university collections such as the Toowoomba City Council, Gold Coast Council,RedcliffeCityCouncilGriffithUniversity, Swinburne University of Technology, the University of Queensland Press, the University of the SunshineCoast and the Australasian Royal College of Surgeons. His work is also held in numerous private and corporate collections in Australia, the US, UK, and Germany.
He lives with his artist wife, Cynthia Breusch, in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney
