EAST SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA.- A fortnight after the Sydney Writers Festival closes its final page, Australian abstract painter Mostyn Bramley-Moore returns to Sydney’s Watters Gallery on 15 June to open an exhibition, ‘Red and Blue Places’, of new abstract literary paintings.

With 25 works, 'Red and Blue Places' embodies his typical, enigmatic style of work - partially revealing, partially concealing, but always leaving the final interpretation to the viewer. Red and blue landscapes are populated by a collection of objects, symbols and 'personages' that are simultaneously both familiar and strangely challenging.

One of Australia’s more unusual painters, Bramley-Moore has had 30 years of individual exhibitions around the world – New York, China, UK and Australia – with his iconic off-beat blend of abstract figurative two-dimensional and sculptural work. With a professorship at the Queensland College of Art, he has notably combined a career as one of Australia’s top arts academics and as a practicing artist – a rare achievement in the artworld today.

The artist considers himself as a ‘literary’ painter, with contemplative sense of narrative in his work and a kind of scale and landscape that writers test in their novels.

“Typically, my paintings flicker between abstraction and figuration. Really, they are neither one nor the other. I try to tell stories, and paintings need a large repertoire of strategies and devices to do this,” said Mostyn Bramley-Moore.

“I like it when my paintings test a genre to the limit, when they are on the disputed border of success and failure, when they challenge comfort, when they arrive on the corner of ‘walk’ and ‘don’t walk’”.

“The results dwell on the border between the inarticulate and the eloquent,” wrote Dr Christopher Heathcote in Art&Australia, June/ August 2000.

“These are very good works,” writes Louise Martin-Chew in ‘The Australian’ (5 April, 2002). “At 50, Bramley-Moore is a distinguished younger member among Australia's spectrum of abstract painters, up there with the likes of Alan Mitelman and Jon Plapp, and following a more narrative path than that of fellow abstractionists Victor Majzner and Michael Johnson ….[he] deserves to be better known for his consistently subtle, meditative paintings.”

“I have always been interested in ‘naïve art’, ‘outsider art’, ‘tribal art’, ‘accidental art’… I am fascinated by things that were not created as Art but which we have decided to categorise in this way,” said Bramley-Moore. “I am interested in the point at which a mark becomes meaningful, when a sound becomes intelligible.”

“Painting seems important to me because it is one of the most elemental activities that I can imagine. Probably to sustain a focus on this combination of simplicity and timelessness, I mainly use materials in very fundamental ways. I try never to forget that I am scratching lines and daubing paint on bits of paper and fabric. I want paintings to be objects rather that just surfaces.”

International in outlook, the artist consolidated his art-school training in 1970’s New York. Bramley-Moore returns to the America in August for a 5 month residency as ‘Visiting Artist’ at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the oldest art school in America. This prestigious invitation comes during the year that the PAFA celebrates its 200 anniversary. It is also one of the oldest art museums in America.

Mostyn Bramley-Moore has a broad exhibiting career both in Australia and overseas (USA, England, Scotland, Korea, Yugoslavia). He also has a distinguished career in teaching in Australian art schools. Currently Professor and Director at QLD College of Art, Griffith University (from 2000 onwards), he was recently Dean of the School of Art, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne (1996-99) and has held a number of distinguished posts such as the Visiting Professor of Art, University of Hawaii as well as a significant number of Artist-in-Residences.

“I started painting seriously at university when I was 18 years of age and I am still going. After postgraduate study and countless exhibitions it sometimes frightens me that I am still learning how to paint at 53. By now I am an expert in being non-expert,” he added.