Bedroom Interior and Drapes After Your Painting Apple Orchard Orgy 2019 oil on raw linen 150 x 150 cm
10 Paintings/10 Texts. In the spirit of Summoned Paintings, this time I have not written about my work. Instead I invited ten of those I communed with during my year in and out of the studio to respond to a painting each in text.
By Eleanor Louise Butt
The sun breaks through the leaves, momentarily blinding me. I hold the waxen apple in my hand and press my thumb against the skin, anticipating the flesh cracking open between my teeth. Fragments of orange light cut across the scene of Amber Wallis’s painting, Bedroom Interior and Drapes After Your Painting Apple Orchard Orgy. At first glance a study in abstraction, then from the centre of the painting a dense patch of pubic hair emerges. Unfolding around it is a bedroom scene where blurred, faceless bodies writhe together, enveloped between blocks of blue and grey which both support the figures and the composition. A swathe of deep green runs diagonally across the top, a stand-in for the canopy of leaves in Justin William's referenced painting Apple Orchard Orgy. In the tradition of making an artwork after another artist’s, the ambiguity of the title also suggests that this could be the next in a series of orgies.
Eleanor Louise Butt is an Australian artist based in Melbourne