Taking Shape
What if his voice suddenly failed? He would make drawings. What if someone admired his art and asked him where it all began? Julian Hooper would hand over his nearest sketchbook full of preliminary drawings. Drawing, the activity at the core of the Auckland-based painter’s work, equals potential.
Open that sketchbook somewhere near the middle and locate a thin, pitched architectural form, a linear polygon divided into three units: it will reappear a year later, a little more heavily outlined and volumetric, a little more like a figure–ground visual perception test but still simple and elegant, in the acrylic on canvas Puzzle (2020). On other pages a circular segment appears, replicating the shape of a kicked-over, partially filled cylindrical tank. We will see that motif again, more relationally oriented and with a facial profile flanking it, in the painting The Man in the Moon (2021).
In his recent paintings, Hooper tests a basic set of abstract shapes and motifs, exploring what metamorphoses they can be put through. In one work, he may create a semi-portrait out
