There’s a Snake Out Near the Clothes Line

- Rodney Forbes: LOVE & WORK
- Rodney Forbes’ latest body of work covers a wide swathe of territory, (from love to work and from cats to atomic disintegrators) but also a wide geographical scope. The Australian painter lives in Gippsland, Australia’s greenest region, home to koalas and platypus, and has exhibited internationally and traveled widely.
- Forbes visited New Mexico on a research trip to Colorado University in 2012 and fell in love with Santa Fe. Gallerist Glenn Green invited him to show some of his paintings and now this will be Forbes’ third exhibition at Glenn Green Galleries.
- On a cold clear night in 2024, Forbes walked up the grassy hill behind his Gippsland studio to admire the stars. He slipped on the frosty grass, breaking a leg. While healing, he reorganised his studio to get around on crutches and make handling pictures easier, switching to a 9 by 5 inch format for the remainder of the paintings. This size was made famous by the Australian Heidelberg School of painters, who worked on 9” x 5” cigar box lids to facilitate plein air painting.
- Forbes loved the format and painted them on solid pine boards. ‘I like the object quality of the little boards and also the lack of a canvas weave facilitates a lush thin technique with oil paint’, he said. Why “LOVE & WORK”? Sigmund Freud, the founder of modern psychology, thought that they were the only important things in life. He famously said, “Love and work...work and love, that’s all there is.” Forbes agrees, saying that art is the perfect combination of work and love.
- Forbes began his working life as an electronics technician during the Vietnam War. He worked on anti-aircraft missiles on warships, and often sailed on sea trials. It left him with a lasting love of ships and the sea, which often feature in his paintings. At 30, he retrained as an artist and has had a distinguished career as a painter and art educator. He was the Head of Gippsland Centre for Art and Design at Monash University and has collaborated on numerous curatorial and exhibition projects with Australian and American Indigenous artists and academics. His work is held in the collection of The National Gallery of Australia and many international collections.