Sylvania
Brian McKAY
2005 | oil on etched and sealed aluminium | accession number 798
purchased by the Art Board 2007 - Murdoch University Art Collection
© the artist

Brian McKAY

born 1926 Meckering, Western Australia
lives and works Fremantle, Western Australia

Brian McKay is one of Western Australia's most senior and committed modernists. He has a strong artisan approach to his painting and also derives techniques from his past experience as a commercial designer. From this experience he has developed a love and fascination with surfaces. McKay has recently shifted away from his meticulously prepared canvas supports to work on commercially made aluminium surfaces.

When glimpsed there is a slickness to McKay's oil on aluminium paintings yet on close inspection there is a distinct hand-craftedness to the paint application. The paint is applied in two ways as either flat opaque enamel or as veils of transparent oil paint. Sylvania is in the later category with its distinctive stripes of slim vertical coloured panels. The surface of Sylvania resonates with varying depths that shift as your eyes dance around the painting. Indeed, the technique employed allows the paint to breathe with alternating weight and lightness.

Brian McKay lives and works in Fremantle, Western Australia and has exhibited since the mid 1950s. Much of McKay's work over the years has been influenced by the textures, light and architecture of Greece, where he lived with his family in the 1960s; and later London, where he was influenced by hard edged, minimalist art.

In more recent years McKay has created several large public artwork commissions, such as the beautiful pale blue murals in the foyer of Perth’s huge Central Park Tower building, a splendid shimmering metal mural which adorns the outside of Perth’s new ABC building and the sculpted ceiling of the Fremantle Maritime Museum.

McKay’s work has been showcased in two major survey exhibitions during his career. The first was at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in 1988 and the second has held at the Holmes a Court Gallery in 2005.

Other selected artwork acquisitions