Solomon Grainger

Solomon has been drawing as long as he can remember. A recipient of the National Gallery of Australia Summer Scholarship in 2016, he rediscovered his early childhood drawings in a box, half way through Year 12. The discovery inspired a completely new direction for him, moving away from realism and into the abstract and figurative. But Grainger sees it very true to himself.

"The drawings revealed what I always knew, that I have been drawing as far back as I can remember. They were also eye opening because they showed my style completely untouched by any external influence."

Those drawings had a very consistent theme - dragons. The dragons always had the same style to them, large heads with an eye with a cross in the middle, and jagged rows of diamond shaped teeth with smaller bodies. "This was me in my purest form of artistry."

"Looking at these early representations, it doesn't seem as though I drew them as something to fear, but as a creature of wonder. There is a calmness to these dragons."

Grainger says there always seemed to be four main archetypes he focused on, the most prolific being dragons, followed by mummy, flowers and daddy. His early experiments with painting from these images led to much more abstract decisions when applying paint to the canvas.

"Having spent my whole life trying to improve my skills with realist representations, freeing myself of that need seemed to reconnect me with the fun of drawing as a child. I know I'm not the first to have reconnected with art from early childhood, but making strange random markings and lines on the canvas that had no specific aesthetic purpose or meaning other than a sub-conscious emotion being expressed comes from an intuitive process."

At 18, Grainger has already achieved a lot, winning the People's Choice Award at Belconnen Arts Centre's College Express 8, NGA Summer Scholarship 2016, and some of his earlier work can be seen on the walls of pubs and cafes around Canberra.

Having been accepted into the Australian National University School of Art, Grainger has deferred to take a gap year and travel to Europe and see the masters he has admired, and immerse himself in the art scenes there. And who are those masters he would most like to see? "Turner and Michelangelo are the obvious ones, but Cy Twombly and Anselm Kiefer are two modern artists I would love to see more of."

Grainger has worked on this series for about 12 months and it is a prolific body of work. "This body of work has been an evolutionary process in itself, like the child learning to draw and eventually pulling in external influences and symbols as he or she grows and matures as a person and an artist."

Ella Chartres, Director - Aarwun Gallery - May 27 2017