It has often been held that Painting is a narrative art, but this is just a conceit. Painting is only narrative if the viewer already knows the story, or if the story is being explained to the viewer, in words, at time of viewing. “Narrative Painting” can only illustrate something already known. Although painting has often been representational, her representations are not narratives. The experience represented in traditional painting is symbolic and/or allegorical experience, but painting is deeper than mere representation.

In his Ode on a Grecian Urn, the Romantic poet John Keats famously writes that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”. In The Origin of the Work of Art, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger describes the nature of the relationship between Truth and Beauty. Heidegger says that “Truth is the unconcealedness of that which is” and that Beauty is the appearance of Truth in the work of art. Since Truth is the revealing of itself, the arising of Truth and Beauty is not a fixed matter of fact, but rather a process or an opening. I relate this opening to the way in which Heidegger defines the word phenomenon in his central text Being and Time:

Abstract painting came very late to Australia. Non geometric pure abstraction has been particularly late to develop here. Even now, almost all Australian abstract painters continue to refer to their work in relationship to landscape, light or nature, as if abstract painting is merely a reduction from, or an extension of, a motif from Nature. Such an approach is related to the kind of 19th and 20th century Symbolist practices from which abstraction initially arose, but such practices are quite distinct from those of the abstract painter.