Introduction

The art of Robert Boynes has often used the city as its source. The urban environment has spawned a variety of images and themes from the beginnings of the artist’s exhibiting career in the mid-1960s to his most recent work as evinced in the present series.

This is more the ineluctable attraction of the city for Boynes partly lies in its innate ambiguities. The city is both a generic and a specific metaphor. Generic, in that his paintings are making statements that have universal relevance. Particular, in that it is a specific city (in the present series, Sydney) that has provoked his reaction. That these two operate with perceptual and conceptual simultaneity infuses the resultant images with a palpable aesthetic and thematic tension.

Robert Boynes. The Woolloomooloo Bay Series:  Peter Haynes - Director Canberra Museum and Gallery

The Wave - 1998 120 x 150cm Acrylic on canvas

Beat up (with apologies to El Greco) - 1998 120 x 150cm Acrylic on canvas