Abstract
The ubiquitous Australian corner shop – whether it is called a milk bar, deli or even the general store – can still be glimpsed when driving through country towns. Sadly, though, they’re a rare sight these days in suburbia.
Like the one featured on the cover of this issue, they evoke childhood memories of blue heaven milkshakes, idling away hours with friends – and the lolly counter. Rows of rainbow-coloured sweets, lined up in tiers and protected from sticky fingers by the glass-fronted case, where 20 cents would buy you a bulging little white paper bag, filled to overflowing by the shop owner.
As artist Christopher McVinish notes, ‘I like to choose houses and streets that seem of an inscrutable nature, with a stillness possessed by something: memory, hope, fading endeavours, the vaguely threatening, the ordinary as odd, things implied. For me there is beauty in that.’
McVinish likes to make ‘portraits of place’. This painting forms part of an on-going series of works ‘that celebrate a synthesis of memory and place, where architecture and landscape become a symbol of something nostalgic, if not elegiac’.
And in a nod to his depiction of clouds closing in, and the glaring sunshine that leaves a pavement sizzling in the summer heat, he explains, ‘I might add weather, different light, to heighten the narrative effect.’
The viewer, having been invited into McVinish’s world, may reminisce about life in simpler times. His visual stories depict contemporary life like a kind of half-remembered dream that lingers in the mind.
‘I have drawn on the past as well as the present in my quest to find meaning in the mundane,’ says McVinish. ‘I intend … to provoke a narrative in the imagination of the viewer and in doing so enable the viewer to exist temporarily in someone else’s world – as if suddenly transported to a place where other lives exist and time has been suspended.’
The Brisbane-born artist now lives and works in the Blue Mountains. He has been a finalist in many art prizes, and has held more than 30 Australian solo exhibitions and participated in other exhibitions nationwide. His art is represented in public and university collections, as well as being held in numerous private collections, both in Australia and internationally.
Christopher McVinish
Corner shop (2020)
oil on canvas
62 x 92cm
Cover image courtesy of the artist
© Christopher McVinish
