The East is for lovers 2024

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Having moved to the eastern suburbs of Sydney to recover from addiction and manic depression, artist Thom Muir had no means, desire, or inclination to re-engage with his former creative life.

Walking to daily meetings past a demolition site, a local construction worker would come to gift him 30 canvases otherwise destined for landfill. Having despaired of art and life, this act of kindness illuminated an avenue for the adrift Muir to paint again. He would redevelop a spirituality in artistic practice that would reframe the Australian landscape and the temporal beauty of the human figure as an expression of the sublime. This body of work is the story of that journey.

'The East is for lovers' is comprised of landscapes and figures in oils and mixed media. This work explores human impermanence within the landscape and the flow of land, sky and sea in the current of time. The jubilance of the Sydney coastline and its inhabitants as a celebration of the improbability of life in the manner and moment at which we find it.

The people are both indelicate and nuanced, divine and grotesque. Muir explores these dualities, ultimately portraying the landscape as the redeemer, in a series which seeks to reflect on our place in the flow.