Venus of Venus

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Chalk Horse, Darlinghurst

By Andrew Frost

In the infinitely strange world of Tara Marynowsky’s little watercolours the maternal is rendered as an eternal mother-monster hybrid. The image is founded in the interplay between colours and shapes created by the meeting of fluid pigment on coloured paper and then, with the deft addition of a few lines, the artist creates figures, heads and bodies reminiscent of the Venus of Willendorf, a fox-woman in repose, or a sock-headed creature with ice Gollum eyes.

For Venus of Venus, her latest outing with Chalk Horse, Marynowsky has also included works on found vintage postcards, paintings such as Destinaire where the artist has once more painted over a background image here creating a bizarre mix of Edwardian sentimentalia with sci-fi estrangement. The trick of symbolist art is to get the viewer to believe in the truth of a metaphor and although the surface of Venus is so hot it melts steel, yet it’s not too much to believe a Venusian may even look like this. Of course, that’s a fiction and what Marynowsky is really doing is playing the card of the uncanny. And it’s amazing – is works its magic every time.

Pic: Tara Marynowsky, Destinaire, 2014. Watercolour and gouache on used vintage postcard, 8x10cms.