From one of Australia’s most esteemed contemporary artists, John Young’s Snow Pines III (2004) brings together two distinct mediums: a digital print and oil painting on linen. The work overlays a row of delicately painted pine trees with a digital rendering of auspicious clouds, a traditional East Asian motif associated with good fortune, blessing and transcendence. In this meeting of image and gesture, old and new visual languages converge.

Part of Young’s The Persian Paintings series, Snow Pines III reflects the artist’s longstanding engagement with religious imagery and ideas of the sublime and paradise. The pines appear to emerge through a veil of mist, their quiet verticality set against the soft, patterned field of clouds. Figuration and abstraction, painting and digital technology, East and West are held in delicate tension.

Created at the beginning of the new millennium, the work feels particularly attuned to a moment of transition: a threshold between inherited traditions and emerging technologies, the ancient and the contemporary. Young’s use of digital printing alongside oil painting is not simply a technical experiment, but a meditation on how images, symbols and ideas endure as they move between cultures and eras.

Born in Hong Kong, Young migrated to Australia in 1967. Having studied the philosophy of science and aesthetics alongside art-making, he has developed an intellectually rigorous practice that explores his bicultural identity, the legacy of late modernism in the West and the cultural discourses of our time. His work is held in major public collections including the Art Gallery of New South Wales and National Gallery of Victoria, and he has held more than 80 solo exhibitions internationally, including four major survey exhibitions in Australia.

For collectors of contemporary art, experimental printmaking or works that reward quiet contemplation, Snow Pines III is a particularly evocative example of Young’s ability to make seemingly disparate visual traditions speak to one another.

John YOUNG (1956 - )
'Snow Pines III' 2004
mixed media on canvas
Image Size: 84 x 69 cm
Dimensions: 84 x 69 x 4 cm
Comes with Letter of Provenance
Inscribed with title and date verso: Snow Pines III / Summer 2004; Sherman Galleries Paddington NSW stamp on stretcher bar
Condition:very good
(c) The Artist or Assignee