“Our culture needs more painters on the dark side of experience, men who can spend years insisting, against all decorum, that art is not all sweetness and light…..; that art can be an erratic yell, an irrational fear, a ritual in the dark, an exorcism, a dirge for lost innocence….” (Robert Hughes – 1964)

John Moroney is one of these painters, revealing universal truths with evocative painting and sculpture, that analyse and deconstruct familial relationships, describing themes of love, fertility, death and rebirth. Giving hope to the notion that what one might experience as an individual is not isolated, that there is something we all have in common with the greater human experience.

A Farewell to Arms, is John Moroney’s  first Solo Exhibition in Newcastle, after winning the painting section of the Newcastle Emerging Art Prize (2014). He has also been selected as semi-finalist for the Doug Moran Portrait Prize and a finalist in the Black swan Portraiture Prize in Perth. John is currently majoring in sculpture at The National Art School after completing his Diploma of Fine Art at Newcastle Art School in 2013.

John says, “These paintings tell personal stories but my intent is to synthesise the experience. By using metaphors and oscillating between an empirical and emotive viewpoint, I aim to present images that reveal universal truths, to offer archaic or essential concepts that can be understood and reinterpreted by all. I aim to reveal something of the tale of you and I, to tell the story of our lives.”