Morning mists

Just before signs of the degenerative disease Huntington's Chorea seriously impacted on the life of South Australian painter Horace Trenerry, leading to his death in a nursing home in 1958, his works began to exude a chalky translucence comparable to certain European painters such as Fernand Hodler of Switzerland and Gwen John of Great Britain. As with their visions, there was an enigmatic quality of colour within his colourlessness, and beyond the deceptive simplicity of his subject matter, typical of much landscape imagery which emerged out of the Heidelberg school, an intense response to nature resulted in a rarified inflexion of the language of painting.

Trenerry scholar Lou Klepac rates 'Morning mists' amongst the greatest handful of his works: "Trenerry is still to be discovered by the public at large" he said, "but has always been admired by other artists, for example Jeffrey Smart. His late visionary paintings especially are extraordinary, rendered thickly not for the sake of thickness, but under a spiritual impulse which well near defies unravelment of the motif from the pure process of painting."

Australian Art Department, AGNSW, 2001