MOST artists trample the corn around their existential crisis, but Perth painter Robert Gear met his head on.

It all came bubbling up after he read T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, a set of poems tackling the weighty themes of time, mortality, religion and spirituality.

With metaphysical clocks spinning around his head and the grim reaper bearing down, images began to pop into Gear’s subconscious while on his daily walks around the Darling Scarp.

He began putting brush to easel and came up with 15 gothic-style paintings that combine bucolic scenes with Victorian dread for his latest exhibition Time Present and Time Past.

• One of the paintings by Robert Gear (below) in his latest exhibition Time Present and Time Past.

“All the works in this show are of what I have seen, imagined or experienced,” he says.

“I’m attracted to what I see when it connects with a memory formed by my experience of living in the world. 

“I work to reinvent the mundane and the ordinary and imbue it with an aesthetic that offers my audience a pathway to connect with common beliefs and shared experiences.

“My painting is a slow process where I try to convey emotion, sensations and feelings. Many of my works have titles that lean towards the non-secular, an outcome of being immersed in a religious education system.”

There’s certainly a wry poke at religion in some of the paintings, including a long table covered in a white tablecloth in the middle of an eerie forest, which looks like the Last Supper staged by Dracula.

There is a strong Victorian feel to many of the 15 paintings, which were created using oil on linen or board, with Gear capturing the light beautifully at different times of day: “I use light to illuminate the objects and manipulate the compositions until I find something I recognise. Light has many interpretations…divine truth, illumination of the soul, and a way of seeing,” he says.

Originally from New Zealand, Gear’s family moved to Perth in 1961 and he went on to complete a teaching diploma majoring in Art at Nedlands Secondary Teachers College in 1977, and a degree in Fine Art at Curtin University in 1980.

He’s worked in secondary education most of his life, while continuing to paint and hold solo and groups exhibitions. 

After decades of creating art, Gear is still committed to his craft  – he spent 18 months working full-time on the paintings for his latest exhibition and finished most of them in early 2023.

He says they are an unofficial follow-up to his 2020 exhibition 339 Days, which tackled “time and the finitude of our lives”, a theme that pervades T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.

Gear says the poet has influenced a lot of iconic Australian artists including Albert Tucker, Jeffrey Smart and John Brack.

“This opening verse of T.S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton fascinated me and lead me to explore and read about the religious, metaphysical and spiritual aspects of the poem and the nature of time itself,” Gear says.

“…Ultimately, I’m seeking to create poetic visual recollections of my life’s experiences and my sense of place in the world. I want people to see something that they have experienced in their own lives. I also want to share my vision of the world so that others might recognise something that they otherwise might not have noticed.”

The exhibition includes a small limited-edition book with a short story dedicated to one of Gear’s dear friends who passed away in 2019.

“Its narrative speaks of metaphysical, emotional and spiritual experiences that we shared on The Swan River/Derbarl Yerrigan specifically on and around the Narrows Bridge,” he says.

Time Present and Time Past is at Art Collective WA, Cathedral Square on Hay Street, from May 25 until June 22. For more info see artcollectivewa.com.au.

by STEPHEN POLLOCK