Guy Warren

“I think Guy’s legacy as an artist will take longer to become apparent. His was such a big life that it is hard right now to see it with any clarity.

Guy’s practice over the decades has been marked by its insistence of returning to the landscape. It was a never ending subject that he constantly renewed and the motif of water and the river, its constant pulsing surges, move continuously through his work.

I have a feeling Guy’s work is about immersion rather than accuracy, a general mood rather than anything specific. It is only through this kind of immersion that a tree-fern can transform into a figure and a patch of bush can be turned into a quick whiplash shorthand of marks generated from the wrist and eye. When you carry that landscape in your head it merges with all the other images you carry too and what emerges, if you let it, is something biographical and unique.”

– Glenn Barkley, 2024 [Artist, Writer & Curator]

Adapted from a eulogy delivered at the funeral of Guy Warren on Tuesday 25 June, 2024