Australian artist Tony Lloyd explores the relationship between natural and constructed worlds through his dramatic paintings. Cultivating a subtle style of photo-realism, Lloyd meticulously captures dark and moody atmospheric scenarios, reminiscent of auteurs of film noir like Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch. Manipulating the surfaces of his canvasses to create tonal variations that are thoughtfully observed, Lloyd conjures something more akin to a metaphor, disallowing his images to be fully comprehensible, presenting us instead with individual moments of a greater whole. “The image loses its anchor to a particular place, a particular time. The idea of 'where' and 'when' becomes abstracted. In the imaginary timeframe of painting a sense of timelessness becomes possible and diverse moments can exist concurrently," says Lloyd. Working from photographic images, which record a fleeting moment of the past, the artist translates into paint enigmatic scenes with ominous undertones that defy the notion of past, present or future.
Tony Lloyd lives and works in Melbourne where he studied painting at RMIT University, gaining his MA in 2001. Lloyd has had over twenty solo shows and has been included in a number of group exhibitions in Australia and Europe. His work also featured in Heat: Art and Climate Change at RMIT Gallery and in 2009, Gippsland Art Gallery presented a survey of his work from 1999-2009. Lloyd has twice received grants from the Australia Council for the Arts and has been short-listed for numerous art prizes. The artist’s paintings have been collected by the State Library of Victoria, Gippsland Art Gallery, Artbank, Macquarie bank, BHP Billiton, the City of Whitehorse and many individual private collections in Australia, Japan, Europe and U.S.A.
