Rodney Simmons

Rodney Simmons was born in Wollongong, Australia in 1967.

He completed a degree at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales in 1987. After travelling extensively through Asia, Africa and Europe he returned to Australia and has held solo art exhibitions in Sydney since the late 1980s. Around this time his work was exhibited in the Salon des Refuses, a show which runs alongside Australia's pre-eminent landscape award - the Wynne Prize. In 2006 Rodney was awarded the $10,000 Biennial Norvill Art Prize one of Australia's most prestigious regional landscape awards. He also had a solo exhibition in Sydney and was part of a select group of artists chosen for an Australian Government sponsored show in Dubai.

"My paintings take many months of merciless self criticism to complete but evolve into something endlessly surprising..." Rodney Simmons

Rodney has been referred to as a painter poet - without words, without images - without any recourse to our normal modes of communication his awkward scrawls of line and colour have a surprising ability to affect. Layer after layer of paint reveals yet more marks and lines - like a senior art critic at The Sydney Morning Herald, Bruce James so aptly described "it's like calligraphy unravelled."

The Art of Rodney Simmons

Rodney Simmons must keep surprising himself all the way through the painting process, to do things that he could not, and must not, have been able to orchestrate consciously. A painting thus painted can take many months of merciless self-criticism to complete, but evolves into something endlessly surprising, full of the whole unpredictable variety of the human touch. This kind of intense intoxication in the process becomes that of the viewer. Wild, torn and out of control, these abstract paintings reveal themselves as remarkably lyrical and soothing with the passage of time. I think of his work as having a ripped lyricism. They are savage yet soothing. There are some artists who are truly poets. They take materials that seem mute, dumb and ordinary - Morandi with his pots, Joseph Cornell with his junk - and make them strangely eloquent. Without words, without images - without any recourse to our normal modes of communication - Simmons' awkward scrawls of line and colour have a surprising ability to affect. By some baffling alchemy his paintings slip into the house of our feeling life, thumping walls in rooms we didn't know were there. This ability is the mark of a true painter poet.

Peter Duggan, 2005.