David Aspden

Gallery A, 1969;  Private Collection, Melbourne, till 2006;  Estate of David Aspden since then

Probably Group Exhibition, Gallery A, Sydney, January - February, 1969;
Abstraction V, Charles Nodrum Gallery, 26 October - 18 November, 2006, no. 31;
David Aspden: Survey, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, 10 August — 23 September, 2012;
Abstraction 17: A Field of Interest, c. 1968, Charles Nodrum Gallery, 26 April - 19 May, 2018, no. 11

Christopher Dean & John McDonald, David Aspden: Survey, exhibition catalogue, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, 2012. illus p 4:
"In Jnana, Aspden takes the boldest of paths by cutting a strip of bright red through a field of blue - a sapphire or maybe a royal blue. The red zip is divided into three: a line of scarlet framed by two darker strips of crimson... The vertical zip, in its most fundamental reading, always reflects the human presence. It suggests, like the old conundrum about a tree falling in the forest when there is nobody to witness the event, that a painting requires an audience to be fully complete. The viewer is the vital element that brings the work to life, the spark that ignites whatever deeper meanings the painting may contain." (McDonald, op. cit. p. 29-30);
“Acrylic paints had come into vogue in Australia in the early 1960s; artists such as Aspden would buy powdered acrylic pigments, then mix them with binders and water to produce a solution that would soak into the thirsty unprimed cotton duck, producing an extraordinarily flat, matt effect. The almost industrial use of acrylic pigments by artists to produce saturated veils of flat high-key or dissonant artificial colour — as opposed to thick, textured skeins of earthy tones using oil paints — is what separated Aspden and a generation of ‘hard-edge’ painters, later known as ‘colour field’ painters, from their predecessors.” (Dean, op. cit. p 14)

This is a rare and classic example of the first series of large scale acrylic paintings based on a zip or curtain motif; they began in 1965 and were first exhibited at Watters Gallery in Sydney.