Rowdy Warren | 'Wild Flowers, 2020' | 90x180cm

Code: MARW20040

Artist: Rowdy Warren

Title: Wild Flowers

Area: Adelaide, SA

Medium: Acrylic On Linen

Size: 90x180cm

Year: 2020

Rowdy Warren's Wildflowers paintings grew out of a turning point in his own practice, when years of punk poster design and street-wear branding gave way to a new way of looking at the Australian landscape. Working in saturated, sometimes explosive colour across scales from the intimate to the mural-sized, he returns again and again to the wild field - not as botanical record but as a burst of pure visual energy, built from the same instinct for bold mark-making that shaped his earliest graphic work.

Rowdy (Grant) Warren was born and raised in South Australia and has called Adelaide home since the 1970s. He has described finding his first pencil at three or four years old as like finding the key to a whole new world, and conventional schooling proved a poor match for an original and spirited imagination that was better challenged outside its restrictions. He first came to notice around Adelaide as a member of a punk band, designing the band's logos and posters to promote their own gigs, and discovered in the process a real love of creating a visual statement. Logo work for others followed, and soon after he established his own street-wear brand, immersing himself in a world of creativity, presentation, design and expression. His creative energies remained vibrant and restless, and a meeting with a group of Indigenous artists proved a turning point: he drew inspiration and skills from them while imparting contemporary ones in return, a period of artistic awakening in which he seemed to see the mesmerising Australian landscape for the first time. His Wildflowers paintings, worked in saturated colour across scales from intimate to mural, are the best known result.