John Anderson
Recent Works 2006

"You only have to look at John Anderson's paintings to guess that he's an artist who gets his hands dirty... Anderson's paintings [are] just incredibly vigorous. The real vigour doesn't come from the shoulder or the wrist but a finely honed decision making process... Many of the paintings have a sexual charge...showing a world on the prowl or engaged in hot and grimy rituals. His pictures reflect contemporary circumstances in a filmic way; he paints freshly and usually retains a curiosity for the forms of his motifs, so that he avoids formulae and imaginatively follows his obsession.

The beauty of getting your hands dirty in the sense of Anderson's painting is that you communicate an experience, real or imagined, to an audience with an air of immediacy and sympathy. It's an aesthetic of not being detached but allowing yourself to be implicated in the scandals of other people's peccadilloes. Anderson's pictorial honesty is to paint directly and valiantly the shamelessness of his own imagination."

- Dr Robert Nelson
Associate Dean, Faculty of Fine Arts and Design, Monash University. The Sunday Age, October 1, 2000.