Mike Worrall

As a boy growing up in England in the 1940’s Worrall would have been very familiar with certain contemporary painters such as Augustus Johns and Stanley Spencer. These artists were typically English is so far as they adhered to an easily identifiable school of painting.

Perhaps Worrall still adheres to some of these qualities, some forty years after leaving his UK home and settling first in New Zealand and then in Australia in 1988.

Over the years his highly personal brand of surreal, dream like imagery has endured, coupled with the all important title which his mysterious, intricate, staged visions seem to demand.

Each large-scale painting is in some way masking a feeling of tension. This could be a peaceful scene on first glance then, depending on the way we see, an intriguing element of something unknown, unexpected, disquieting might catch our attention. The picture disturbingly altered by the intangible. The search for an elusive point above or beyond physical reality gives his work a subtle and often surrealist quality, although not always subtle. The chosen gestalt and colour, movement and energy in the work, attract the eye and draws initial interest, and then the element of tension, often dreamlike, even nightmarish, unleashes a feeling of curiosity, wonder and expectation.

Mike Worrall’s works seem to be conceived out of pure impulse, and possibly that is true of the original idea but conversely, it is obvious that they are planned and painted with great skill and display his individuality as a painter. Mike Worrall’s works are marriages of reverie and real, grounded in the tangible, physical world but guided by his soaring imagination.

Jennifer Vandeleur