Edward Inchbold Australian, b. 1995

For some time, since toward the end of painting my recent solo exhibition, Wisteria Lemonade (Stella Downer Fine Art, 2025), my work has oscillated toward and away from the figure. It was this painting, The Scarf, that most clearly exhibits this behaviour of oppositions, with the central figure gained, obscured, reasserted, dismantled, and finally all but crushed, saturated, and cast over by waxy oil.
The canvas itself was exhibited in a group exhibition in July, but I thankfully retrieved it to rework in this fashion, resulting in The Scarf, 2025.
I realised quite early in my painting that getting an image over the line meant finding a way through the paint toward a certain clarity, but also toward the acknowledgement of failure. I mean the failure of imagery in all media, and the failure of painting as its central and most persistent problem. The medium is slow. It is pushing around coloured mud in three dimensions, spreading it across a blank, two-dimensional plank with bristly sticks. This oily struggle can last months or years, and the fact of the surface becomes a moral issue. Otherwise it is simply ornamental.
If the work finally resolves itself, it does so not by transcending its limitations but by accepting them as fact, and by allowing the accumulated revisions, hesitations, failures and harms to the surface to form the image. In this sense the painting becomes a record of endurance, and the surface becomes the only place where such endurance is legible.