Tim Storrier: An Unlikely Liaison

I first met Tim Storrier in 1987 when, as a freelance journalist, I was asked by the Melbourne Age newspaper to do a profile on the artist following the release of a major monograph on Storrier authored by Linda van Nunen. It was, in its way, an awkward moment.

I had, for the previous seven years, published and edited a fairly ‘hip’ magazine called Tension. By hip I mean we had focused on the then up-and-coming conceptualists that the theorists and curators were then enamoured by – John Nixon, Vivienne Shark LeWitt, Tony Clark, Dale Frank, Jenny Watson, Imants Tillers, Mike Parr, et al. Storrier was the utter antithesis of this group – commercially successful and the darling of Sydney’s Charm School. The only artist more despised by the conceptualists was Storrier’s mate, Brett Whiteley. Writing on Tim Storrier was a form of treason and the death knell of any credibility I may have had.

There was a secondary problem. I was, secretly, a fan.

My first, albeit fleeting, encounter with Storrier’s imagery would have been in the 1970s via reproductions of his earlier, complex paintings of rather alien encampments. These were rendered