Sue Cooke – Silvia Inferno

Josh Bashford

Regeneration 2

2019

Like a phoenix, Josh Bashford rises with renewed engagement with the world and his art, after a serious accident early in 2019. A period of recuperation, unable to work on his distinctive, intricate woodcuts, resulted in an unexpected shift into new forms and colour, then a stunning refinement of his best-known, larger black and white works based on the natural world around his Canterbury studio.

The colour works are challenging, as you might expect given they emerged through the process of regenerating body and soul after the injury.

Questing, sometimes bewildered faces float amidst a fluid swirl of motifs ? swimmers and divers, suggesting the building up of bodily strength, as well as his more familiar whales and birdlife. He brings new technique to the colour works, first embossing the woodcut into the canvas, applying colour highlights, and finally overprinting the structure of the black woodcut to create works that are powerful but fluid at the same time?

It was also a year of new generations in his family, and in the teeming birdlife in the Little River area, which Bashford has embraced in his incredibly detailed large woodcuts. There’s a firm nod to his Samoan heritage and tapa cloth in the ink on unstretched canvas; these latest have notably evolved from his earlier works to appear – deceptively – effortless. Teeming with birdlife, and motifs of nurtured new generations, swirling, joyous; they reflect a young artist regenerating into a new period of confident art practice.