Photograph by Wayne Pataki
WELCOME TO GUY HAWSON'S WEBSITE.
Guy is a Sydney based artist and has been painting professionally for 14 years. Unusually among artists he enjoys painting abstract and figurative and landscape paintings. He finds these disciplines complement each other. Recent themes include rockpools, Captain Cook, The Anzacs and the infamous Fairies, hanging in Sydney¹s Arthouse Hotel in Pitt Street.
SIGHS FOLLOW YOU ROUND THE ROOM.
Sydney Morning Herald, April 24, 2002.
You have to look closely at the huge mural hanging over the bar at the Art House Hotel on Pitt Street to really appreciate it.
Hanging above the beer-swilling public's heads, among the colourful flowers painted by Sydney artist Guy Hawson, is a bunch of very randy fairies captured in flagrante delicto in the moment of passion's embrace.
"The brief was pretty open, so long as the work was controversial," Hawson told Spike. "At first I thought it was a wonderful brief but, to be honest with you, I never consider myself a controversial painter. I didn't want to do something for the sake of being controversial, which is why you really have to study the mural before you see what's going on in it."
Art House co-owner Andrew Utiger said the mural had become a conversation piece at the pub, with just as many people praising it as those critical of its erotic nature: "I don't think a lot of people that come in here have actually realised what the painting is of. Mostly though, it gets a laugh out of people."
The Fairies is reminiscent of the controversy created by Australia's most famous nude, Chloe, which hangs in the bar of the Young and Jackson Hotel in Melbourne. Painted by French artist Jules Lefebvre in 1875, Chloe has been linked with Young and Jackson's since 1909, when Henry Young bought her from a Melbourne surgeon, Dr Thomas Fitzgerald, and hung her on the walls of his watering hole.
The painting had been exhibited in the National Gallery of Victoria in 1883 but was forced out after only three weeks when an outraged public rallied against it.
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