Christopher Horder’s Stain Paintings Strive to Capture Nature’s Unseen Forces

When Sydney-born painter Christopher Horder was in Year 10, his English teacher gave him Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel On The Road. Influenced by its anti-conformist message, Horder left school a year later to enrol in a Diploma of Fine Arts at TAFE. “I had to go and start doing what I wanted to do,” he says.

Soon after, Horder rented a space at Lennox Street Studios in Sydney’s Newtown, where, aside from a productive year in Berlin in 2010, he’s been painting on and off for 30 years. The affordable, rambling and genuinely bohemian ex-boys school is “a real safe haven for artists”.

Over the past 12 years, with a dedication fuelled by “trying to capture something whimsical, profound and sublime”, Horder has been honing his signature stain paintings. His technique emerged from a series of experiments with ink, acrylic and watercolour on canvas. “They started offering up unpremeditated bursts of imagery,” he says. “It encapsulated what I see in nature but also unseen forces, as if something ominous, brooding and romantic was hovering just out of sight.”

Horder’s process is both technical and intuitive, developed over years of working mainly outside in the initial phase, with his canvases laid on a concrete surface. While his materials are traditional – watercolour, ink and oil – the catalysts are elemental – water, sunlight, heat and time.

In 2023, he began overlaying his swirls of ink and watercolour with oil paint, intensifying the contrast of light and dark. His large-scale portal-like paintings invite a sensation of falling upwards like the swoon of craning your neck in a Renaissance-era chapel to behold a vaulted ceiling covered in heavenly frescoes.

Writing poetry usually pre-empts a bout of painting for Horder. “Poetry gives me the energy and motivation to deeply explore what I’m doing.” The concept for his 2024 exhibition at Nanda\Hobbs, The Fruits of Spring and the Bats of Night, originated in a phrase he wrote in the 1990s. “I’d always loved that idea of the tremendous effort of spring’s fruit being devoured by the bats of night,” says the artist, who’s currently experimenting with glazing techniques to add another optical layer to his work. “It has all of the cyclical beauty and darkness that I’m interested in.

Studied: Diploma in Fine Arts, Hornsby TAFE, Sydney; Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours), National Art School, Sydney

Exhibited at: Nanda\Hobbs, Sydney; Liverpool Street Gallery, Sydney; Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin

What the critics say: “Christopher Horder’s watercolour, acrylic and ink renderings on wet canvas appear like ancient cave paintings.” – Michael Fitzgerald, The Sydney Morning Herald

SEE ALSO: With Artist Tim Silver's Works, Meaning Lies in the Eye of the Beholder