Provenance: Private collection Sydney

Alderbaran III, 1980 is an important work closely related to the painting of the same name from 1977, illustrated in the two authoritative texts on the artist’s work. This painting is one of Coburn’s greatest symphonies, in which the viewer is totally immersed in an environment of colour.1 The Miroesque arcs, crescents, ellipses and abstract shapes of Coburn’s familiar vocabulary, dance joyfully at the centre of the blazing canvas, wholly independent of the picture plane. Coburn has painted the colours and shapes of the Australian landscape lit by the star Alderbaran. One of the brightest stars in the sky, Alderbaran (also known as Alpha Tauri) was used as a navigational tool in ancient times and, no doubt of relevance to Coburn, was referred to by the Hebrews as ‘God’s Eye’. It is one of the four Royal Stars and is associated in Christianity with the Archangel Michael ‘He who is like God’. Coburn would have also been familiar with the Australian poet James McAuley’s Under Alderbaran published in 1946, the central poem of which ends:

Over the giant face of dreaming nations
The centuries-thick coverlet was drawn,
Upon the huddled breast Alderbaran
Still glittered with its sad alternate fire:
Blue as of memory, red as of desire

Amadio suggests that, despite these spiritual connotations, it is the colours of the desert which prevail and the 'the poem Coburn finally paints is of his own country of the mind.' 3

1 Rozen, A., The Art of John Coburn, Ure Smith, Sydney, 1979, p.9.
2 McAuley, J., Under Alderbaran, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1946
3 Amadio N, John Coburn: Paintings, Craftsman House, Roseville, 1988, p. 88.