Signed Coburn lower right
 
John Coburn is one of twentieth-century Australia's best-known artists, celebrated for his distinctive style of abstraction. John McDonald recently wrote of Coburn that "It is perhaps his greatest achievement to have reached large audiences with a form of abstract painting based on simple clear shapes and radiant colour. Most of Coburn's pictures have a joyous quality, and that may be why they exert such broad appeal."
Reference: 'Art of the Clear, Precise and Joyful', The Sydney Morning Herald, November 9 2006.

Coburn's paintings from the 1970s, such as Earth Song I pictured above, exert the exuberance that McDonald refers to. Miro-like forms in vivid colours dance across the canvas in the artist's powerful symbolic language.

Coburn is represented in the National Gallery of Australia, all State galleries and the Vatican Museum, Rome.