Artist's Statement

	Aldo Giurgola 2005 (center panel) by Mandy Martin (b. 1952) oil on canvas

Aldo Giurgola Portrait

This triptych presents the breadth of Aldo Giurgola’s life-work in the context of his own life-journey. I wanted to present him as a man of humility who has truly served humanity and to represent this through his three “houses”, that of God, Parliament and his own house.

Panel 1 represents the humble yet pure St Thomas Aquinas Church, Charnwood (Canberra) which Aldo designed with MGT Architects in 1989/90. Sunlight spills into the interior, creating a play of light and shade. It also describes the form of the snow-covered peaks behind the Technical High School at the small Italian village of Maniago which Aldo designed in 1981 with his US firm, Mitchell/Giurgola Architects, as part of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s post-earthquake aid in the region of his birthplace, Trieste.

Panel 2 The Italian Alps connect with the Brindabellas in the A.C.T., where Aldo lives and works, and describe an angle of New Parliament House which he designed with MGT Architects between 1979-1988. Aldo appears in the foreground of this panel, head slightly bowed, and reflected in the dark, minimal depths of the pool in Members Hall, the symbolic centre of Parliament House. The aural shift in flooring is represented by the changed light between the wood and marble, and in the shadowy depths of the central court are a few Parliamentary portraits of the “old school”.

Panel 3 The Brindabellas connect with the distant vista of the far shore of Lake Bathurst in the highlands south of Goulburn where Aldo designed and constructed his own country house in 2004. In the middle ground are closer hills which catch the red glow of late afternoon light. Nearer to his own dwelling at the right of the panel are the trees which are a reminder to Aldo that if we remove them to survey the full panorama of the valley below (as he initially thought of doing during construction), we are faced with a view of our own destiny.

Mandy Martin and Aldo Giurgola

The three panels of the portrait are united visually with the ellipse of light in the middle of the composition, surrounded by darker tones and light shafting from top right to middle ground. Aldo literally stands in the middle of a platform of light which reaches back into the landscape.

These signs of universal hope and/or transcendence were employed in turn by J.M.W. Turner in his drawing of Tintern Abbey and by Tom Roberts in his “big picture” of the Opening of the First Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia, which hangs in Parliament House. My commissioned painting in the Parliament’s Main Committee Room, “Red Ochre Cove”, quotes the Tom Roberts painting, and through incorporating this same device here, I hope to allude to the importance of painting and art to Aldo throughout his life and his architecture.

The materials utilised in the triptych are simple: white oil paint (in keeping with the purity of Aldo’s architectural forms and his preference for white); yellow sandstone (as close in colour as possible to the sandstone in his photographs from Trieste) to reference his birthplace; red ochre to mark his decision to live in Australia, and raw umber to represent the deep red soil from the hilltop near Lake Bathurst where he literally has put down his own roots.

Mandy Martin
23 September 2005

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