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Aaqus conducted two years of gallery and archive research into the classic
craft of painting the human figure in traditional Western artworks.

Artists are trained to focus on both the foreground object of the viewer's interest (such as the human figure) AND the background visual context.

This focus on both the foreground and the background distinguishes artists from untrained viewers.

Artists also call this focus on the background, awareness of the 'negative space'.

Around 1989 and 1990, Aaqus sketched nude masterworks and their backgrounds in German, Italian, French, Dutch and English art museums.

He discovered that all traditional backgrounds or negative space was divided by the masters into three horizons or planes.

Returning to Melbourne, Aaqus was inspired by the witch and soldier Nyneve in The Death of King Arthur by Thomas Malory (1483). Equestrian Nyneve was the second Lady of the Lake - so Aaqus painted an athletic model and surfer.

Each original Nyneve painting incorporates the 3-plane negative space that Aaqus discovered in all the European masters.

The paintings include Nyneve (IV) nursing a broken arm from a riding fall; (VI) viewing Arthur on his death bed; and (III) divining the poison apple at a banquet.

Nyneve IV

Nyneve I

Nyneve V

Nyneve VI

Nyneve III

landscape paintings artist pictographs investors, world collection modern art