John A Rowe, Shadowy Figurese on the Curtains at Night, 2026. Image courtesy of the Artist.
John A. Rowe
Gallery 2
Opening Thursday 19 March, 2026, 6-8pm
Friday 20 March - Sunday 12 April
It Only Hurts When I Laugh gathers a deeply personal body of paintings by John A. Rowe, an artist for whom anxiety and image-making have been lifelong companions. Born in Britain and now living in the Blue Mountains, NSW, Rowe’s thirty-year career as an internationally awarded children’s book author and illustrator runs quietly alongside these works, shaping their sense of story, symbolism, and emotional immediacy.
For Rowe, painting is not a form of therapy but a form of necessity. It is a way of giving shape to feelings that resist language. A naturally nervous and anxious person, he paints from within that unsettled terrain - where fear, uncertainty and vulnerability reside. Yet these works rarely succumb to heaviness. Instead, they meet darkness with humour, allowing unease to surface with a comical twist.
The paintings function like visual fables: dense with symbolism, populated by feeling, and guided by instinct rather than intention. They are not made as gestures of “art for art’s sake,” but as emotional narratives and images that externalise what might otherwise remain hidden or unspoken.
Though rooted in personal experience, this exhibition reaches outward. Rowe invites viewers to recognise traces of their own anxieties within the work and to enjoy the humour in it. By transforming fear into imagery that is playful, candid and deeply human, these paintings offer connection and an acknowledgement that fear is not a solitary condition, but a shared one. They offer reassurance and the quiet comfort of shared experience. They also present the artist's uncanny talent for marrying morbidity and frolic, rigor and wantonness.
About the Artist
British artist John A Rowe lives and works in the Blue Mountains, where he paints primarily with acrylic on canvas. Rowe studied Fine Art at several European institutions, most notably the Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna, where he studied under the influential and remarkable Austrian painter Maria Lassnig.
Having lived with acute anxiety and nervous tension since early childhood, Rowe’s work is driven by a compulsion to give form to inner unease. He is drawn to artists who confront the human condition with emotional intensity, distortion, and unflinching honesty, such as Egon Schiele, Chaïm Soutine, Francis Bacon, and Lucian Freud.
It Only Hurts When I Laugh brings together a body of work that mainly balances psychological discomfort with a sharp, often mischievous sense of humour. These paintings explore the absurdity embedded within fear, vulnerability, and self-awareness, revealing Rowe’s distinctive ability to hold opposing states at once. Morbidity and playfulness, restraint and excess, collapse and composure coexist, resulting in images that are as comically thought-provoking as they are disarmingly human.