Many artists, including very good ones, are essentially formalists and are primarily concerned with the formal resolution of their compositions – line, mass, volume, gravity, and colour – the pleasing and harmonious disposition of all of these elements. Their work finishes at this point.
Others are fundamentally Romantics, for whom the gestural mark, the performance in the arena of the canvas or sheet of paper and the feeling of wonderment at their own responses to nature are a source of endless fascination. This Romantic fascination with the world and the artist’s response to it, is the key to their art.

With Jock Clutterbuck there is of course the formalist element, mandatory for any serious artist, and there is also the Romantic gut response, he is amazed by the celestial heavens at night or by the sound of silence in the bush, but I think that there is also a further element, an unusual element, that places his art into a separate category.

His art and his life are imbued with a mystical philosophy, a profound quest for making sense of our world, its functioning and the way things appear in it. He calls this a knowledge journey. This is not an example of ‘new ageism’ or a tokenistic nod to Zen philosophy or holistic theories of the ‘world spirit’, but a profound, detailed and all absorbing study over many decades of complex and frequently arcane texts.

by Emeritus Professor Sasha Grishin AM, 17. Nov. 2013