There is an energy, impatience and love of the poetic in Mitch that is evident in his picture-making. While his shifting subject matter can be seemingly unpredictable, something that he once compared to the 'quick movement of finches in a tree', what can be expected is that he is drawing from the close world around him, from his experience of his own body, his family and friends, his home, his studio, his neighbourhood, familiar urban views and architecture, things that are embedded in his psyche from places he frequents and things that he sees, hears and reads.
Does anyone paint a better line than Mitch Cairns?Wes Hill, ‘Review Mitch Cairns Art Gallery of New South Wales’, in Artforum, Vol. 64, No. 1, September 2025
Quotes from or references to favourite writers appear in the work in titles and images. Likewise, his slow-accumulating pantheon of portraits are an ode to artist friends and heroes. Other artists appear in the periphery of his work, not as portraits, but as direct influences, teachers, mentors, collaborators.
Since 2020, Mitch has developed a repertoire of expanded self-portraiture where other things stand in for him.
Since 2020, Mitch has developed a repertoire of expanded self-portraiture where other things stand in for him.
[T]he many thin layers of pigment intentionally leave no evidence of his brush work. “I have accidentally become a technical painter,” says the artist, bespectacled and feet bare amid the paint-flecked walls of his warehouse studio in Rozelle in inner-western Sydney.Steve Dow, ‘Senses and symbols with Mitch Cairns’, Art Guide, 9 April 2025
I produced Self-Portrait as a Lemon Tree after completing a small suite of still lifes which featured lemons, I believe I was thinking about taste at the time. Working backwards, in my walled garden studio and as the painter of the still lifes, I was sure that I was the lemon tree.Mitch Cairns, email to Jennifer Higgie, 21 Jan 2023 published in Jennifer Higgie, Thin Skin, exh. cat. Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2020, p. 58
