Landscapes
This exhibition of Landscape Oil Paintings opened at the Queen Street Gallery in Woollahra, Sydney on 25 February 2014.
The oil on canvas works range in size with the largest being on 4×3 foot (1219x914m) stretchers. They have multiple layers of oil paint laid down over time in glazes like geological layers.
The works have a strong feeling of place, capturing moments in time on the land – or in the mind. Gestural sweeps of impasto cloud and mist are spread above the skumbled folds of viridian hills and the deep blue shadows of trees. They attempt to strike a balance between the depth of representational landscape painting and the two-dimensional surface of abstract paint on canvas. The landscape is at once reduced to an essential, minimal surface and yet draws the eye in, to mist-covered hills and valleys.
Beyond that artful play between representation and abstraction, there is another geological layer in these works, a contemplation of place, of nostalgia, perhaps a journey and a sense that just over that next viridian hill could be the destination.
