Brett Green is an emerging artist based on Sydney’s Upper North Shore. His practice is influenced by life in and around the Australian bush where he spends as much time as he can exploring the native landscape. Brett’s deep connection to the natural environment stems from a life lived adjacent to National parks and reserves since early childhood.
‘I have lived most of my life near native bush land on the fringes of suburbia and spent a great deal of my childhood exploring the natural world. I see forms from nature, in both the sublime and beautiful contexts as essential parts of my visual vocabulary. The accidental shapes we may read into natural forms such as trees, rock and cloud formations, and how they relate to images each of us have stored in our minds, fascinates me.
My current works are motivated by a fascination for the ambiguous and grotesque forms I observe in the Australian native trees endemic to my local area. Decades of extreme elemental forces like storms, fire and drought have twisted and contorted these forms into inspirational subject matter. The fleshy bulk of the Sydney Red Gum tree for example, reminds me of a towering Jenny Saville nude in both colour and form, while up close, in the bark of a Scribbly Gum I might see the defiling scrawl of Cy Twombly. Using a combination of acrylics, oil sticks and oil paint I hope to communicate a sense of the weight and movement of the subject through scale, fluid twists and turns and by embracing the chance that spontaneous, intuitive mark making can reveal’.
