Hiraeth XIX

This artwork explores the cavernous nature of memory, as circular splotches of deep green and blue create jewelled recesses of light. Crude washes and glazes of purple and pink cloud the mind as raw canvas and mark-making wiped back by turpentine and erased, evoke feelings for the longed for and lost.

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David Bentley is a landscape artist beginning his practice working in the Tasmanian landscape. His early career was spent responding to wild places through representational, romantic landscapes but he has recently reinvented his art making as an abstract expressionist painter. His most recent body of work delves into an intimate and introspective world of yearning, lost memories and nostalgia. By combining new and traditional techniques of oil painting, David's work tugs and pulls at the viewer's expectations of abstraction and teeters on the precipice between landscape and the representational. It is in this vague in-between where his psychological landscapes provoke the viewer into a state of agitated meditation.