Hiraeth XXVII

The creation of this composition was automatic and relied on intuition and the expression of thought and feeling. A bare skeleton has been drawn up with oil pastel before a series of thick slashes of palette knifed oil paint and turpentine washes have been applied. The dripped effect created from the process of applying washes and glazes, along with the swathes of canvas left raw and unpainted creates a discordant mix of the melancholic and nostalgic.

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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.