Landscapes & Love Songs brings together 2 artists, David R Hill and David Asher Brook.
David R Hill is a British (active in Australia) artist who was born in 1938 and has resided and worked as a painter in the Blue Mountains region for over 40 years. His work is modernist in style, often utilizing the majestic, adjacent landscape of Katoomba in the Blue Mountains and the surrounding regions, including west of Mount Victoria. His travels to the out back, including Arnhem Land and Central Australia, have inspired paintings based on the historical and geographical significance of these locations.
Generally highly coloured, his oil paintings are both dramatic and bold, yet they offer the viewer a sense of space and stillness.
David Asher Brook, a Sydney based artist, has a unique methodology which I find totally fascinating and engaging. Quite simply, the application of painting circles or elipses of various sizes, then subsequently painting inside these circles over what could be described as naive or raw imagery underneath - the foundation painting.
This 'foundation' imagery is innocent and at times romantic, perhaps representative of the artist's quest for idealism in his day-to-day life. There is a sense of nostalgia and wonderment in these works, and the circular veiling technique transforms these paintings into art with a unique aesthetic and an enchanting and often mystical presence.
To quote David Asher Brook: " One inspiration that planted a certain emotion in me at a young age and has never entirely left, was from the 1960s movie The Time Machine of H.G. Wells. It was the story of a man, who locked himself away and through invention, was able to transcend his present reality with a mechanism that worked but is never explained. This gave me the notion that by pure thought and obsession a person who locked himself away from the world was able to venture and access something that was not in plain sight. It is this childish and naive sense that I think still drives me, a kind of internal adventure".
