Taking in vistas that are expansive and sweeping, bathed in a diffused, atmospheric light, William Breen’s images transcend the banal, hectic truth of the world, to become something born of the sublime, full of the potential for mystery and meditation.
Catalogue Essay by Phe Luxford Staring out into the horizon, that point where sheets of land and sky meet at a single seam, is to contemplate a twofold landscape wider and deeper than the logic of a single moment. Within this coalescence of monolithic plate and atmospheric ether, an eternal, almost unfathomable experience of deep time greets our fleeting smallness. This vista of land, this orb, spins around a sun, and the changing colours and intensity of its light heralds the beginning and ending of each of our brief, earthbound days. Pigment is laid down upon canvas in an attempt to speak to the evidence of this vast reality, to ground oneself within a framework of the world, and to bare witness to it’s beautiful happenstance. For his latest exhibition Skye Road, Victorian painter William Breen continues to explore the central theme of the landscape, a compulsion that has steadily driven his work to date. While his earlier landscapes are best known for their use of soft monotones, full of enveloping mist and haze, here Breen embraces light and air as a vehicle for expansive meditation, as a means to articulate an encounter with the sublime. These works, in their depiction of early morning and late afternoon, cast emotional drama over the landscape and speak to the heightened feelings such encounters can evoke. Full of turbulent clouds, flushed pink by a setting sun or bruised grey in anticipation of an approaching storm, it is the sky that dominates these new works. Stratus and cumulus serve to create a blanket of temporal awareness, their transient forms reinforcing the solid and fixed nature of the terrain below. Diffuse light, pre-dawn or post-dusk, seeps through the clouds, softly illuminating the surface of things, while hiding others in shadow. It is here within the light of the sky that time’s passing is metered, trapped, slowed down, where a moment of contemplation can be realised, where a single shot of elated connectedness can take place. Simultaneously stretching out toward the limits of the frame and pushing deeply into the pictorial interior, Breen’s landscapes exist in delicate balance: the proportion of sky to ground, the tonal transitions of light to dark, the curving undulation of paddock to fence, the slope of a craggy cliff face as it meets the smooth edge of the ocean. Meticulous and yet by no means photo-real or hard edged, there is a deliberate blur to his finely detailed images, a soft bleed of one form into another, that acts as a threshold into a suspended moment. Making art from the need to contemplate is a means to sit with and spend time in the silent company of the world and its elements. William Breen unassumingly asserts his ability to capture more than that which can be seen in a single encounter. Skye Road presents a view of the landscape as both external and internal, awe inspiring in its enormity and endurance, and yet comforting in it’s rhythms and cycles. We mark out our time in its presence.
ABOUT WILLIAM BREEN Flinders Lane Gallery first exhibited William Breen’s paintings in 2000. He has been a finalist in the Arthur Guy Memorial Prize, Tattersalls Art Prize, Doug Moran Portrait Prize, the Brett Whiteley Scholarship, the Redlands Westpac Art Award, the Geelong Art Prize and the Nillumbik Art Prize, the Conrad Jupiter Art Prize, as well as a finalist in the John Leslie Art Prize. Breen has been shortlisted for the prestigious Wynne Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and the Fleurieu Peninsula Biennale Art Prize.
He is represented in corporate and private art collections in Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom including the RACV Collection, Macquarie Bank, Bendigo Art Gallery, Gippsland Art Gallery, Deakin University, Artbank, City of Perth, National Australia Bank, LaTrobe University Melbourne, Loyola College, Melbourne and the City of Whitehorse Collection.
