Past Exhibitions
Sydney: Open City
03 - 21 November 2011
Wonderful Clouds
03 - 21 November 2011
Wonderful Clouds J’aime les nuages…les nuages qui passent… I love the clouds…the passing clouds…over there…over there…the wonderful clouds. Clouds are the things that dreams are made of, building up across a distant horizon, changing colours and shapes every moment and scattering away when you turn your head. Reflecting and highlighting the landscape below, splashing the valleys and mountainsides with light and shade or sweeping over broad stretches of shimmering sea. Duncan Stothart
là -bas…lá-bas… les merveilleux nuages!
Almost with You
12 - 31 October 2011
This series of work continues the artist’s exploration of nostalgic urban landscape subjects in Sydney and the New South Wales Coast.  Since the body of work was started several of the subjects have been altered for evermore by development or destruction. Others instill sense of yearning for another time. All of the paintings in this series have been made on a coloured ground or priming, to reflect the mood at a particular time of day. To control for a sense of light, a strictly limited triadic palette of earth colours has been used in the under-layers and a similarly structured palette of primaries (each having a relationship to their corresponding earth hues) for the finishing layers.  As each layer builds some of the previous layer is left exposed, creating surface complexity which in turn creates depth and luminosity.
Eclectic, The Artist's Eye
22 September - 10 October 2011
The Macquarie dictionary defines the word eclectic as, ‘derived from many sources’, a word I think fits perfectly my concept for this exhibition. My principal inspiration is landscape, that place where we find meaning and a connection to a sense of place. I’m not particularly interested in virgin bush landscapes, what interests me is the ‘cultivated landscape’, that is the visual traits of our attempts to fashion this land to our utilitarian, sometimes aesthetic notions of what ideal country should look like. Our landscape shows evidence of the many successes but equally it is littered with failures, ruins, abused earth, a testament to our clumsy struggle with forces over which we sometimes have no control. There is also the ‘landscape of the mind’ an altogether much more subtle and complex, shadowy place, inhabited by countless images and sensations looking to find meaning in a complex world. The more I paint, the more I see, and the more I see the more I want to paint, to try and fix that place or that sensation in a concrete image by the timeless technique of oil painting. By selecting an image or concept to paint and isolating a subject in a frame, I am inviting the viewer to consider my perception of that subject, to take a second look. My painting is all about the language of perception. My aim is to trigger an emotional response, an, ‘I know that’ moment. I believe that we all share a very sophisticated collective visual memory bank, and if an image draws a response then it’s doing its job.
Unspoken Moments
22 September - 10 October 2011
This exhibition deals with the pictorial representation of situations arising from the complex relationship of our psychological structure and the external world.
