David McLeod

My last solo exhibition  in 2019  referred to the almost forgotten world of rural communities and their seeming decline.

I was exploring a nostalgia for the past that can be comforting but not the reality. It was the past world of a depicted landscape that represented hardship and difficulties but also a less hurried and less complex world.

Every five years or so I feel the need to stop and reassess what I am doing. My  painting style is deconstructed and re-examined. These are  my ‘greener pasture’ moments, where I feel I have evolved as a painter and moved on to take on new challenges and approaches to landscape painting.

I have embarked on portraying my own version of the Australian landscape based on my wife and her family’s experiences growing up on the land near Warrnambool, and my own family’s hard experiences in the Riverina of southern NSW.

My coastal works hark back to childhood memories of the sea where beaches were within easy reach for us growing up in Sydney. Whenever I’m in Sydney, I often visit the coves beaches and rock pools of Coogee and Bondi. 

In recent years, I take a more wholistic approach and where the landscapes are planned out and have become more panoramic and expansive than before. I use the panorama to highlight where things sit in aerial perspective, and where curves, shapes and horizons meet and collide. In both the coastal and riverine pictures, there is a feeling of the power of water, such as the surly dark green seas I create or the dangerous pull of a fast brown river.

Skies and water also feature, with a large palette of blues, blue greens, greys both soft and harsh, creams, pinks and various hues of whites. Green has become a dominant colour in my landscapes and I use a variety of green tones and hues to create a spatial feeling across the picture plane.

My brushwork has become more expressive to capture the power of water, sky and movement.

Click here for artwork by David McLeod

Exhibitions at Tacit Galleries include:

2019 Hinterland

   

Exhibitions

Solo

2022 Greener Pastures, Tacit Galleries, Melbourne
2019 Hinterland, Tacit Galleries, Melbourne
2017 Town & Country, Cambridge Studio Gallery, Melbourne
2012 Regency - Art Inspired by Living in Regent, Bundoora Homestead, Melbourne
2006 The Inland Sea, Cusp Gallery, Melbourne
2004 A Mirror to My World, Cusp Gallery, Melbourne
1998 New Work, 106 Gallery, Melbourne
1994 New Work, Christine Abrahams Gallery, Melbourne

Group

2020 20[2020], Tacit Galleries, Melbourne
Endangered Space, Counihan Gallery, Melbourne
2019 Len Fox Painting Award, Castlemaine Art Museum
2014 The Flanagan Art Prize, St Patrick’s College, Ballarat
2010 Landscape Paintings, Circle Gallery, Brisbane (w/ Peter Diamond)