Angus Douglas

With a swag of new subject material, Angus Douglas’s latest exhibition takes the artist’s keen eye for landscape and Tasmanian light to new levels. Composed and expansive at once, the paintings draw the viewer in and reward as one explores their depth, texture and shade. We can feel the atmosphere as clouds, sky and mountains frame the perspective. The interiors and urban compositions similarly point to distant dimensions, yet bring an immediacy and simplicity.

In the tradition of Tasmanian watercolourists, past and present, imbued with the islands’ unique light, these paintings are thoughtful studies of space and colour. Douglas’s works also pay homage to the tradition of Calligraphic painters whose aim was impressionistic brushwork through gesture and character. The paintings acknowledge the particular ‘back road’ arcadia of the state’s interior, depictions of three different coastlines and the special facades of industrial and urban Launceston.

Drawing on his formative training with Max Angus and Patricia Giles, along with a family background in design, Douglas is building a reputation as a painter of the built environment and wild places, with regular exhibitions and commissioned works. He is renovating an old cottage on the family property ‘Woodhall’, near Perth and has lived in Tasmania since 2001.

Anna Van Stralen

Life Support is a painting investigation exploring industrial structures that relate to the provision of human needs and wants, traversing and being held by the natural environment.

I like to think of my paintings as fragments of a subjective experience of place – in different moments in time and the spatial environment, objects can take on a significance purely based on their formal presence in their surroundings. The colours, shapes and textural quality of industrial objects and their settings can be diverse depending on external factors; finding an object and place at a specific time can grant the viewer a unique experience of both.

The Life Support paintings are focused on my own subjective experiences of these crossover spaces between built and natural form, and are informed both by the materiality of the wood I paint on as well as the notions relation to colour and visual drama that my experiences of place provide me. These images are based upon a moment in time that has passed away.