Shifting Landscapes surveys two decades of John Sheehan’s paintings. The exhibition is a selection of works from his early days at art school (1991-1993) when he studied under Phillip Hunter, Victor Majzner and Ian Parry, through to some of his most recent pictures (2012).
The landscape has always supplied Sheehan with a framework that facilitates the search for visual meaning and yet his work resists genre classification.
Sheehan’s paintings reveal themselves slowly, rewarding the unhurried and patient viewer. First impressions are dominated by the unusual and dynamic colour combinations. These slowly give way to deep atmospheric fields and passages of modulated mark making. Often highlights of intense colour are offset by expanses for blacks, creating a mysterious yet spiritual intensity.
Sheehan seems to rejoice in unconventional juxtapositions, and in doing so generates a fresh originality that can so easily be lost in painting that uses the landscape as its point of departure.
Bundoora Homestead Art Centre
Until 10 February, 2013
John Sheehan, Lone Tree, 2010, watercolour
