Rhett Brewer

Artist Statement:

Although I’ve been painting professionally since 1981 I feel that I am a relative newcomer to the Australian Landscape. I’ve exhibited my paintings of old buildings, junkyards, industrial landscapes and urban streetscapes but apart from sporadic painting excursions in the bush where I’ve painted for pure please and kept them for myself I have managed to avoid exhibiting what we recognise as ‘Australian Landscape’. The reason for this is that it’s been done so often, I’ve seen so much of it with oily coloured paint pushed around on a stretched rag. I live in the bushy and I spend a lot of time in it. I like the way it reclaims the things we build. Time and the elements turn man made things back and make them their own. That has always been what interests me. So the work I make usually has our built environment and the natural world in a kind of struggle. I use roads, cards, houses, bridges and other objects and often juxtapose them with natural forces like sunlight, rain, the surge of the sea, the movement of air, chemical transformation and time itself.

Unlike most of the other artists on the Flider’s trip in May 2012 I got as much from the bus ride, shooting photos through the window and spotting ruined things as I got from walking through the ancient hills, but I’ll never forget it and I know I’ll go back soon because it’s where my work is taking me.