The Art of Less with Andrew Hillhouse at Noosa Regional Gallery
When it comes to art, Noosa Regional Gallery Director Michael Brennan provides his insights into how the art of less can often offer more.
Abstraction can be a bit of a challenge for some people. If it’s to be more than background noise or interesting interior decoration, then some effort is required on the part of the viewer.
It can take a bit of work to find a way in. And then there’s the idea that if a painting doesn’t look like something tangible, then it requires less skill and effort on the part of the maker and is therefore less admirable than something that looks realistic or something that is relatable because it depicts a recognisable thing from the world around you.
Of course, that’s not true. There’s nowhere to hide with well resolved abstract painting.
Recognisable things come with a host of associations – wants; memories; emotions. What you, as a viewer, bring to the thing that’s being depicted means that you contribute perhaps as much to your reception and appreciation of the work as the artist does.
And maybe there’s a little of that in non-objective painting too (another fancy way of describing purely abstract art). We all have different associations with colour, tone, texture, space, but we don’t have memories of enjoying holidays in those abstracted elements, nor hoping to find one of them under the Christmas tree with a big red ribbon around it.
What abstraction does offer – for those willing to give it some attention – is a chance to stop and reflect on something beyond everyday practical functions and experiences. It opens up spaces that can be both more philosophical and more primal.
Andrew Hillhouse is a painter based in the Noosa Hinterland. And while his large canvases hint at expansive fields, reflective surfaces and atmospheric voids, they resist ever locking into a depiction of the world around us. Instead, they provide us with a space to experience something common to all these things – something essence-like, perhaps. Spending time with the potency of these works allows the receptive viewer to tap into a larger energy that courses through us all.
Similarly, Daniel von Sturmer considers different properties of perception with the purity of paint. Stripped back to black and white and zoomed in to almost microscopic detail (well, maybe not quite that small), von Sturmer uses his material to prompt reflection on perception itself, our biases, and how they impact our view of the world.
That’s some pretty heavy lifting for paint to do. And the kicker is, von Sturmer’s painting is actually a video of the stuff, dripping down a wall.
Both artists have concurrent exhibitions at Noosa Regional Gallery this autumn. Von Sturmer’s comes courtesy of the National Gallery of Australia’s Regional Initiatives Program – an initiative that sees significant works from the national collection lent out to public galleries across the regions.
Between them, they open a shared space for thinking about how we see, how we interpret external stimulus, and how we construct our understanding of the world through visual impressions.
