Out of the Blue : Ben Fennessy - Recent Paintings and Prints 3 April - 21 April
Opening Launch - Friday 5 April 4pm-6pm
The ‘Out of the Blue’ exhibition at F Project Gallery was a serendipitous, unexpected opportunity to show paintings and glass prints from the last few years. I’m rather taken with the colour blue. Given I live on the coast, that’s not surprising, as the sky and sea are in constant view.
The environment of South-West Victoria is a great source of artistic inspiration. Having lived in the bush and on the coast, in Wadawurrung Country, and now in the shadow of Koroitj/Tower Hill, on Gundjitmara land, for most of my life, these wild and beautiful vistas have seeped into my soul. This body of work is a small sample of my passion for place. I am particularly focused on the play of light on the horizon and the changes that the weather and seasons bring … and blue hues.
Each of the works in this show have some shades of blue in them, ranging from a full-on blue blast of ultramarine in Winter Cloud, a wash of cerulean in Escarpment Budj Bim, a sweep Prussian blue in Blue Rain and a tiny brush stroke of indigo in Seascapeorama.
Ben Fennessy is an established painter, printmaker and art educator. He studied painting and drawing at the National Gallery School, Melbourne, and the Victorian College of the Arts and has been a practising artist for over fifty-five years. He has exhibited widely throughout Australia and his work is in collections here and overseas. Ben is a member of the South-West Printmakers group who exhibit annually at the F Project Gallery in Warrnambool. Ben has been selected for the Geelong Acquisitive Print Awards, Geelong Gallery in 2005, 2017 and 2023.
Ben draws inspiration for his abstract landscape paintings and prints from the local beautiful natural environment, where light and shadows, sun and rain, can change the colour, feeling and tone in moments. These vivid colours express his interpretation of the inherent drama of the Australian environment, however at the root of his work is the influence of the English tradition of landscape painting, the pastoral and romantic landscapes of the original ‘pale stale males’, Gainsborough, Constable and Turner.
