The Reality of Landscapes

"Light has always been vital to my work. To me it is about transition and change. It transforms the character and form of the landscape. It distorts and obscures, it clarifies and sharpens. It excites my sense of the abstract - that glimpse is the seed of a painting." - Bruce Hunt 

Born in Wellington in 1964, Bruce Hunt was educate at Wellington Collegeand Victoria University. Working as a full-time artist since 1983, he has exhibited extensively throughout New Zealand. As a studio painter he travels widely in pursuit of visual information but is drawn back again and again to those few special locations that are the vital inspiration to his work - the Lindis Pass, Danseys Pass, the Old Dunstan Trail, the MacKenzie Basin and Erewhon in the South, Ninety Mile Beach and Muriwai in the North. 

He presently resides back in Dunedin within reach of the hinterland that has been the focus of his work for nearly three decades

. His ‘uneasy’ relationship with the landscape, and his emotional response to it remain the foundation of his work. While Hunt's images are based on specific places they evoke not document, the direction of his approach has been to ‘sieve’ the landscape of ‘unruly’ elements and refine down each image until the focus of the work becomes the essence of mood and atmosphere, light and tone. The profound affects of light are an ongoing preoccupation in Hunt's landscapes. 

Convergence. 1000 x 1200. Acrylic on canvas. $14500. 

Painted with skill and subtlety, his paintings are constructed with layer upon layer of pigment using a free fluid technique until the final painting is an amalgam of these many layers of vivid under painting, impatient brushwork followed by formalisation and focus. 

With 'Convergence' currently on display in the gallery make sure you call in the next time you are passing through - Hunt's works are made to be experienced!