Estuary, paintings by Brian Purcell

Following his first successful show in 2021, The Day on Fire, Brian Purcell is returning to the Shop Gallery, Glebe, with a new show of paintings.

Estuary features scenes painted around Bongil National Park, near the artist's home in Bellingen. Gums rise from marshlands and interweave in patterns, the marshy water eventually flowing into estuaries and on to the sea.

Purcell is interested in the effects of light and colour on the Australian landscape, and the tensions between representation and abstraction.

The exhibition also features vibrantly coloured still life and figure paintings. Brian Purcell is also a published poet and singer/lyricist. Attending art school in the eighties, he has only recently been able to paint more seriously.

This year he was a finalist in the Bluethumb art prize, and is a featured painter on their website. His painting 'Cathedral, Gums at Twilight' will soon appear in Openbook, the State Library of NSW's award-winning quarterly magazine.