The South Yarra Doodles is a new body of work on paper by Melbourne-based artist Richard Besley. Dripped, rubbed, pushed and pulled across the paper, the pigment in these works acquires a life of its own. Through a process of working and reworking multiple layers of watercolour, pigment, oil stick and charcoal, the image unfolds as a force-field of clamouring surfaces.
In the past, Besley has been preoccupied with nature and natural processes. His earlier compositions are pared-back and mellow, offering up a commentary on those aspects of the physical world that fall somewhere between science and mystery, from the atmospheric conditions of Venus to the movements of tectonic plates.
The South Yarra Doodles represent a shift, both in approach and in context. Besley left his studio in the bush in St Andrews, travelled to New York and London, and returned to settle in South Yarra. As a result, Besley’s practice has opened out to processes of chance, experimentation and play. These works no longer find their origin in phenomena in the physical world. Instead, they are abstract in the purest sense, emerging out of unplanned improvisation. Suspending judgement, Besley has allowed colours to melt and collapse, and shapes to push against one another. This dynamic body of dense, subtle and intense work is born out of a strange form of chance guided by the artist’s hand.
The South Yarra Doodles is Besley’s fifth solo exhibition at Chapman & Bailey Gallery.
View more images here
Exhibition runs 5 - 24 March, Chapman & Bailey gallery, 350 Johnston st, Abbotsford. Phone: +61 3 9415 8666
Email: gallery@chapmanbailey.com.au
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