Geoff Dyer (1947-2020) was undeniably one of Tasmania’s most esteemed painters, recognised as leading Tasmania’s unique contribution to contemporary landscape genre on a national stage. Throughout his long professional career, Dyer built a national reputation for his powerful oil paintings, developing a highly distinctive style that not only captured the rich complexity of the Tasmanian landscape, but also its raw beauty and often unstable conditions.
Dyer was prolific throughout his career, contrasting thick impasto against subtly blended tones, often scraping paint across the surface of each work with an array of large palette knifes. As a result, each work carried a highly physical quality, felt through the weight of paint, as well as described through the exertion of gestures and marks made during construction.
Inspired after a trip to France, Dyer created a suite of paintings that explored the differing shapes and spaces of the European and Tasmanian landscapes. Dyer reflected on the fields and open planes of rural France compared to the dense and raw wilderness of Recherché Bay and D’entrecasteaux Creek witnessed by early explorers.
‘This current body of work has in part been fuelled by my recent trip to France, in particular the area around Entrecasteaux in Aix-en Provence, the home of Bruni D/Entrecasteaux (1737- 1793). I have attempted to paint the soft cultivated, almost park like environ of that landscape, showing the sharp contrast to the southern Tasmanian wilderness {Recherché Bay,D/entrecasteaux Creek} that the navigator explored in 1792- 3. I sensed echoes of Corot and Courbet, in the velvet quality of the light, a vivid contrast to the harsh, yet subliminal qualities of our untamed Tasmanian wilderness, a vision that was certainly not lost on those early explorers.’ – Geoff Dyer
Geoff Dyer (1947-2020) had a highly celebrated professional career spanning over fifty years, with countless solo exhibition nationally, as well as exhibitions in Singapore, Guangdong and New York. His work is held in numerous important collections including the National Portrait Gallery, Artbank, the University of Tasmania, the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery and the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA).
GEOFF DYER
Waterhole IV 2012
oil on linen
121 x 153 cm
Signed lower right
SOLD
PROVENANCE: Private Collection Hobart.
