Great Expectations
5th March 2021
Northern Tasmanian artist Keith Lane explores the connections between the psyche and the body using an intriguing technique that combines coloured pencil with more traditional painting mediums. In this show he measures the gap between aspirations, whether they are of marital bliss or of a meditative life, and uncompromising reality. Often the works are masculine, with their ranks of press ganged sailors or thoughtful men disturbed from meditation by helicopters above but the form of the work is delicate and ornamental. A tracery of images wraps around the solid form of the body, a reminder of what might have been had the world been different.
Lane’s work is masculine and philosophical, defying easy explanation;
“…. what works as art is poetical in that it resists final analysis. Because its language does not constrict meaning, art undermines logical order and sequential time. By extension, aesthetic experience vibrates between instinctive response and intellectual analysis and between imagination/myth and reason/history and creates a resonance between artist and viewer.” Nancy Underhill writing in Modern Painters.
