Horizons
An Exhibition of Oil Paintings by Dean Buchanan
Introduction of Exhibition
These paintings are an exploration and continuation of one of my favourite themes – The Horizon.
According to the dictionary the definition of horizon is: the great circle in which earth and sky seem to meet or the limit of a person’s knowledge, experience, or interest.
When you are mountain climbing you get many many horizons and over views of the complete lay of the land and connecting waterways with the dome of the sky above and often cloud patterns below but always the horizon stretching far as the eye can see.
In my bush paintings the horizons are often viewed through the trees & foliage. My Gulf paintings have views to distant islands & peninsulas but I have always tried to rise up above & beyond the landscape.
I have spent the last 40years painting landscapes and realise there is always something beyond the horizon another landscape another sunrise or sunset. It is a never ending quest.
INTRODUCTION
Dean Buchanan’s art reflects his energy, passion and intimate connection to the New Zealand landscape and environment.
He expresses this love of landscape in his large oil paintings. Mountains, bush, coasts are rendered into semi-abstract forms outlined in thick strokes of color, often straight from the tube. They are colorful, dramatic and complex depictions of particular places. They have a raw vitality that reflects New Zealand’s rugged scenery in cohesive, vivid, and strikingly energetic images.
About the Artist
Dean Buchanan was born in 1952. As a child growing up on Auckland’s North Shore he was always busy, always drawing, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy, images from the comics, vast jigsaw puzzles always on the go. By the time he attended Westlake Boys as a teenager, Dean was already painting, at school, and at home in the garage. And they were big paintings, two meters and more. Oils mostly, themes drawn from Dean’s own fast-developing intellectual life and the seas of New Zealand suburbia surrounding Castor Bay. And he was running cross-country at Westlake Boys, developing the other great passion in his life, a delight in that physical exertion which leads to extreme fitness.
Dean was also transfixed by line and colour, by the complex geometries of New Zealand landscape and bush. He still wanted only to be an artist. He had to develop his own unique style and voice. He cycled and walked. He painted. He climbed mountains and looked down from the top. He traveled to England and visited all the famous galleries. The same punishing regime of work and exercise is maintained today, up well before dawn, painting in his studio down the bush path from his house, cycling, climbing, and always more painting. Dean has found his unique voice, his unique vision of the world around him and now as ever he seeks only to paint it.
