David Hansen

Quintus Publishing

RRP: $39.95 HB 63 pp

David Keeling is a painter fully grounded in western art’s long history of classicism, the tradition which runs from Botticelli to Poussin, from Purvis de Chavannes to De Chirico. He uses that artistic language - that combination of figuration, narrative and landscape - to describe Australia’s shorter and sadder history of invasion and ecological destruction. From bleak, denuded hillscapes of the 1990s, with their isolated markers of civilisation - houses, gates, dining tables, curtains - to the more recent, richly-patterned treescapes of the Narawntapu National Park, Keeling’s work uncovers and expresses the beautiful, tragic, surreal poetry of the Tasmanian environment.