Visual Arts / Behind the View, works by Cassandra Dove. At Belco Arts, until November 30. Reviewed by KERRY-ANNE COUSINS.

Canberra artist Cassandra Dove’s latest exhibition at Belco Arts called Behind the View is inspired by landscape, in particular the landscape around Canberra and the surrounding region.

Her large, predominantly expressive abstract paintings of colour and light provide the viewer with an immersive experience.

In an article in the latest National Gallery of Victoria’s magazine, Olivia Meehan champions slow looking – that is taking the time to look at art in an attentive way, quoting Monet to support her argument.

I was reminded of this article when looking at the paintings in this exhibition.

Dove has been inspired by the landscape of the Canberra region and has immersed herself in its changing moods. Her works are skillfully orchestrated to bring together the allusion of a landscape but referenced through the artist’s own emotive response.

Large fields of heightened colour and light move across the surface of the canvas. Initially what seems like an amorphous mass of intermingling light and colour begins to take on different shapes as created passages of light and dark lead the eye into the work. Suggestions of streams, waterfalls, mountains and trees appear but it is only the merest suggestion of forms. Dove leaves the works open to individual interpretation.

Heightened colour is used by the artist to evoke a sense of drama as in the work Sawpit Creek Falls and a smaller work The Secrets of Molonglo Creek where a contrasting splash of blue against a warm palette indicates the presence of a waterfall or creek.

Finding Calm on the Monaro, with its soft muted colours and framing border of trees, suggests a change of mood perhaps an evening atmosphere of gentle melancholy. In three related lyrical works,

Kosciuszko nos. 1, 2, and 3 large lilac-coloured shapes drift across the canvas only parting slightly to reveal the merest suggestion of a tree canopy. Scale also can bring with it a change of mood with a large work, The Bellas, suggesting the powerful lure of distant mountains.

In other works, Dove has chosen to use a more pictorial narrative. In On a Winter’s Walk the artist depicts the lake across an expanse of water. Two other paintings are of trees, The Adorned Empress and Paperbark Queen. The red bark trunks are rendered majestically against an Australian deep blue sky.

However attractive these paintings are, I am drawn to the more abstract works. The artist’s ability to orchestrate successfully these large fields of colour draws the viewer into their central pictorial space. By really looking into these works you discover not only a hidden landscape but also a landscape of the imagination.