Bruce Backhouse
Bruce Backhouse is a Johannesburg based artist is concerned primarily with contemporary landscape painting. He believes that the South African landscape has been explored to the point that it is no longer visually challenging to either the artist or the viewer. He reviews this genre in his work, his aim to make viewers question what they see and think differently about landscape.The medium of watercolour has been used historically as a means for the topographical recording of our natural landscapes. It is also one that became the British middle-class answer to affordable artworks – a medium that suffers lack of recognition in the contemporary market. Backhouse considers these issues regarding medium and its immediate implications, engaging his viewer in a critical analysis of the art value system. His static, pointillist landscape offers a new way of engaging.
Backhouse believes that contemporary visual ability far exceeds that of any other period in history. The visual based technology we engage with daily has expanded our ability to comprehend and process. It has stirred a desire for more complex visual stimulation. The notion of information appraisal and visual editing is something that fascinates Backhouse. He supplies the viewer with as much information as possible. In the same manner that cubism depicts a multiplicity of angles of a static subject, so Backhouse does with landscape, capturing the same area from different points of perspective, rendering his work with an energy and vivacity that is often lacking in traditional landscape. He believes this multiple perspective to be more true to nature. He avoids presenting a work that manifests itself as a visual ‘truth’ and instead gives the viewer room to find their own landscape within his painting.
Concerned with technology and the representation of the multiplicity, reminiscent of the futurists, he says that the evolution of the viewer is the fundamental premise upon which the works are formed. "This is a key element of what I am trying to communicate", he says. "The single snap shot of a moment in time is now a multiple view landscape, relating directly to our environment in the technological age and the viewers growing visual sophistication".
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