Australian painter Michael Cowdroy eschews the broad vistas and minimal color palettes of many of his compatriots’ landscape paintings, but his Sydney suburban streetscapes retain the same sense of sharpness in the air and intensity of light. Working with delicate brushstrokes and hues that evoke the French Impressionists, he portrays neighborhoods and homes surrounded by nature. By opposing the pale and rusty tones of the streets and buildings to the vibrant, infinitely modulated greens of the surrounding foliage, Cowdroy suggests a delicate balance between man and nature.
This juxtaposition lends his compositions an incredibly tactile quality, the loosely defined structures and surfaces allowing viewers to invest the images with their own experiences. His dynamic framing of streets and landscapes puts a contemporary spin on classical perspective, with vanishing points often hidden around bends in snaking roads and many images dominated by enormous trees. The results are evocative images that use a familiar visual lexicon in new and exciting ways to convey a gripping and immersive sense of place.