Lines on the Landscape

Working in a bold, expressive impasto, David King charts roads, ridgelines and shifting weather with an almost operatic instinct for drama: sky pressing low over the hills, light pooling in unexpected places, fences and telegraph lines drawing the eye forward. The scenes he paints travel widely — the Illawarra escarpment, the Central Tablelands, the edges of Goulburn, Orford’s pale fields, the misted greens of Ireland — but his subject is not geography. “I see the same things everywhere,” he says. “Ireland, Tasmania, the Tablelands — fences, gates, telegraph poles. They join all these places.”