Hugo Van Dorsser's paintings are a manifestation of nostalgia - emotionally charged, playful and surreal.
The Christchurch based artist merges his own personal history with imagined narratives, balancing his compositions between graphic and bold, to a more fluid movement and diffused brush stroke. Working with familiar objects from our collective childhood, naive stick figures and primary colours, Van Dorsser’s canvases invite us into a surge of memory, finding where these images live within our subconscious and where they stand now.
This project will explore unconventional approaches to painting through an engagement with sustainable farming and the surrounding landscape. I will experiment with found farming tools, natural materials, soil, and locally found minerals alongside oil paint and bonding agents to develop alternative methods of mark-making and image-making.
Daily walks, drawing, and working on the farm will inform a series of landscape and foliage studies, providing both inspiration and source material for the resulting paintings. Through this process, I aim to explore the relationship between land, material, and painting.