Running at the NSA Galleries from May 20 to June 8 is Scott Bredin’s Paintings and Drawings 2000-2003.

Scott Bredin aims to produce paintings that are convincing both as abstract form as well as conveying an empirical experience of the world. These paintings have their genesis in drawings done in the landscape – a number of which are included in the exhibition.

The drawings and paintings are the result of repeated visits to particular places over an extended period of time. The drawings constitute a network of routes, tracks across this landscape.

Underpinning the work is the conviction that the “Western” landscape tradition is a resource to be mined rather than written off as a tool of colonisation and settler acquisitiveness. Instead of insisting on the bleakness of an environmental history that tracks the procession of exploration, colonisation and exploitation of the planet, these paintings and drawings cultivate a more complex story that shows the limits of such critiques and in so doing reveals the richness and antiquity of our landscape myths.

The publicity reads: “By working through the landscape tradition the work exposes how much we stand to lose in the wholesale desecration of the landscape and its attendant myths. Salvation does not lie in making judgements on the quarried, despoiled, gouged earth, but in presenting a raw vision of the world as it is: glowing, flashing, transient.”

Scott Bredin completed a Masters of Arts in Fine Arts (cum laude) at the University of Natal. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions and his work is represented in corporate and public collections, including the Tatham Art Gallery and Barkley Bank PLC. He currently lives and works in Durban.