After spending two decades as a clinical social worker, Cassandra Dove made a dramatic career shift that launched her into Canberra's art scene in the early 2020s. Now, this largely self-taught artist is showcasing her work in a major solo exhibition at Belco Arts, demonstrating a fearless approach to color, scale, and gestural application of primarily acrylic paint, often combined with oil pastels.
Dove's artistic process centers around a deep sense of place as her essential starting point, which becomes absorbed into her personal emotional responses as she experiments with sweeping fields of color and textural marks. Her working method involves creating multiple paintings simultaneously in series, constantly returning to her canvases as paint layers dry and new opportunities for development emerge.
One of the exhibition's standout pieces is "The Bellas," a commanding work measuring roughly two meters high and more than a meter and a half across (203 x 158cm). This substantial painting exemplifies both the strengths and challenges of Dove's artistic approach. The artwork creates an immersive painted surface that invites viewers to enter the space and dissolve into the painting itself. Sky, trees, bushland, and water are blended together into a watery vision that remains largely abstracted while containing suspended forms that could be interpreted figuratively.
"The Bellas," which may have originated from the landscape of the Brindabella Ranges, succeeds as a cohesive painting through its paint drips and sweeping emotional gestures. However, the exhibition reveals the inherent challenges of abstracted landscape painting. While established artists like Michael Taylor have mastered this technique over decades-long careers to create structured watery visions that anchor compositions to the canvas, many of Dove's paintings, despite their emotional intensity, struggle to achieve the resolved solidity that fully functions as complete artworks.
Another exhibition highlight is "Candy Dreams and Peppermint" (168 x 164 cm), a large, immersive painting that appears as an almost hedonistic celebration featuring a riot of colors including pinks, greens, browns, and ochres. Created using acrylic paints combined with oil pastel and watercolor markers on canvas, this work displays a lovely rippling sensation where different perceptions of space and depth manipulate the dense surface textures. The painting conveys a rare and precious joie de vivre in the act of painting itself, a quality often missing in many contemporary painting exhibitions.
The exhibition also features other significant works, including the beautiful, focused square painting "Autumn Architecture" (122 x 122cm) and the large, dissolving canvas "Poplar Pride and Confetti" (203 x 123cm), which showcases clever passages of color manipulation with areas of blue creating sensations of depth. These pieces demonstrate Dove's ability to transform her emotional responses to landscape into dynamic visual experiences.
Essentially, this exhibition represents an emerging artist's bold and free embrace of the local landscape, expressing a desire to share her excitement with viewers as part of an immersive experience. Dove's work reflects her transition from social work to art-making, bringing an emotional authenticity and fearless experimentation that distinguishes her contribution to Canberra's contemporary art scene.
"Cassandra Dove: Behind the View" runs at Belco Arts West Gallery, located at 118 Emu Bank, Belconnen, until November 30. The gallery is open Tuesday through Sunday from 10 am to 4 pm, with free admission for visitors interested in experiencing these large-scale, emotionally charged landscape abstractions.
