Colin Pennock: Modern Recluse

Irish-born artist Colin Pennock produces emotionally driven landscapes swelling with refined riots of colour. With his studio nestled in the bush of the Noosa Hinterland, the artist directly responds to his immediate surroundings while mnemonically engaging with the remembered landscape of his homeland. Navigating through Pennock’s sumptuous layering of colour and visceral application of paint, the viewer catches glimpses of images that appear, disappear and reappear in an oscillating cycle of revelation and concealment. 

Pennock’s new series of paintings draws on the artist’s increasing sense of solidarity with his life and work. Reacting to recent experiences of loss, and haunted by the images of conflict that plague the media, the artist creates cathartic abstracted worlds that both enable and embody a shedding of emotion and purification of mind. For Pennock, the contemporary world is a crucible of cruelty – made all the more poignant by our culture of mass image dissemination and social media – and it is this reality that has pushed him to withdraw from society; to become a ‘modern recluse’. ‘I want to find a place that shelters me from the banal and senseless’, says the artist. Working in solitude in his remote studio, he searches for peace via misty hues and a gentle constellation of marks, his refined layering of paint like a cognitive cleansing that gradually re-establishes equilibrium. A subtler cosmos of colour than the artist’s previous works invokes a new state of mind, with milky teals, tranquil lilacs and warm ivories invoking the quiet calm that Pennock so pines for.