Cassandra Dove, Poplar Pride and Confetti, acrylic paint on canvas, 203 x 123cm. Photo: Belco Art.
After 20 years of working as a clinical social worker, Cassandra Dove burst onto the Canberra arts scene in the early 2020s and is now holding a major solo exhibition at Belco Arts.
As a late starter and apparently largely self-taught, Dove is fearless when it comes to colour, scale and gestural application of primarily acrylic paint, sometimes combined with oil pastels.
She is an artist for whom a sense of place is an essential starting point, and this is swallowed up in her personal emotional response as she starts to play with sweeping fields of colour and with textural marks. She works in series, with several paintings usually underway at the same time, and constantly returns to her canvases as layers of paint dry and opportunities present themselves for further development.
Cassandra Dove, The Bellas, acrylic paint and oil pastel on canvas, 203 x 158cm. Photo: Belco Art.
A major painting at the exhibition is The Bellas, which is roughly two metres high and more than a metre and a half across. It demonstrates both the strengths and weaknesses of her approach.
Dove creates an immersive painted surface that invites the viewer to enter the space and to dissolve into the painting. Sky, trees, bushland and water are whipped together into a watery vision that is largely abstracted but also contains suspended forms that could be given a figurative reading.
The abstracted landscape presents a challenging balancing act for most artists to master. An artist such as Michael Taylor has mastered the technique over a career that has spanned many decades to create a wonderful watery vision that nevertheless contains a structure that anchors the composition to the canvas.
Many of Dove’s paintings have an emotional sound and fury, but fail to achieve a resolved solidity that fully functions as an artwork.
For me, The Bellas, which may have had a starting point in the landscape of the Brindabella Ranges, essentially succeeds as a painting with its dribbles of paint and sweeping emotional gestures. Several other paintings in the show do not succeed.
Cassandra Dove, Candy Dreams and Peppermint, acrylic paint, oil pastel and watercolour marker on canvas, 168 x 164 cm. Photo: Belco Art.
Another large, immersive painting that is a highlight of this exhibition is Candy Dreams and Peppermint, which appears almost like a hedonistic celebration with a riot of colours, including pinks, greens, browns, and ochres.
It is realised in acrylic paints combined with oil pastel and watercolour markers on canvas. There is a lovely rippling sensation about this work where different perceptions of space and depth are allowed to manipulate the rather dense surface textures.
The painting appears to convey a joie de vivre in the act of painting, a rare and precious quality that is often missing in many contemporary exhibitions of painting.
Other major works at the exhibition include the beautiful, focused square painting Autumn Architecture and the large, dissolving canvas Poplar Pride and Confetti, with its clever passages of colour manipulation, with areas of blue creating the sensation of depth.
This is essentially an emerging artist’s exhibition that demonstrates boldness and freedom in embracing the local landscape, expressing a desire to share this excitement with the viewer as part of an immersive experience.
Cassandra Dove, Autumn Architecture, acrylic paint on canvas, 122 x 122cm. Photo: Belco Arts.
Cassandra Dove: Behind the View, Belco Arts, West Gallery, 118 Emu Bank, Belconnen, closes 30 November. It’s open Tuesday to Sunday from 10 am to 4 pm.
