May 11, 2004 Courier Mail Review by Heidi Meyer May 11, 2004, 'Dreams and Journeys', Art Galleries Schubert, Gold Coast

Solitary figures convey sense of longing

EXTRAORDINARILY detailed and visually compelling, Brisbane-born artist Cynthia Breusch's latest collection of paintings, Dreams and Journeys, marks a quarter century of full-time painting for Breusch.

Each work, as she points out, is "a small universe of its own"

Steeped in rich earth tones and myriad hues of purplish blues and greys, each canvas is a study in contrasts. Seemingly infinite expanses of land, sky or water threaten to engulf the tiny, solitary figures with which Breusch is so fond of peopling her works.

"My recent work represents a kind of voyage, as if I have travelled to my imagined worlds sift-ing, retrieving and documenting, and brought back for the viewer a glimpse into a private museum of possibilities and associations."

Breusch says.

"It's a cliche nowadays, I know, but I really do lose myself when I'm working. It's almost as if I go off to another dimension and all of the ideas that I've been walking around with, gestating inside of me, come out. A lot of them are quite powerful and it's only when I look back later that it hits me."

It is this power, like the sense of imminent danger or loss that pervades the works, which makes painting so fascinating for Breusch.

"There has always been something about the solitary figure that interests me, perhaps because I think that, ultimately, we're all alone, dealing with ourselves and that comes through in the paintings, definitely. Sometimes it's as if I almost become the figure I'm painting."

Many of Breusch's paintings are an exercise in contradictions.

Waiting For An Answer, for example, depicts a woman painted against a barren land-scape, standing inside a ring of fire.

Shielding her eyes with her hand, her face is upturned and she is staring at the sky.

Is she simply surveying her surroundings, or is she awaiting an answer to a question the viewer has no knowledge of?

The sky that swirls above appears menacing and a palpable feeling of disquiet radiates from the canvas.

The vivid and atmospheric At The Still Point shows another woman, her body enveloped in a white robe, staring at the storm clouds swirling above.

Despite the warm golden hues used to illustrate the landscape against which her tiny figure is shown, there is a pervasive sense that something ominous is going to happen.

Breusch says that she often becomes so involved in a piece that she stops painting only when night descends and there is no light for her to paint by.

"It's true - if I'm involved in painting, say, a really tumultuous sky, then hours can pass me by, but the truth is that as much as I love painting, as absorbed as I get, it really is 99 percent hard work and 1 per cent inspiration." she says.

"Painting itself is a great mystery to me, but through it I try to convey the illusory qualities of existence the way a poem or music might. I want to somehow make timelessness visual and hint at a sense of longing common to many of us, I think, but which can never quite be named."