Review by SUE SMITH, Edited by Sandra McLean, Courier Mail,  Thursday, June 4, 1998
Cynthia Breusch, Other Realms, Cintra Galleries, 40 Park Road, Milton until June 13

World of her own

BRISBANE artist Cynthia Breusch first gained prominence as a romantic in the tradition of Charles Blackman. In her most beautiful and affecting works, she painted her favourite subjects - dreamers, children, flowers, cats, ladders - in hallucinatory combinations, surging with tides of brilliant colour.

Now, after a belated tour last year of Europe's museums, there is a big change in Breusch's work. Her latest paintings at Cintra Galleries, presenting a dream world of imagined landscapes and shadowy interiors, have a strong undercurrent of a Germanic/Italian heritage that conveys Arnold Bocklin's deathly silence, Caspar David Friedrich's isolation and Caravaggio's dark conflicts.

Yet the artist mostly avoids the traps of eclecticism, of being swamped by her sources. In her best work, Breusch creates a vividly imagined world, conjuring visual equivalents of the visual equivalents of the feelings that her subjects inspire in her.

Best of all, she now seems determined to remake her subjects in her own idiom, one in which landscape is portrayed increasingly as a powerful subject in its own right.

She does this by moving away from her earlier stylised or abstracted backgrounds toward an exotic, other worldly scenery of isolated islands, moonlit gardens and wind-tossed trees.

These themes are taken up with striking effect in Breusch's signature style which typically achieves a jewel-like intensity of image conveyed by careful tonal gradation and by painstaking build-up of successive paint layers. The artist applies. her colours in thin glazes, in scumbles, and sometimes by dragging it on with a dry brush, achieving a glowing, "weathered' look reminiscent of old icons or altarpieces.

This sensuous technique is combined with a potent portrayal of nature in Woman Under an Ancient Sky. A windswept woman in a thin white dress stands alone in an empty landscape that seems endless. About two-thirds of the painting is sky, filled with a mass of churning clouds, vigorously painted a la Constable. The mingling of air, light and cloud at the painting's centre holds out a promise of transcendence, but the unleashed elements of nature keep fulfilment out of reach.

In other works, European landscapes are inhabited by fantastic evocations which give the same bizarre sensation as the clear imagery of a dream. Where there are human figures, they may be characters from well-known paintings, or children self-absorbed in drawings, or simply lone figures who stand precariously on isolated pillars, escape ladders just out of reach.

But whatever is going on in these fascinatingly oblique pictures, always the artist's basic subject is the human condition, vulnerable and alone.