March 27 - April 19
SHIMMER
Tim Allen captures a profound experience of nature in Shimmer.
From a lifetime of exploring rocky crags and deep valleys, Allen’s distillations of landscape are seemingly effortless. Not only are the works abstractions in their expressionist application of paint, they are also abstracted from the en plein air studies that are their genesis. His brilliance is in capturing fleeting moments, shifting clouds, flowing streams, and immortalising movement and chance with perfectly poised brushstrokes. Memory and intuition play a crucial role in forming the landscapes in Shimmer, bolstered by his immersion and interrogations of place throughout New South Wales and Victoria, some intimately familiar, others rarely visited but enduring.
Every so often an observed vista brings with it a suggestion of possibility. A study becomes the origin of a new and entirely spontaneous composition, which emerges through the process of making. A strange synergy is created between gestural strokes and evocative marks that reveal the geological and vegetative foundations of place. Environmental topography builds as painterly lines and scumbled surfaces paradoxically capture stilled environments bursting with motion.
Allen is well versed in the language of the landscape, but he is deeply familiar with the nature of paint. Through collaboration with the medium, he expertly dances with chance, allowing the paint to behave in unpredictable ways. His own restraint is critical for the organic elements of oils to remain untouched within the layers. The result is a controlled chaos, loose liquid drips intersecting with impasto scratches of toothy pigment. Abstracted textures and colours in the macro are vivid landscapes from a distance. The compositions do not depict a struggle between artists and artwork, but an understanding of playful chance and possibility.
In Shimmer Allen presents an ecology that is luscious and thriving. Crisp green foliage surrounds abundant bodies of water. Riverbeds are submerged beneath flowing streams, where tannins and reflections of sky and pendulous foliage combine to create an opalescent palette. Angular rocks project forth from cascading water, providing a rhythmic stillness among its frenzied passage. Allen’s series is the glow of a balmy summer afternoon, where the fresh chill of a rockpool is palpable within the mind.
“The creeks, rivers and bodies of water in Shimmer want to exist in the real world as well as being a vehicle for painterly play. They reflect and refract and reveal and hide layers of colour depending on light, time of day and depth of water.” – Tim Allen, 2025
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