Geoff Harvey
Ashes to Ashes
19 April – 11 May 2022
The first theme is about Cricket a game I enjoyed playing as a school kid & still enjoy watching each summer. Cricket is considered the gentleman’s sport. And is made up of formal arrangement of players dressed in white on a green field which is visually arresting to me. Body language & the motion of the sportsmen has been one of the challenges for me to capture in these paintings. In the sharp focus of high summer light these top sportsmen have been an inspiration for me to paint.
And the second subject is Black Summer 2019-20 with painting of the horrendous bushfires that engulfed the Blue Mountains & the bushland areas of NSW. When Sydney was blanketed in smoke & everybody was restricted to indoors activities I felt compelled to paint what I was seeing on the news each & every hour. Daily images of these devastating fires were constantly published & as I listened to the fire reports on radio I kept painting. Feeling so helpless in this situation the only thing I could do was paint & to hope that there would be an end to this catastrophic global warming event. These paintings are a record of this tragic event but in another way they are also quite beautiful. They portray a landscape ravished by fire where not only does the deafening sounds & the smells appear present but also the intense heat is very much felt by the viewer.
Geoff Harvey
April 2022
This is Geoff’s 25th solo exhibition with Robin Gibson Gallery
