(“Mooi River” – landscape painting by Scott Bredin)
Leonardo da Vinci is widely credited for having inspired the term ‘Renaissance Man’. His restless mind defied categorisation as it swung effortlessly from the exacting precision of science and engineering to the passion and creativity of fine art.
KwaZulu-Natal artist Scott Bredin is also something of Renaissance Man. A lifelong practitioner of the timeless art of landscape painting, Bredin is also a skilled software developer whose gifts in the digital domain have led to the creation of safety and risk management apps which are used by mines and power stations across the globe.
These twin pursuits have spawned an arc of serendipitous symmetry: as Bredin’s technology enterprises lead him to the remote regions of South Africa, Australia, Papua New Guinea, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Canada, Malawi, Ghana, New Zealand, Mozambique, Syria, Qatar, Zambia and the DRC, so is he able discover myriad subject matter for his atmospheric paintings and drawings.
Bredin’s bucolic upbringing on a dairy farm in the Ixopo area inspired his lifelong attraction to nature and its infinite vistas of shape, form, texture and colour. His love of landscapes led to a Masters in Fine Art (cum laude) and, thereafter, into a thriving career spent telling the stories of the earth through his rich palette of oils.
Bredin is a master of capturing the sensual moods of his subject matter: his paintings are by no means of the ‘still life’ variety as he sublimates nature’s drama and dynamism into the heady atmospheres of his canvases. When describing the painting Lydenberg and its ‘burnt veld and distant clouds offering no rain’, Bredin allows one to almost taste the desiccated air and singed brush in the back of one’s throat. In Queensland, near Cloncurry, he notes that ‘every stone in this gully is broken, not worn: it sounds like I am walking over a pile of shattered plates’ and the harsh and desolate landscape in the painting creates a similarly synaesthetic effect.
Bredin’s latest exhibition is entitled Yearning, Grief and Hope and is described as “a series of love letters to places inaccessible under lockdown; to memories of childhood; to friends and landscapes lost”’ Yet, with Bredin’s gift for distilling the essence of a landscape’s potent atmospherics onto canvas, they are not lost, but live forever. Furthermore, such is the evocative potency of his paintings that one need only look at them to be fully transported to these starkly beautiful, far-flung fields of vision.
Yearning, Grief and Hope is the online exhibition of new work by Durban-based painter Bredin which is available at https://elizabethgordon.co.za/
A selection of his paintings will also be available physically at the gallery. To arrange a viewing, email joy@elizabethgordon.co.za or call 031 303 8133.
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