A Day on the Green

Two tiny figures lie stretched out on a thick smear of pale peach paint, one of them apparently wearing sunglasses. Everything around them is green, built up in broad slabs with a palette knife so the surface looks like a plastered wall that has cracked and settled. Werner Bronkhorst, a Western Australian painter, works this way on purpose: he lays down heavy ridges of oil paint first, lets them dry, then adds people at a scale of a few millimetres using a very fine brush. The paint is not describing a picnic blanket on a lawn. The paint simply is the blanket, and the lawn, and the strange lime-coloured shape hovering above them.

The title borrows from the Australian concert series held on winery lawns, where crowds spread out on the grass with a bottle and wait for the music to start. Bronkhorst has made a career out of this joke, shrinking humans down until they are dwarfed by ordinary brushstrokes, turning trowelled ridges into cliffs and dunes and ski slopes. It works because of the size difference: the smaller the figures, the more you notice the texture they are resting on. Whether the pale green shape above is a distant hill, a shadow, or just a second scoop of paint is left entirely open, and the two sunbathers do not seem bothered either way.