Marking Space, Movement & Time

On the Landscape Paintings of Bronte Leighton-Dore

In Andrew Benjamin’s, ‘What is Abstraction’, a comprehensive exposition on abstraction in painting is presented. Arguments regarding abstraction and its relationship to modernist painting, made by Clement Greenburg in his various essays, are critiqued and developed upon. Andrew Benjamin concludes artworks are simplistically interpreted to fit a misconstrued narrative of art history, one presented as a linear chronological development. It is erroneous, he claims, to regard the notion of abstraction as obsolete and have its avant-garde capacity rendered impotent. He affirms, rather than an exhausted genre, contemporary instances of abstraction continue to challenge the medium of painting. Central to Andrew Benjamin’s claim is that by identifying the function of time, as not only important to the historic categorisation of genres, temporality, should also be interpreted to be present within paintings itself. Allowing for the complexities of time provides the impetus for the continuous interpretive renewal for both individual paintings and at the disciplinary level.  Applying the framework for understanding abstraction developed Andrew Benjamin it will be argued that the landscapes of Bronte Leighton- Dore is an example of avant-garde painting today.