Literature

Songs of the Bush constructs a landscape in deep rust, mauve and scattered orange, the surface built with dense impasto strokes that give the composition a worked, layered materiality. A blue ground presses in at the upper edge, the sky barely admitted. The marks accumulate into forms that suggest dense vegetation or eroded terrain observed from close range, the distinction between subject and ground collapsing into textured surface. The title locates the work in a specifically non-European landscape tradition while El-Kadhi Brown's handling makes that landscape interior as much as observed.