Blending two distinctive styles, Euan Macleod and Gregory O’Brien’s collaborative paintings reflect the appreciation both artists have for the outdoors, and equally, their shared curiosity about human history, and concerns about present-day life.

These two artists have spent the last fourteen years ducking in and out of their personal art practices to travel to remote nooks of Aotearoa. From scenes of the Bay of Plenty to South Otago, their works are meditations on provincial, often far-flung places.

Their approach is seeded by the Irish writer Patrick Kavanagh, who believed that the realities of the small town should not be thought of as ‘a perimeter’ but instead, as ‘a space through which the world can be seen’. In this way, the term ‘local knowledge’ encompasses far more than the facts about a place—it suggests how we connect to a location through shared experience and cross-generational understanding.

Image:

Euan Macleod & Gregory O’Brien (2024). Discontinued Line (detail). Image courtesy of the artists and Bowen Galleries, Wellington