William Breen’s landscapes portray the open vistas of Victoria’s coastal regions with delicate photorealist accuracy. Cool and quiet they seduce the viewer with their classical composition and are imbued with a quality of meditative contemplation. They enable us to enter into them, permit the mind to clear and evoke the sensation of breathing in crisp, country air.

Journeying through the lanes and back roads of Apollo Bay and Blairgowrie these paintings reveal to us Breen’s intimate engagement with these areas - he regularly drives to these climes to escape an otherwise urban existence. It is this notion of ‘turning away’ from urbanity that is most essentially cased within these paintings.

Flinders Lane Gallery first exhibited Breen’s paintings in 2000. The positive response to his paintings has resulted in nine successful solo exhibitions at the gallery. Breen has also been selected several times as a finalist including most recently in 2006 the Geelong Art Prize and the Fleurieu Peninsula Biennale Art Prize. His paintings can be found in several important collections, including Artbank, National Australia Bank, Loyola College, La Trobe University, Whitehorse City and the Smorgan Collection.

The images echo a state of suspended animation, when everything slows down to a point where one can appreciate the contemplative nature of a world in balance, a world where everything is in its right place: an ideal vision.

Although each painting is an intuitive "moment of clarity", there is also a nostalgic quality, a half remembered past. The scenes are suspended in time and space in an emotive architectural landscape. Bathed in a diffused atmospheric light, the meditative nature of the urban image transcends the banal or familiar, into something sublime.
WILLIAM BREEN