Damian Moss
Between the Lines 2006

'One of Sydney's best painters...Moss's new show - his first at Tim Olsen Gallery is a suite of breathtaking new paintings that conjures shadows of thin branches and dead leaves as if cast by a diffuse light coming from behind a screen. In fact, Moss's studio is filled with these scraggly branches. He sets them up high on milk crates between the canvas and the studio's halogen light source, so that their shadows fall across the canvas. Painting the lines in against his beautiful monochromatic backgrounds (which push forward in patches to become foreground), Moss uses the thickest, roughest bristles he can find.

"The brush is like a scourer," he says, "scraping off paint with every stroke, so you never get a build up of layers. When you clean it, your hands bleed!" The paint on the completed surface is very thin, and the underlying white of the gesso radiates out through the whole painting.

Moss's paintings have an evanescent, transitory feel, one that conjures the kind of daydreams that come from lying on your back staring at light playing against window shades.

Extract from Sebastian Smee, 'Exhibitions', Metro, Sydney Morning Herald, February 2001