Maldon, Victoria

Abstraction is key to Kevin Lincoln’s work. While much of his work retains recognisable elements from life – portraits, landscape, still life – it is the language of abstraction that had increasingly informed his oeuvre over the past two decades.

Plein air drawing and watercolour painting are a long-standing aspect of Lincoln’s practice, underlying much of his abstract painting, but for many years remained a private pursuit and was separate to his exhibited work. He works in sketchbooks, which he carries with him in the landscape, in museums and when travelling. In his catalogue introduction to a recent retrospective of Lincoln’s work at the Art Gallery of Ballarat, gallery Director Gordon Morrison asserts the significance of Lincoln’s landscapes; …….no painter since David Davis… has been able to represent the Australian landscape in its mood of nocturnal or autumnal melancholy. We all know the Australia of the Golden Summer. We can even picture in our mind’s eye the land of drought and flooding plains. Lincoln offers us an entirely different but equally authentic Australia. (Gordon Morrison ‘Foreword’, Kevin Lincoln, the eye’s mind Ballarat Art Gallery, 2016 p.7)