Ones to Watch: Steve Salo

Melbourne-based artist Steve Salo is best known for his expressive landscapes and emotive portrait paintings. The Victorian coast inspires many of Steve’s landscapes. In Hope, Steve’s gestural painting style and colour palette of limited blue hues centers the viewer within a misty, moody landscape. He says, “For a painter interested in portraying feelings evoked by being in a place, the Peninsulas and the Great Ocean Road encompass every emotion and the constant rethinking of colour, tone and brushstrokes. Detail and softness for the gentle, abstraction for the mysterious, sweeping and wild strokes for the presence of time eternal.” Reminiscent of the works of J. M. W. Turner, Steve’s atmospheric landscapes may just be the revival of Romanticism we never knew we needed.

Feature image: Steve Salo, Hope. Oil on aluminium, 60 x 60cm. Courtesy: the artist and Whitewall Art Projects, Berrima.