Bethany Saab

The table is set with abundance, eclecticism and free-spirited style in Bethany Saab’s delightful new series of interior scenes.

The Canberra-based artist’s latest release is her first in more than a year, making this a rare and exciting opportunity for collectors to experience and acquire her joyous, expressive and beautifully realised still-life paintings. From kitchen tables and benchtops that teem with produce, accoutrements and glittering glass bottles to shelves festooned with foliage and flowers, Saab’s windows onto the domestic world are enlivened by colour, decorative details and a dazzling interplay of light and shadow.

A fabulous layering of pattern on pattern brings exuberance and optical charge to each painting. In one, the shadow lines cast by a Venetian blind intersect with a tablecloth’s overscale florals, while another sees striped and spotted napery unfurl beside pretty blue-and-white Delftware as organic tangles of lilies, orchids and dahlias spill out of pitchers, pots and glass vessels.

The result is a fabulous paean to the everyday pleasures of cooking, painting and living in a space warmed by books, art, textiles, handmade objects and beautiful blooms.