Long Island Tides is part of a small series of landscapes painted by Breuer-Weil based on different aspects of the natural beauty and light of aspects of Long Island. Part of a general renaissance in current contemporary landscape painting, Breuer-Weil’s works in this genre have their origins in the School of London. As a student at Central Saint Martins School of Art he was particularly inspired by the walls and doors of Francis Bacon’s studio in Reece Mews, the places where Bacon cleaned his brushes leaving vibrant orange, pink, red and blue accretions of abstract pigment. Using his own palettes, he made his first experiments in landscapes born of the aesthetic of the palette, of raw colours transformed into receding space. In tandem with his monumental public sculptures and symbolic paintings he continued to create these more private landscapes that are experiments in pure colour and light. The recent series based on Long Island are also a conscious tribute to Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning who painted many of their greatest and most expansive works on Long Island.
Phillips would like to thank the David Breuer-Weil Studio for their kind assistance with this cataloguing.
