Leo Bensemann

Leo Bensemann spent virtually his entire life in the Canterbury region, where he painted heightened, simplified versions of the landscape he knew well, using a strident at times almost hallucinogenic palette. His graphic work of the 1930s and 40s was frequently Gothic in style, drawing on European mythology, literature and pictorial traditions. The sense of disquiet that dominated those works is melded in his mature paintings with a vision of the natural world in all its unrestrained splendour.