Creative Spaces | Ben Waters x King Living

A star among the represented artists at Michael Reid Northern Beaches and a mainstay of our gallery’s program, celebrated contemporary painter and lifelong local Ben Waters is a major force within the creative community of our idyllic slice of Sydney. With a rising profile on the national art scene, he is one of the most distinctive interpreters of our local landscape, building a painting practice grounded in his longstanding connection to Pittwater and the emotional currents stirred by immersive encounters with the area’s untamed bush.

After sketching out in the field during long, winding bushwalks, Waters returns to his Avalon studio to translate his impressions of our natural environment through a highly original visual language. Capturing willowy gums as they arch and overlap atop steep escarpments that sweep towards glittering expanses of water, Waters brings his paintings to life with a bold graphic charge and an approach to colour that is entirely his own.

Now looking ahead to his next solo exhibition – set to open at Michael Reid Northern Beaches in June, with previews available for registered collectors in the coming months – Waters recently teamed up with leading Australian furniture marque King Living for an art-meets-design collaboration with a distinctly Northern Beaches spin. In the resulting Creative Spaces video series and its accompanying feature, the artist takes viewers inside his Avalon painting studio and reflects on colour as a means of expressing a deeply felt connection to his natural surroundings.

It’s a fitting welcome to the ‘Beaches for King, the homegrown global design powerhouse that recently opened its most expansive showroom yet in the nearby suburb of Balgowlah. Adding to the brand’s network of retail spaces across Australia, North America and Asia, King’s Northern Beaches opening was celebrated with a pop-up exhibition within the showroom that placed Waters’s works in conversation with the brand’s Australian-designed and -made furniture.

“I have a lot of difficulty matching colour to reality,” says Waters in the Creative Spaces video. “I usually work with tone instead.” Building a palette attuned to the light and rhythms of our local environment, the artist says he seeks out a synergy of lightness and darkness in tone. “If it’s busy and the colour is too loud, there’s too much going on. That’s not what I experience in nature. There’s always a combination of busyness and calm.”

In Creative Spaces, leading interior stylist Kerrie-Ann Jones takes design cues from the artist’s paintings and channels their earthy tonality and warm, tempered vibrancy to build a layered living space furnished with King pieces and set within an elegant Seaforth home. “Art can come in at the very beginning of a project, or throughout,” says Jones, who shows viewers how to imbue their own space with the elemental warmth and soft-edged naturalism so beautifully expressed in Waters’s work. “It can either inform the palette, or add a bit of tension and surprise.”

With burgeoning acclaim, interest and demand surrounding his practice, new bodies of work by Waters are routinely acquired well in advance of his exhibition openings. Collectors are encouraged to register for early previews and priority access to his forthcoming projects, which include his next solo show at Michael Reid Northern Beaches – opening this June and available to preview soon.

To sign up, please email sophienolan@michaelreid.com.au