Untitled Landscape (St Bathans), c.1966

Bensemann made several painting trips to Central Otago in the 1960s and 1970s. Dates on paintings and letters to friends enable one to identify trips in 1962, 1966 and 1979 in particular. Since the painting St Bathans was exhibited at the Group Show in 1966 and other Central Otago paintings are also dated that year it is probable that this painting which also relates to the St Bathans area was painted or at least started on the same trip. Bensemann was fascinated with the stark and devastated landforms left behind by invasive gold-mining activities. In this instance the untidy detritus of metal abandoned by the miners implies a conservationist message, though Bensemann’s painter’s eye was attracted to these denuded landforms, perhaps because they reminded him of the bare rock backgrounds so loved by Italian Renaissance painters such as Giotto, Bellini and Gozzoli. Coincidentally, Doris Lusk also painted the industrial debris left by departed miners in Central Otago in a painting dating from the 1940s. This painting was not exhibited in Bensemann’s life time.