Bruce Buchanan is a realist landscape painter working in watercolour - a medium he has mastered over many years. He considers watercolour to be a beautiful medium for the way it runs, precipitates, and always threatens to misbehave. The infinite combinations of various pigments and intensities of tone in watercolour provide the basis of mood which is essential to his work.

Prior to painting full time, Bruce was an architect and has a natural understanding of structure, form, perspective, scale and detail of buildings. The combination of man-made elements with natural landscape features in a lot of his work. He has an affinity with historic places and materials. The way shadows fall on corrugated iron and brickwork, the way glass reflects the light, the sky and other objects, makes them compellingly tactile materials worthy of infinite interpretation. There are recurring themes in his work. Bruce tends to contemplate a subject for some time – often days, before mixing paint. He is careful with choice of subjects, preferring subjects with a certain dynamic – usually of mood and atmosphere which have the potential for subtle interpretation.

Buchanan has exhibited across Australia and his works are part of private and public collections including Ramsay Health Care Australia, The Brisbane Polo Club, Ipswich Regional Art Gallery, Stanthorpe Art Gallery and Queensland State Treasury Corporation. He is represented in many private collections, both in Australia and internationally.

“It is always a process of observing and recognising what it is about a subject that has attracted me to it in the first place. Often this is not about what is actually there but what I think is actually there. It can be some elusive element or the disposition of elements. It might also be just a “slice” of something – not the whole thing. It is often influenced by the time of day and the way shadows fall”
— Bruce Buchanan