The break

William Mackinnon's work focuses on the sport of surfing, a 25-year pursuit for the Melbourne-based artist. Growing up in Victoria's west, Mackinnon spent much of his adolescence surfing the wildly beautiful coastline of western Victoria. Drawing on experiences from his own life, Mackinnon instils moments such as driving and surfing, with palpable emotion. In one work, Mackinnon captures the moment of arrival at the coast, the awaiting ocean glimpsed in the distance. Created using four almost equal bands that appear like geological strata, the painting's verticality consumes the viewer in its splendour. In another work, Mackinnon captures the long pause between adrenalin-fuelled peaks of riding the waves, conveying the vastness of the ocean and the contemplative aspect of the surfing experience. In the third work, the wave is a mountain-like presence in an otherwise flat ocean, its power and scale dwarfing the surfers as they make their way into the water. This wave references art history's most famous, that of Hokusai's ukiyo-e woodblock print The Great Wave off Kanagawa (c. 1830), while also bringing to mind the devastating tsunamis of recent years. Popular culture representations of the sport of surfing have tended towards the exhilarating and the dramatic. Mackinnon chooses to describe non-heroic moments that sustain the thrilling peaks: the journey, the lull and the fear.