Painting - subject or technique

from w
I visited an art exhibition the other day of recent paintings by Leigh Chiller. All were landscapes (I think) but when I looked close at the way the paint was painted onto the canvas it seemed he used thick paint manipulated by something like a credit card. Not a brush in sight - or not many. This made me think about the difference between subject matter in a painting and the interest in technique.

In some pictures the technique is almost invisible as the emphasis is on the subject - such as the pic here taken of Fiji Institute of Technology students looking at a painting.



Leigh Chiller's work however demands that the viewer guess what the picture is about.