Sensory Wonder - 2nd-25th June 2023
Artist Statement -
“What is the best time to plant a tree? Twenty years ago. What is the next best time? Now.” - Old Chinese saying from the Overstory by Richard Powers.
Climate change is effecting all our lives in more ways than one and as an artist who has spent all my life exploring natural wilderness areas as inspiration it has directly effected my ability to get out bush. The floods and fires of the last 4 years have meant roads blocked, campgrounds closed and walking tracks destroyed. My inspiration has come closer to home, any wild place I can get to where its open and the weather is good. It has also meant more reliance on an internal memory of place.
This body of work comes from many trips into the bush around NSW National Parks and private reserves, hiking and drawing from nature and experiencing the wonder of our natural environment. The absolute beauty of our flowering gums and gnarly trunks, waterholes, rivers and escarpments never cease to capture my imagination. The feeling the wild natural environment engenders in me is both absolute joy, wonder and sometimes incredible sadness that these places still need to be protected from corporate greed, a lack of connection to nature and climate change.
Partly because I must now rely more on memory and partly from a desire to push further into the realm of non-literal interpretation, this body of work explores abstraction from both an expressionist and observed point of view. The observed subject is but one part of the whole, with the emotions, senses and spiritual connection playing a strong part.
At some point the painting takes over and becomes more about the colour connections, the materiality of paint and the gesture of the line. I adhere to structural composition at the beginning and slowly break it down so the rhythm of light and dark and colour against colour becomes the dominant language.
I aim to capture the essence of the bush by painting with all my senses including vision - observation of forms, light and colour; touch - the textual quality of leaves and moss, the movement of wind and rain; taste - the taste in my mouth of damp earth; sound- the wind roaring through the trees, the rush of water over rocks; smell - deep mulch, crushed eucalyptus leaves, the smell of smooth bark freshly shed.
To paint like this one must put oneself almost in a meditational state, back at the scene and painting blind through memory of the senses. Painting becomes an active state of immersion into the sensory application of memory and material. Is also means lots of marks that go wrong and lots of paintings that never make it to the gallery walls. It’s a process of experimentation as I am painting what something sounds like or what something feels like not necessarily what it looks like.
To paint the essence is to paint my deep connection with nature knowing we are symbiotic with nature and will perish without understanding and nurturing that relationship. It is an essence we are all connected to whether we acknowledge it or not.
I could only hope that people who view my paintings can also engage with them on a level that is not just visual but also sensory, emotional and spiritual.
“What is the best time to plant a tree? Twenty years ago. What is the next best time? Now.” - Old Chinese saying from the Overstory by Richard Powers.
Climate change is effecting all our lives in more ways than one and as an artist who has spent all my life exploring natural wilderness areas as inspiration it has directly effected my ability to get out bush. The floods and fires of the last 4 years have meant roads blocked, campgrounds closed and walking tracks destroyed. My inspiration has come closer to home, any wild place I can get to where its open and the weather is good. It has also meant more reliance on an internal memory of place.
This body of work comes from many trips into the bush around NSW National Parks and private reserves, hiking and drawing from nature and experiencing the wonder of our natural environment. The absolute beauty of our flowering gums and gnarly trunks, waterholes, rivers and escarpments never cease to capture my imagination. The feeling the wild natural environment engenders in me is both absolute joy, wonder and sometimes incredible sadness that these places still need to be protected from corporate greed, a lack of connection to nature and climate change.
Partly because I must now rely more on memory and partly from a desire to push further into the realm of non-literal interpretation, this body of work explores abstraction from both an expressionist and observed point of view. The observed subject is but one part of the whole, with the emotions, senses and spiritual connection playing a strong part.
At some point the painting takes over and becomes more about the colour connections, the materiality of paint and the gesture of the line. I adhere to structural composition at the beginning and slowly break it down so the rhythm of light and dark and colour against colour becomes the dominant language.
I aim to capture the essence of the bush by painting with all my senses including vision - observation of forms, light and colour; touch - the textual quality of leaves and moss, the movement of wind and rain; taste - the taste in my mouth of damp earth; sound- the wind roaring through the trees, the rush of water over rocks; smell - deep mulch, crushed eucalyptus leaves, the smell of smooth bark freshly shed.
To paint like this one must put oneself almost in a meditational state, back at the scene and painting blind through memory of the senses. Painting becomes an active state of immersion into the sensory application of memory and material. Is also means lots of marks that go wrong and lots of paintings that never make it to the gallery walls. It’s a process of experimentation as I am painting what something sounds like or what something feels like not necessarily what it looks like.
To paint the essence is to paint my deep connection with nature knowing we are symbiotic with nature and will perish without understanding and nurturing that relationship. It is an essence we are all connected to whether we acknowledge it or not.
I could only hope that people who view my paintings can also engage with them on a level that is not just visual but also sensory, emotional and spiritual.
