As part of my studio clearance for 2025, I'm releasing this beautiful work. Set in a forest with tall silver barked trees, there's a sunny patch that where the warm afternoon light has filtered through the canopy, and is hitting the forest floor, lighting up the leaves and vines.
There are a couple of inspirations in this work - it has fragmented colour, like the impressionists did, where colour just gets put on the canvas in tiny pieces, and not blended. It has a bit of a Henri Rousseau feel to it - in that his jungle paintings were often very dark in the background, allowing for bright pops of colour and form to emerge from that background. Whereas his works might have been saying something about white colonial understandings of 'savagery' and wildness, the darks in my paintings are invitations to walk through a forest in search of more patchwork brilliance.
My original reference for this painting was a deep stand of gum trees near a carpark on campus in my local town. Which just goes to show that if you squint, you might see a bit of magic anywhere.