Border Track Lamington

This oil painting, executed on meticulously prepared stretched linen, showcases masterful layering and glazing techniques reminiscent of Flemish and Baroque masters. The composition is carefully constructed, guiding the viewer’s eye through a dynamic interplay of light and shadow (chiaroscuro), lending an almost theatrical intensity to the scene. Strategic contrasts between illuminated areas and deep shadows heighten the depth and realism, pulling elements forward with stunning clarity while allowing others to recede into atmospheric mystery.
The use of scumbling softens transitions between layers, creating an ethereal glow and subtle shifts in tone. Cooler hues delicately retreat into shadowed passages, while warmer tones advance, ensuring the forms emerge with richness and dimension. The glazing technique enhances luminosity, with earlier layers kept thin and transparent, allowing later, thicker applications of paint to bring highlights into striking relief.
Texturally, controlled impasto in focal areas plays against smoother, softly blended passages, reinforcing the sense of depth. The dramatic yet harmonious composition, paired with rich tonal shifts, evokes a classical grandeur, immersing the viewer in the emotional weight and depth characteristic of the Baroque tradition.

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Gregory Cliffe is an Australian artist whose practice has evolved from early explorations in Abstract Expressionism, sculptural formalism, and performance installation art into a mature, conceptually grounded engagement with painting. His formal training began at TAFE and the Colleges of Advanced Education in Sydney, followed by early recognition through performances at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris in 1984, supported by an AGNSW Moya Dyring Studio residency and an Australia Council travel grant.
By the 1990s, Cliffe shifted his focus toward painting, completing a Master of Arts at the University of Western Sydney (1999–2001). This research culminated in Fragmented Values: Compulsive Lives at The Tin Sheds Gallery, where he examined how cohesive in groups operate — how the desire for security and unanimity can override critical thought. These ideas continued into his 2016 exhibition Groupthink at Lost Bear Gallery, where everyday sporting, business, and leisure scenes became subtle studies of shifting cultural values and interpersonal dynamics.
For more than two decades, Cliffe’s studio research has centred on the stratification of memory, the idea of “totalized time,” and the ways social values are transmitted through stories, fables, and family narratives. Influenced by Proust, he explores how memory shapes identity across generations. His interest in yarn spinning, humour, and anecdote — inherited from his father — informs fictional characters and scenarios that invite viewers to interpret motives, behaviours, and relationships without needing specialist art knowledge.
In recent years, Cliffe’s practice has turned toward landscape, family history, and social heritage. Working primarily in oil on linen, he employs glazing, scumbling, and controlled impasto inspired by Baroque, Romantic, and Pre Raphaelite traditions. His Romancing the Landscape series investigates European and Australian environments as places where geology, history, and lived experience converge. These works blend atmospheric depth with a contemporary sensitivity to ecological tension, cultural identity, and the quiet narratives embedded in place.