Numinbah Valley

This painting draws on my experiences walking through the Border Ranges and Lamington National Park, where the drama of the terrain and the memory of place converge. The work reflects my ongoing interest in how landscape shapes identity, history, and cultural memory. Classical glazing, scumbling, and controlled impasto create luminous depth, while impressionistic strokes capture shifting light and mood. The scene balances pastoral calm with rugged geological presence, echoing the tension between wilderness and human activity. Part of my Romancing the Landscape series, the painting blends observation with sentiment, exploring how stories, ancestry, and lived experience become embedded in the land. Through this interplay of technique and narrative, the work meditates on resilience, time, and the enduring dialogue between nature and those who inhabit it.

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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 sustained engagement with painting. Following formative experiences in Paris in 1984 through the Cité Internationale des Arts, supported by an AGNSW Moya Dyring Studio residency and an Australia Council travel grant, he returned to Australia and gradually shifted his focus toward painting, later completing a Master of Arts at the University of Western Sydney.

Over four decades, Cliffe's practice has explored the relationship between memory, identity, and place. Early investigations of individual experience expanded into examinations of collective behaviour and social systems, culminating in projects such as Fragmented Values: Compulsive Lives and Groupthink. These works considered how shared beliefs, cultural values, and social narratives shape human experience.

In recent years, his work has evolved toward landscape as a repository of cultural memory, environmental change, and lived experience. Working primarily in oil on linen, Cliffe investigates the intersections of landscape, history, and memory, considering place as a palimpsest shaped by successive generations. Through atmospheric and layered imagery informed by Baroque, Romantic, and Pre-Raphaelite traditions, his paintings explore the traces, narratives, and human presence embedded within the land, revealing landscape as both a physical environment and a psychological terrain.