Passage: Source

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A$4,000

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Artwork Details

Medium Oil, Canvas, Ready to hang
Dimensions 100cm (W) x 127cm (H) x 4cm (D)
Review Stars 21,257 Customer Reviews
Original Artwork
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Artwork Description

Passage is an ongoing series in which landscape becomes a site of interior travel. Rather than depicting a specific place, each work maps the shifting topographies of memory, emotion, and lived experience. These paintings are not destinations; they are thresholds—moments of transition where the visible world meets the unseen movements of the mind.

My process begins with materials that hold their own histories: pigment, clay, marble dust, and oil. Mixed together, they form a surface that is both fragile and resistant, echoing the layered nature of consciousness. I work with the physical weight of these materials, allowing gravity, erosion, and sedimentation to take part in the composition. The result is a tactility that suggests the landscape is forming and dissolving simultaneously, much like memory itself.

In this painting, the waterfall becomes a central conduit—a vertical passage through darkness and density, an axis where clarity ruptures through obscurity. The drips, veils, and deposits of paint mimic the way recollection slips, accumulates, or floods unexpectedly. Light is not merely illumination but a force that exposes what lies beneath.

The landscapes in Passage are psychological terrains. They hold remnants of places I have known, but they are altered through the lens of introspection. They speak to the instability of memory, the friction between past and present, and the continual effort of moving through internal thresholds. I am interested in how an external scene can mirror an internal state—how the mind travels through its own weather.

Ultimately, the series explores how we carry the world within us, and how each passage—whether of time, loss, renewal, or recognition—reshapes our inner geography.

Artist Bio

J. E. Thomas is a Sydney-based painter whose work explores the intersection of psychology and imagination. Through a representational style infused with elements of magic realism, Thomas creates visual narratives that invite viewers into worlds where the ordinary meets the surreal.
Each painting reflects a fascination with the subconscious and the symbolic, offering layered meanings that encourage contemplation. Themes of identity, memory, and perception recur throughout Thomas’s practice, expressed with technical precision and a distinctive sense of atmosphere.
Thomas’s contribution to Australian art is recognised in Max Germaine’s Artists & Galleries of Australia, Volume 2, a testament to a career dedicated to thoughtful and evocative image-making.

Commissions

J.E.'s studio is in Sydney