Gundagai to Beechworth

This painting was a finalist in the Muswellbrook Art Prize. It is a visual description of a drive from Gundagai in NSW to Beechworth in Victoria during a dry summer.
The gently winding and lightly trafficked road led me through country which although extremely dry, was profoundly beautiful and beguiling. Three weeks after this journey much of the area was burnt in horrendous fire following heat wave conditions.
I work from photographs, drawings and memory to capture the visual elements and sense of place that have made an impression on me.
The old disused train bridge in Gundagai, the flooded drying lake with dead trees, the ram escaped from its enclosure to nibble sparse grass by the side of the road, the beautifully curving line of the road snaking around the feminine forms of the hills.
These elements, as they are revealed in the painting are not necessarily realistic or in chronological order of the experience, which suggests a surreal quality, the objects chosen are the essential forms which have stayed in my memory from that journey.

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Since graduating from Sydney College of the Arts in 1979, my art practice has developed through a variety of mediums; jewellery and object design, sculpture, installation art and drawing, however now I am mostly working with painting. I relocated from Sydney to the Blue Mountains over twenty years ago and have been absorbed by my natural surroundings ever since.
My painting practice has as its subjects mainly landscape, but also interiors. In both areas I work to capture the emotion that the subject creates in me, and to that end I am not so interested in capturing the accuracy of the subject matter. There is in my work, an incongruity between trying to achieve an emotive looseness, and a focus on the minutia of the bush, or the details of the interior, those small things that hold me momentarily as all else stands still. This preoccupation with detail is a remnant from past training in jewellery and object design which is a part of me I don’t wish to lose, and yet I struggle toward a desire for abstraction.