Mel Doohan grew up on the red dirt in far western NSW, way past Wanaaring (have a look at a map!) and then in her teenage years, on the banks of the Darling River near Louth, NSW. This experience and her subsequent busy city life created a deep nostalgia and yearning to revisit the outback for which oil painting has been the perfect panacea.
In her paintings Mel aims to express the connection she feels to her subject and her emotional reaction to it, rather than to reproduce an exact likeness. For example she aims to draw the viewer’s focus to a particular aspect of a landscape that she finds most compelling. This may be the characteristic deep red dirt of far western NSW contrasted against the stunning blue of a cloudless inland sky or she may choose to use a more muted softer palette to express the soothing sense of calm that a return to the outback can bring for her.
Mel is a keen observer of changing seasons, the transformations brought to the land by droughts and rain, by changes in river flow, and by patterns of usage. Mel says that the resilience and restorative capacity of both the land and of remote communities underpin her love for the outback.
Mel describes her painting style as “modern classical”. She uses classical techniques to achieve particular effects in her work, such as to emphasise the sense of distance, however she often plays around with modern techniques in the same piece, for example, by leaving the foreground out of focus, or limited in detail, and she is enamoured by using vertical brushstrokes created with a flat brush. In general Mel describes her use of colour as more modern than classical, because, ultimately, she is aiming to produce something she enjoys to paint and loves to look at. She sees no reason not to use her artistic licence to achieve this.