I Like To Paint!

I like to paint. What I like to paint best of all is the landscape around me. It's become a necessary thing; something essential; a spiritual exhalation. It takes time to work into landscape, its ambitious. You need to know who you are going into it, what you're seeing, and what you want to say. You've got to have a palette that fits you.

And then you put that on a page.

Easy right?

Nay nay.

Not a bit.

I live and work in the Snowy Monaro region of NSW. I work in a painterly style and am drawn to loose and evocative landscape. I enjoy raw colours and the contrast between light washes and thick impasto. Its gritty, it gives you something to hang onto. The landscape pieces showcase the richness and depth of colour that can be achieved with watercolour. They explore the relationship between the land and sky, many of them drawing out the indigo, raw sienna and oxides that create a flow between the sky above and the land below.

You'll notice a looseness in some work, an abstraction or sparsity of line in others – for me this is necessary when working with landscape. The land can be rich, or it can be bleak; it can be lush or harsh, but you can never quite see to the edges and its always in a state of movement. Every second of every day there are natural forces at work, and by way of retort - a myriad responses, adjustments and settlings.

To have any chance of grasping it meaningfully my experience is that you have to shoot for the essence of it, being generous with your interpretation. Sometimes starting out more boldly than is comfortable, other times excising restraint. The trick is always in bringing it home; in making the careful choice about when to down tools.

I hope you enjoy my work. I hope there are pieces that resonate with you and that as a body of work it does its job in sharing my perspective on landscape.

An acknowledgement of country

My Landscape shows are drawn on the open spaces and big skies of the Snowy Monaro – the lands of the Ngarigo and the Ngunnawal. I pay my respects to the elders of the Ngarigo and the Ngunnawal, past and present, and acknowledge their continuing to connection to the lands and waters of this county.

A note on the Snowy-Monaro

As landscapes go the Snowy Monday is a large, rough, cracked and old place. It's hot and its cold; it can be wet, but mostly its dry, and the wind can howl like a wild thing.

If you've been down here or read the work of Paterson, you'll know it can be productive country, but there is a rawness to it that you don't find in the north. The rocks have worn through their coverings of soil and the trees are tough, they hang on.

I feel a connection to this place, it's made a mark. I hope in bringing these pieces here, a little further north, I can share that in some measure.