How important are the sketchbooks!! Take a peek at three different ones from the studio…yes trees but also my sketches and workings that lead to my geometric landscape paintings. I will have these for visitors to browse through at my upcoming show, Resonance: The Shape of Seeing and I will be in the gallery every day to chat and talk you through my approach to both themes of work.
I hope to see you there.
Resonance: The Shape of Seeing Working Dog Gallery 89 Chandos Street St Leonards
Still a long way to go but I love this stage of a painting, when the layers are starting to reveal the atmosphere of a time and a place. It is when I realise just how important those pleinair sketches and quick tonal references are.
This is the Pieman River, deep in the heart of Tasmania’s Tarkine wilderness, light filtering through trees, shifting across branches and foliage in fleeting moments. I want you to feel that immersive experience and to see how light transforms space, depth and emotion.
My new solo show, Resonance: The Shape of Seeing opens in a couple of weeks @workingdog.gallery and I will present an idea I have been working on for the past eighteen months.
This exhibition brings together two distinct bodies of work that, at first glance, appear to speak very different visual languages - Light filtering through trees and the terrain reduced to its essential geometry.
The common thread isn’t the subject matter but the act of seeing itself. One begins with observation and sensation; the other with distillation and structure. Both are asking how perception becomes form.
I am super excited and will be sharing a lot more on this subject over the next week or so but for now, here’s a sneak peek of the studio, the work fresh from the framers.
The online catalogue will be available soon and I will be posting dates and opening times.
If you haven’t done so already, why not sign up for my newsletter via my website, link in bio.
I like to bring the landscape back to shape, colour and rhythm, finding the relationships between horizontal, vertical and diagonal forms. As I move through a place, shifting viewpoints and changing perspectives become part of the painting, creating a sense of movement rather than a single fixed view.
I’m interested in moving away from traditional one-point perspective and leaving space for the viewer to find their own way through the work. I want the shapes to suggest something familiar without explaining everything.
Colour plays a central role in that conversation. I’m interested in how each colour holds its own weight and how its size, balance and relationship to the colours around it can change the feeling of the whole painting.
Drawing is where I begin to understand what I’m looking at, but painting gives me the freedom to reshape that experience. It’s a way of simplifying, rearranging and distilling what I’ve seen into something that feels true to the experience rather than to the view itself.
Where I Belong Acrylic on canvas 123 x 125cms
From my upcoming show: Resonance: The Shape of Seeing Opening 18 - 30 August
Based on sketches from north west Tasmania, this painting grew from the memory of freshly ploughed fields, rich black earth (previously filled with a healthy onion crop) waiting for a new season.
I’m fascinated by the point where landscape becomes abstraction. Reducing the complexity of a place into shape, colour and rhythm feels like a way of getting closer to the experience rather than further away. Horizontals, verticals and diagonals push against one another, while shifting planes and perspective create their own quiet rhythm.
Not a record of a view, but a memory of moving through it.
When you can see traces of the earlier arrangements in the patterns of fields and terrain. The light shifts the configuration in and out of prominence and decades of consistent non-reversible ploughing creates highly distinctive, undulating geometric patterns in the land.
Towards The Far Horizon invites the viewer to encounter the landscape in a new light. Rather than depicting place as fixed, I want the painting to reveal it as a living palimpsest, layered with memory, history and continual transformation. Through a dynamic geometry akin to musical movement, colour and form unfold in rhythm, drawing the eye towards the horizon while evoking the unseen structures and enduring traces that lie beneath the surface of the land.
Towards The Far Horizon Acrylic on canvas 140 x 123cms
To feature in my upcoming show, Resonance: The Shape Of Seeing. Details coming soon.
This is a landscape I have carried with me for years. Cornwall reveals itself in planes of light, sharp horizons and the quiet architecture of tracks, walls and gateposts. Gorse covered hills glow beneath vast skies where clouds build slowly before breaking across the land. Memory softens detail but strengthens feeling, and this painting grows from that remembered landscape; its colours, its rhythms and its enduring presence.
End of the week and a peek at how the studio is looking as preparations for my August show come to fruition! I love a busy studio with works at various stages of completion, some at the framers, others languishing in the corner and some still requiring finishing touches! Organised chaos? Definitely not, everything is running to plan. Can’t wait to show the full exhibition and hope that some of you can make it along to the gallery. All the details will be posted soon and I look forward to seeing you. Have a great weekend!
How do you ever depict an ever-changing landscape, when light and space are constantly shifting. Today, as I was reviewing work for my solo show in August, I found myself returning to this painting, inspired by my time in the Monaro Plains.
The flooded tracks became an essential part of the composition. Their irregular, organic shapes push against the strong diagonals of the tracks, a quiet conversation between human intervention and nature’s own rhythms. Big skies that seem to threaten and impress in equal measure.
Rather than being slavish to literalism, I wanted to strengthen what first drew me to this location and to enhance the essence of the subject rather than simply describe it. The revisions are subtle, but they feel more truthful to my experience.
Do you ever revisit older work and reconsider the marks you made, or should things be left in time?
A tree can appear still and self-contained, then suddenly shift as the light changes. Foliage can rest quietly against the horizon or rise like flames in the last light of the day.
Studies made following my visit to the Pacific Rim last year.
I have a series of news works coming to fruition whereby the landscape is distilled into shifting geometries of colour and form, where fields, waterways and horizons dissolve into layered fragments. Each plane carries the imprint of weather, cultivation and time, suggesting a landscape written and rewritten, a palimpsest in which memory, geology and human presence coexist.
I will be showing them at my solo show in August, the details of which will be coming soon. Why not sign up for my newsletter, via my website. See the link in my bio.
The interest of this subject, the street in Crows Nest, Sydney, where I live, lay in the combination of entities, each in itself having pictorial value: the foliage, rich in late autumn attire, the colours turning by the day, the low early sun, animating shadows across the pavement and fences, and the actors, or trees, forcing a strong sense of perspective.
These entities, contribute to the complete picture yet in a sense all make their rival claims to the viewer.
Where The Shadows Play Acrylic on board 43 x 43cms
After 12 weeks away, it feels deeply satisfying to be back in the studio, surrounded by paint, ideas, and works slowly finding their way into the world.
I’m currently preparing for an exhibition in mid-August that will bring together two distinct bodies of work. One centres on trees and the endlessly captivating relationship they have with light. It is this shifting space between what we see and what we feel that I have been exploring.
This work in progress is inspired by the Pieman River in Tasmania’s Tarkine Forest, which I visited earlier this year. It is a landscape of remarkable beauty and quiet power. I’ve included a few of those sketches alongside details from the painting, offering a glimpse into the journey from observation to finished work.
The final three images are paintings from my time @ngcreativeartresidency in Provence.
As the exhibition draws closer, it’s exciting to see these different threads coming together. I’m very much looking forward to the opening and hope that, if you’re in Sydney, you’ll be able to join me.
If you haven’t already subscribed to my newsletter, I’d love for you to sign up. I’ll be sharing exhibition updates, behind the scenes insights into the work, and early information about workshops that my partner, @debbiemackinnon and I will be presenting in 2027. Simply head to my website (link in bio) and wait for the box to pop up asking for details.
Thank you, as always, for following along and supporting my practice. After time away, it feels especially good to be back in Sydney, back in the studio, and back making work....
MOROCCO I’m back from 11 weeks travel- so many sketchbooks, so many fabulous memories. Morocco was such a highlight! Many thanks to Rita at @amazigh_art_tours and our wonderful group of artists. I won’t forget this amazing experience and the warmth of the people we encountered. Keep watching for a few highlights…
A4 sketchbook opens to A3, watercolour paper 300 GSM from @winsorandnewtonau All painted in gouache also from Winsor and Newton
No matter how fast my scribbles might be, each page in this book contains so many memories. Keep watching for a glimpse of some of my days out drawing in Italy and France. Heading home later today with a case full of marks on paper and a head full of new ideas.
They say a farmers market is nature’s way of showing off! All I can say is the market mood here in Place Monge was ripe and thriving!!
The only thing that made me want to paint this busy market in Place Monge was the sharp morning light spilling through the canvas awnings! The stripes immediately caught my eye, a fabulous backdrop to the vendors busy service!
And on to dinner at Place de la Contrescarpe just two minutes walk from our apartment. You may have heard that temperatures across Europe are high and Paris is no exception!
This last light of the sun clinging to the side of the buildings opposite like it wasn’t ready to leave and the mercury still at 30c. Australia is going to feel pretty cold by the time we get home.
Both works in gouache. And lastly a sketch of the same location in the last pages of my scribble pad.
Lunch in the shade in a quiet square of the Marais. The light and shadows played across cafes and restaurants and a cool beer slipped down easily as I sketched away, hardly taking the pen off the paper. I like the detail pics, which completely abstract the subject yet still allow recognition. Drawn with @staedtlerau pigment pen and shaded with @tombowau wash pens.
And talking of abstraction, what a fantastic morning @museepicassoparis So many exciting works, the last piece, a sculpture entitled Guitar, being my favorite!
I like the way rivers move with a kind of sleepy stillness.
Paris in summer at 31c is never truly silent, but beside the Seine there are moments when colour and light seem to slow time itself.
Taking time out in the shade of trees, this quick gouache sketch catches that fleeting calm, the shimmer of reflected light, the coolness beneath the bridge arches, and the quiet hush that settles over the water when the heat begins to ease.
Pont d’Austerlitz near Ile Saint Louis.
Swipe to see a second piece looking directly across the water of Quai Henri IV.
A selection of the incredible work from the artists at our @uptrekcom workshop. They have taken on the challenges of new and diverse landscapes and still life, broken old habits and developed new approaches to creating vibrant and very personal sense of painting in sketchbooks.
Big ups to them all and huge thanks to our hosts here at la_palanque here in the now hot and sunny Dordoigne.
