My Journey Through the Landscape and into Abstraction
'Do the abstract landscape paintings in the Threshold Series depict a particular place?'
This is the question I've been asked most often about these new paintings. It's a good question. Elements of a traditional landscape painting are clearly visible. There are field barns in the composition, banksias, eucalypts or mangroves; the visual descriptions of hills and a horizon, and what can read as sky and land.
But all these elements are abstracted, through colour, pattern and often a graphic simplification of finer details.
This place exists only in my memory and imagination. It's a view that could have been and evokes feelings and sentiments of the Yorkshire Dales landscape but hybridised with what I find in my Australian environment.
The place you can see in the painting isn't really there. It isn't an actual view. But to me it feels like a real place, because of my personal perspective.
So, I thought I'd share with you how I make the visual journey from one landscape to the other and into the final painting. These abstracted landscapes didn't start with a 'vision' in mind, they began with the small details, mostly in the form of shapes and details that speak to me more than any big, beautiful, singular view.
| It Begins With 'Noticing' in the Landscape
Before I paint anything, I spend a long time looking. Under the scribbly gums outside the studio, along the edge of Lake Weyba where the mangroves stand in the shallows, at the beach where there are always interesting finds and or along the pathways that cross the dunes and wind through the bush.
I take in the whole scene through a kind of osmosis as I'm walking.
The sounds I can hear, the smell of the salty air, the scented gums, the petrichor, the light, the breeze and feel of the land underfoot. And all the while, alongside this I'm looking for the details that catch my eye, those little things that often make me wander from the path to take a closer look. Or if I'm at the beach, I spend my walks browsing the shell fragments, seed pods and bits of driftwood that have been gifted by the receding tide.
The pale tracks left by the moths beneath the scribbly gum bark; the way a banksia seed cone becomes a sculptural object after the flowers have gone. I gather these either as memories or field sketches and often I distil them into pure shapes, thus creating a visual vocabulary of collected elements before I begin work in the studio.
| Reimagining Each Landscape Element on its Own
Then each element goes on its own journey of exploration for a while. In my sketchbooks and on loose sheets of paper, I work through separate studies, reimagining one detail at a time through sketch, print, collage and/or paint.
A leaf might begin as a quick pen or pencil drawing, become a gelli print, then a torn paper shape, then a few strokes of acrylic.
Every creative process and choice of material or medium changes it in some way:
drawing with chunky oil pastels reduces detail and makes me focus on shape;
lino printing flattens and simplifies and adds a graphic perspective to shape;
gel printing offers unexpected textures and possibilities for repeated patterns;
collaging creates opportunities for the edges and the scale of shapes to be explored;
paint softens it again and introduces layers and surface history.
By the end of these studies, the banksia or the barn or the eucalypt leaf, has stopped being a picture of a 'thing'.
I have investigated and learned so much about these elements and in my mind they have become shapes, marks, colour relationships or patterns that still carry something of where they came from.
I have found the energetic rhythm within them and this is what carries the motifs forward as symbols of the landscape.
This is where the abstraction really happens, slowly, one element at a time.
| Bringing Landscape Elements Back Together In a Composition
Only then do the paintings begin. I bring these reimagined elements back together in the composition, and on the surface begin layering paper, print, paint and drawing, letting some marks and print pieces remain visible and others become obscured.
The final paintings become the place where everything I noticed and gathered from my walks in the landscape is reassembled in an expressive way. A raindrop might sit beside a barn roof. A banksia might grow out of a stone wall or form the basis of a hillside. And the colour palette carries the abstraction further. This rearranging of elements to make the imagery personal is the part I love most. The images become a composite story that describes the things I have noticed, connected with and taken energy and visual inspiration from.
| Returning to the Landscape in the Paintings
The barns, the hillsides, the eucalypts, mangroves, banksia and the raindrops are all described in the final artworks, but reimagined into compositions that evoke the feeling of being in these remembered places and connect with the energy I once felt there. These are landscapes of the soul.
Every painting begins as a scatter of studies across the studio table. If you’d like to see more of them as they come together, The Studio Edit is my monthly newsletter for collectors, with the stories behind the paintings and a look inside the studio. When you join, I’ll welcome you with 10% off your first print.
