The paintings in this exhibition were made during the last year in a studio I built on an island of the coast of Maine in America. The paintings are a direct response to the landscape on the Atlantic coast, particularly Acadia National Park, marked by woodland, marshes, rocky beaches, ponds, lakes and glacier-scoured granite peaks.
Making these paintings away from the Australian bush, a landscape that remains with me as a strong visceral memory, proved challenging. It required acute observation and intense drawing, and a study of the painters that have captured the essence of this landscape previously, namely Marsden Hartley, Alex Katz, Fairfield Porter and John Walker. Through this intense observation, a new palette, solidity of shapes, and a painterly textural complexity emerged in the work. Heading out into this unexplored terrain not only encouraged a different visual language, but anchored me in a new world, and curiously led me towards a more universal approach to landscape painting.
