'Infinite Never-Never' - the Grawin Experience

The Grawin experience began as a fascination to seek elegance and beauty in harsh and desolate landscape.

Grawin‘s terrain and history speaks directly to its dry, prickly and unforgiving nature. With nothing gentle or soft in this landscape, you develop a thick skin, quickly, much like the locals!

Sitting amongst the flies, heat, and cacti, I found it a challenging environment to work as a painter. This landscape encouraged sketches and oil studies to be created quickly and feverishly due to the oppressive summer conditions. I didn’t have time to ruminate on precise colours and compositions due to the heat. Intuitive use of colour ensued.

In the midday sun I reflected on the landscape’s overwhelming presence and contemplated about the colonial folk who had been here years before me. The chimeras of heat on the horizon played tricks on my eyes. Yet it was during this time of reflection, I noticed a brown bottle with the engraving ‘Tintara Hardy’s and Sons’. The bottle was indeed old due to the coloured glass and imprinted type. Full of red soil, it encouraged my imagination, and I began to think about the people who built the fence lines and came to this area in search of opals.

After exploring the opal fields with paint and camera in hand, we had lunch at the Pub in the Scrub and met locals who reflected the landscape in which they lived - weathered, hard but beautiful. Their skin was baked by the sun, leathered, calloused, and worn. These people were explorers and prospectors, living their lives underground to find the elusive shards of luminous rocks to strike it rich.

My subsequent studio paintings from this experience are full of deliciously thick impasto paint, painted with the direction and confidence of this uniquely unruly landscape. The thick application of paint is juxtaposed by the selection of bright and joyful colours, a technique which aims to create a natural beauty where beauty it is not conventionally found.

Through this body of work, I set out to discover a joyous narrative in an inhospitable landscape. To challenge the viewer to find beauty in places you may not necessarily consider beautiful. To veer off the beaten track to discover the more subtle and unique majesty hidden in pockets across this sun burnt land. The diverse landscapes in Australia can, at times, feel severe and unrelenting, but I still find myself in awe, inspired by the distinctive brilliance and overcome by the presence these landscapes demand.

Yours in art,

Bec xoxo

‘Infinite Never- Never’ Exhibition
Friday 9th Sept - Sunday 18th Sept
Champagne Celebration : Saturday 10th Sept
Colin Lawson, Director
Art Systems Wickham
40 Annie Street, Wickham
m: 0431 853 600 / asw.artspace@hotmail.com/ www.art-systems-wickham.com

Photo credit: Ryan Jenkins Photography