As evidenced by this painting, there isn’t an awful lot near Smeaton, a small town north of Ballarat. I make a lot of “busy” paintings, probably because visually there’s a lot going on in the forest. It’s complicated and messy. Trees stick out at odd angles. Stuff falls over. The whole place looks like an Yvonne Audette painting. But that’s only one aspect of Victoria’s landscape. Perhaps a more widespread and enduring image of Victoria is that of enormous flat paddocks and vast horizon punctuated by volcanic stumps. I wanted to capture some of this, in particular the idea that all the visual interest is held in that tiny slice on the horizon always at the furthest distance from where you are.
This might well be the beginning of a new sequence of paintings of this region.
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