To respond intimately to a landscape is to engage in a process of sustained observation and translation. I was the River Gum and the Pond Lily brings together paintings inspired by two geographically disparate places –works made at a residency at Fowlers Gap, in the far North West of NSW, and works inspired by the temperate coastal woodland surrounding my studio in Maine.
Landscape painting can often be a way of documenting a place, however for me it has become not just a way of honoring the natural world but a departure-point for formulating a singular visual language.
In 2025 I visited Fowlers gap and spent time making studies of the river gums along the temporal waterways and billabongs, much like many Australian painters before. It is sacred country to the Wiljali people and redolent with the spirit of their communion with their ancestors, totem animals, flora and fauna, and their dreaming stories. It has also become a place where artists return to again and again, to watch, listen and learn.
Similarly, I have been responding deeply to the lily-dappled marshes and pools surrounding my property at the foothills of Acadia National Park in Maine, the meeting place of the Wabanaki peoples, where water is abundant, offering up ambient reflections, web like tangles of birches and a rich contrasting palette. Here I tend to make en plein air watercolor notations and monoprints in order to describe the dappled rhythms and complex patterning.
Back in the studio, with physical distance from these places, the studies were used as a prompt towards a conceptual distillation, allowing memory and emotional mark-making to take precedence over representation. It struck me how a common thread began to weave its way through the works – a conversation of sorts. Perception or a way of seeing is particular and personal. I have come to believe this is the key to originality, beginning with the eye, through the heart, towards the hand and on.
As Picasso noted “It’s not what, it’s how”. These paintings are not depicting the place itself, but rather an act of translation – the cognitive bridge built between two distant places. I was the River Gum and the Pond Lily is ultimately an interrogation around perception, an assertion that the artists hand and sensibility can synthesize disparate worlds into a unified visual language – transforming reverence for the natural world into a formal celebration of paint.
LIFE STORY
by Mary Oliver
When I lived under the black oaks
I felt I was made of leaves.
When I lived by Little Sister Pond,
I dreamed I was the feather of the blue heron
left on the shore.
I was the pond lily, my root delicate as an artery,
my face like a star,
my happiness brimming.
Later I was the footsteps that follow the sea.
I knew the tides, I knew the ingredients of the wrack.
I knew the eider, the red-throated loon
with his uplifted beak and his smart eye.
I felt I was the tip of the wave,
the pearl of water on the eider's glossy back.
No, there's no escaping, nor would I want to escape
this outgo, this foot-loosening, this solution
to gravity and a single shape.
Now I am here, later I will be there.
I will be that small cloud, staring down at the water,
the one that stalls, that lifts its white legs, that
looks like a lamb.
