Recent Work

Lagoon Landscapes

Landscape Paintings of Glenbrook Lagoon in the Blue Mountains

Lagoons are mystical places of tranquillity and transition. Shifting sands, soft muddy banks, spiky reeds and fossicking water birds. They are home to an abundance of creatures, often small and inconspicuous, yet essential to the intricate web of life. The sweep of water and sky invite us to drift and float, while the trees ground us, both connecting us to the steady pulse of our own heart and the rhythm of our breath.

As I contemplate the enormous trees on the shoreline of the Glenbrook Lagoon the words of the African American spiritual come to mind, ‘like a tree planted by the rivers, I shall not be moved…’ They stand like guardians of the lagoon, timeless sentinels protecting a precious oasis.

I imagine the lagoon through time: once the domain of the Darug and Gundungarra people for bathing, fishing and drinking, then a staging post for colonialists crossing the Blue Mountains and later a vital water source for cooling the steam trains travelling the Zig Zag Railway.

The lagoon settles my wandering spirit, providing a place of rest and repose. I love to draw here, searching out the forms and textures, allowing my charcoal to explore, meandering freely across the paper.

Whilst each of the works in this body of work appears naturalistic, they nevertheless reflect my fascination with mark-making and the fragile line between abstraction and representation. Passages of each image, if taken from the whole, read as abstract forms and brushstrokes. The marks resonate with the phenomena of nature – the fluidity of water, the scratchiness of bark and the random structure and texture of the foliage.