Pine Lake in Brilliant Yellow, Paynes Grey and Mars Brown, 2021
Pine Lake in brilliant yellow, paynes grey and mars brown.
Oil on Masonite, 60 x 60cm & tondo 30 cm
(part of landscape colour mapping project)
The Tasmanian highlands always demand my silence and respect, conveying time capsules from ancient times, deeply encoded with mysteries. Pine Lake is just such a herald: a small alpine lake in the Central Plateau and testament to some of Tasmania’s rarest trees – the pencil pine.
In this painting I have deliberately limited my palette to three cool pigments, Brilliant Yellow, Paynes Grey and Mars Brown, to viscerally connect the severity with the austere beauty of this unique land. In placing the abstracted colour swatch tondo beside the figurative work I aim to evoke some sort of optical synergy, which sharpens the reading between the individual brush marks and forms in the landscape. This interaction of the swatches and gestural marks reinforces the low-lying cloud dancing between the ancient pencil pines.