Sheltered Side
Cairn off Putty
The title referrers to The Putty Road that links the Richmond area to the Hunter Valley via The Great Dividing Range. The pinnacle of rock reminded me of a cairn.
Shadowland
This painting of the Western Escarpment of The Blue Mountains, looking towards Blackheath gave me plenty of opportunity to work a lot of rhythmic brushstrokes into my interpretation that hopefully complement each other in a polyrhythmic way, just as I believe nature does.
Les Demoiselles d’Echo Point
The Three Sisters at Echo Point in Katoomba NSW is a major tourist attraction and has been since thee mid 19th century. I hesitated to make a painting of this because it has been done so many times by other artists but its a great subject so I found my own way into it. The things that I felt were important were the combination of solidity of the rock formations and also their temporality. They resist and yet they are slowly dissolving before our eyes in a geological timeframe, like sandcastles on a beach. They stand in apparent defiance before the void that will eventually swallow them up. I gave them a chunky, blocklike appearance to empathise the crystalline structure of the quartz that makes up the sandstone that was laid down as the bed of an ancient sea, only to be lifted up, drained and eroded over the millions of years that followed. When I was making this work I became aware that the Sisters resembled Picasso’s women in the painting that gave me an idea for the joke title.
House in the Valley
This little painting is based on a section of the larger work Late Afternoon at Tinkers Hill.
Late Afternoon Tinkers Hill
Soft western light falling over one of the farms on the ridge of Tinkers Hill, Kanimbla, NSW in late Autumn.
Back to the Well
This is a painting of Marsden Rock at Kanimbla, NSW. I’ve made several paintings of it since I first saw it and painted it en plein air from a friends verandah in 2015. Going back and painting it from different places has given me a sense of ownership and familiarity with this rocky outcrop that overlooks the Cox’s River but it’s so striking that I expect many other painters would have made their own views of it too, especially Warwick Fuller who lives right next to it.
Chinese Hills, Megalong
Aerial Perspective is a term known to some painters and photographers as the gradual fading and softening towards blue that we see when looking into the distant parts of a landscape- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_perspective . In traditional Chinese landscapes that often use a monochrome ink they achieve this by watering down the ink and softening the tones as the eye looks into the distance. They also exaggerate the distance, not by western perspective but by working the distant hills higher and higher towards the top of the paper or silk in an exaggerated way, usually not including a horizon at all. My painting uses western perspective, aerial perspective but shows the Kanimbla hills in a way that reminded me of a Chinese landscape.
Towards Shipley
This one is a plein air work of the Shipley Plateau as seen from Kanimbla. It had it’s finishing touches made in my studio after a day onsite as many of my plein air works do. I wanted to bring out the wonderful rhythm of the escarpment and the curves and bumps of the hills that lead the eye up to it.
Point Pilcher Bop
I made this plein air work at Point Pilcher near Medlow Bath in the Blue Mountains. The landscape was so dramatic that for some reason I felt the need to lighten it up and jazz it up with a bit of funky cartoon like brushwork, hence the title Point Pilcher Bop. The clouds are barely exaggerated.
Rhett Brewer - Artist 