Canola and wind Farm, 61cm x 122cm, acrylic on canvas- framed, 2024 (sold)
This painting had its own ideas about how it should end up. It kept suggesting changes to me and it became an arm wrestle between painter and painting. Artists will understand that what you envision for a work, and what it becomes can sometimes be two very different things. I’m happy that I was able to be persuaded.
It depicts the Canola crops, hills, and a wind farm in central western NSW, as a storm front approaches.
Rolling Canola, 61cm x122cm, acrylic on canvas (framed), 2024
I’ve been finding subject matter that suits my interest in colour and composition in the beautiful rolling hills and Canola fields around Cowra in NSW.
Watching Sentinels, 61cm x 122cm, acrylic on canvas, 2024
As seen from the Gordon River Road on a misty day. We were watching the Sentinels, and they were watching us.
Canola, and distant Hills, 61cm x 122cm, acrylic on canvas, 2023– sold
I was driving on the Mid Western Highway, on my way to Cowra and I had to stop and take photographs of the spectacular display of vivid yellow from a Canola crop near Woodstock, NSW- sold
I was exploring the country beyond the Blue Mountains and I drove past this scene. It reminded me of the British countryside I explored as a young artist when I lived there for 6 months in the Eighties. It also looked a bit like a train set to me. I set my gear and started painting.
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.
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.
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.
Rhett Brewer - Artist 