Beyond the Pulpit, 61cm x 122cm, acrylic on linen, 2024

Most of the lookouts and landmarks in the Blue Mountains were named by British Explorers in the Nineteenth Century who were unaware or simply not very interested in the place names given by the predominantly Darug and Gundungurra people, indigenous to the area. Many of these explorers and pioneers were religious and church attendance was still high. Hence, we get names like Pulpit Rock. They liked that name so much that they used it again for another rock form near Mount Victoria a few kilometers along the western track to the potential farmland below the Western escarpment. The Nineteenth Century was ironically the same time that Romanticism, with its reverence for the natural world with its sublime beauty, and awe inspiring power to create and destroy, was the dominant force in European art. Many people were starting to take a renewed interest in the beauty of nature that had more to do with their distant ancestors’ Pantheistic beliefs, and less to do with the centuries of Christian doctrine they had brought with them from Europe. My title for this painting hints at the changes in thinking that were happening during the first half of the Nineteenth Century and our inherited love, and sometimes fear, of a more natural and challenging landscape.