Artist’s Statement

 A  literal connection to landscape in my painting is least obvious.

I watch in silence as the western wind lifts the leaves of a great body of eucalypt trees in my back yard. At its most intense the deep olive wall of green vibrates and oscillates defying the laws of gravity with occasional unhinged debris traversing it to the periphery of my vision.

The observed landscape has always been at the core  of my work. and in these new works I have also focused on the forces of weather shaping its geography . On a trip with my family to Phuket 3 years ago we felt the tragedy of the tsunami when,. in a darkened backroom of a local museum in the town we found some old billboards layered with fading black and white photocopies of photos of friends and family members missing after the tsunami had hit. 

I remember the drought two years ago on South Australia’s Murray River when, whilst visiting, the exposed long brown earthen banks made it difficult to get our dingy into the water. The subject of the Charleville floods in Queensland two years ago commenced in previous work ‘Flood series’, and continues in this series. In the studio, the paint’s wetness being of itself and about water,with the Warrego River breaking its boundaries and culminating in destructive torrents .

I apply the material paint in a tidal wave, storm, drought and wild wind; it is the memory of a personal and localised landscape in extremis. On the surface the marks are there in a state of becoming. The delineation between the painter and painted is unclear.  Like music, the act of painting hits me in the chest, I have the sensation of being thrown against the wall and onto a metaphorical hook upon which I hang.

Penny Coss 2009