Art After Fire

BEELZEBUB
2021
90 x 60 x 1.5cm
acrylic on stretched linen

PORTAL #4
2021
90 x 60 x 1.5cm
acrylic on stretched linen

On February 1st 2020, three large uncontrollable fires converged in the Towamba Valley and tore through our land in a pyro-cumulus event. The forest was engulfed in hot flame and either torched or reduced to ash.

After the fire, what I saw was an open, revealed landscape; the skeleton which lay beneath the flesh of vegetation. Every curve, dip, gully, slope and rise was bared and what trees stood blackened in that smoke-wreathed swathe of white ash spoke to me of a mystical alchemy and transformation.

What had once been a diverse, dappled, mysterious forest with a pristine waterway running like an artery through vegetal flesh was now a vast white ashscape radiating a hushed and potent sense of epic majesty and stoicism.

The standing trees are speaking to me of the cycle of life, growth, death and rebirth through dynamic, vital elements intrinsic to all of us who live on the skin of Planet Earth. New life is surging at Rocky Hall but the old trees are dead and dying, bearing wordless witness to their experience of sudden, explosive transformation.

This painting is a devotional act of translation conveying my own journey through shock, disbelief, grief, awe, wonder and hope. It's a journey many of us may be making as climate change transforms the natural world.

Each stage of creating these works has evolved in a process through the filters of my eyes, feelings, tools and imagination to convey the beauty and grandeur of a loved landscape undergoing an ultimately life-affirming metamorphosis. There is beauty even in death.