Gillian Pope: Another Look at Landscape

I have been drawing, making prints and painting landscapes in many media for years, but this work is a move away from these, another way of looking at landscape.

I have increasingly lost interest in realistic representation of landscape and have tried to concentrate on the colours and shapes without totally losing the subject or becoming fully abstract.

This is a collection of acrylic paintings that I have been working on from sketches I have made around the region. I love colour and it is usually the colours and shapes of a landscape that excite me. Often a green paddock, a clay bank or the shape of a patch of bush on a hillside will make me stop and pause to make a drawing. I have divided the landscape up vertically. Sometimes the lines continue right through other times I prefer to let the colour shape continue uninterrupted.

The picture only comes to life when I add the dark outlines. Until I have reached this point, I am not sure of the outcome and experiment with changes of colour until I am satisfied. I like to read the picture in several different ways. The strips may be read from top to bottom as well as part of the whole. It is important to me that the vertical strips work as a vertical picture as well as part of the whole.