Tracks paintings

Paintings

Tracks: ..."Australians identify with corridors, with tracks and pathways. It is by means of such tracks that we have discovered the country. ...The track was a natural corridor, bounded by the bush on two sides, sometimes with and sometimes without a canopy of leaves. Tracks were a means of ordering and shaping the bush, of bringing it within the compass of culture. ... Bush tracks happened by chance and their alignment was fortuitous; at once natural and contingent, they anticipate later Australian spatial values, especially linear movement. They were much more responsive to the topography; with our powerful earth moving and shaping equipment, the expressway is able to ignore land forms, it cuts through hills, jumps valleys to follow the quickest route. These tracks in the virgin bush were so unpretentious and impermanent, they were never seriously considered as offering any sort of leitmotif. Yet the red clay road with its dense walls of grey-green foliage crowding in on either side, the softly dappled sunlight breaking through occasionally to warm the face in the fresh morning air, the unpredictable winding twists and turns that lead forward, represent the universal journey of the human soul..."
-Philip Drew, The Coast Dwellers page 6-7, Penguin Australia, 1994

These paintings reflect on the changing nature of tracks across land and how we use tracks to transit as well as to locate ourselves within landscapes.

All works acrylic paint, poker work and scorch marks on plywood
dimensions height X width