Melissa Boughey

Beginning with the artist’s immersion within the landscape - jotting notes; scribbling responses; creating a shorthand code for the natural environment - experimentation and play are paramount to the intuitive process of her paintings. Through mark-making, colour play, and a sense of integrity toward materials and surfaces, her visceral works in oil and hand-made beeswax mediums are allowed to develop of their own accord until a final, resolved memory of a landscape emerges.

In his essay Cross-Pollination (2023), Andrew Stephens highlights Melissa Boughey’s distinctive, sensory approach to painting, describing her as an artist who works in a state of “reverie”, a meditative flow where perception, memory, and emotion intertwine. Boughey’s practice combines plein air experimentation with studio refinement, as she immerses herself in the physical and emotional atmosphere of each place. She often paints on dampened paper, dipped into natural waters, responding intuitively to texture, light, and movement. This process allows different landscapes from “the gorges of Tjoritja to the misty highlands of Tasmania” to merge and cross-pollinate on the page. Boughey herself reflects, “I am more interested in creating a feeling of place,” and her richly layered works invite viewers not to look at the landscape but to feel within it, capturing the quiet pulse of being present in nature.

The artist’s translations of her surroundings, her sense of perception, thought and emotional responses, all coalesce in her large, fluid images; first sketched in shorthand on paper and then built up into larger impasto canvases. Loose gestural explosions of colour and line tell us abstractly of the environment that surrounds her. Great daubs of purple brown speak of undulating earth; pools of orange indicate the rising up of a hill or valley; rapid gestures capture the quality of scrubby bush and vertical repetitions suggest an outcrop of trees. Within these expressive images the physical process of observation, appreciation and individual interpretation coalesce in a newly reflected world where mind and matter are fused into one.
Excerpt from catalogue essay by Phe Luxford 2021