Nothing but Blue Skies

**News Update** Jo Davenport is the winner of the 2024 Paddington Prize.

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Jo Davenport’s beautifully gestural paintings speak of an intense relationship with nature and an intimate experience of the artist’s local environment. Her rich, painterly depictions represent the passing of time, the transience of the landscape and the ephemeral nature of memory itself. Coming from a long line of farmers in the Albury region, Davenport is deeply connected to this landscape and the farming community in the area. Although she does not practice farming herself, she is an active member of Earth Canvas, a Regenerative Farmers Program that pairs well-established landscape artists with regenerative farmers situated between the Murray and the Murrumbidgee Rivers in southern NSW. The program has been running for around a decade and has recently established a trust offering artist residencies through the Wagga Wagga Art Gallery as well as funding to cover tuition fees for young people studying regenerative agriculture.

A deep sense of optimism about the local farming community and a reverence for the natural environment is imbued within her vibrant abstract images. Her canvases are full of bold, gestural mark-making. Layered and utterly beautiful, they demonstrate the artist’s innate and keen sense of colour, captivating art collectors and audiences alike with their palettes of golds, pinks, and blues. While connected to the tradition of landscape painting, Davenport’s practice moves beyond the literal or representational, shifting toward an interior, felt response to the sensations of the landscape.

As a subject, nature has always served as inspiration for my paintings. The totality of the painting is a spiritual and material interaction between the felt experience of the landscape and the way I strive to manipulate the materials to conjure up that sensed experience. I am not aiming to paint the image or capture the colours as they appear in nature; instead, I seek form and colour based on emotion. My exhibition, ‘Nothing but Blue Skies’, amplifies the optimism and joy felt when the natural landscape that surrounds me is humming with health and vitality. This felt experience is very real, and it is what I endeavour to capture on canvas.

Artist Statement 2024

Giving Back to the Land Catalogue essay by Dr Peter Hill, 2024

In a feature in Artist Profile magazine in 2020, Jo Davenport said “Now more than ever I want to create a visceral bond, a connection between the viewer and our sublime Australian landscape.” This was the summer that started with bush fires and floods and ended with coronavirus lockdown. Nowhere on this vast continent was guaranteed safe from these apocalyptic events, not even Davenport’s house and studio on a high ridge overlooking the Murray River and wetlands on the New South Wales and Victorian border. She has had many exhibitions since then, and the world has paused on its perilous path. Interviewing the artist four years later about her stunning new body of work for Flinders Lane Gallery, she says “In these paintings I want to show the optimism I feel for the future. I want them to reflect the precious eco-system of the people who love and care for our land: the regeneration farmers, the landscape groups, and especially those with an indigenous knowledge of Country… we all need to give back to the land more than we take.”

Davenport has arrived at this point through being a constant experimenter. There is never a sense of formula or unthinking repetition about either the physicality of the paint she applies, or the ideas and emotions that she digs out of her psyche. She is, quite simply, brilliant at it.

These attributes don’t arrive overnight, like a piece of IKEA furniture. They are hard won after years of hard looking, thinking, and feeling. These works are transformative, first on the artist, and later on we who are invited to share the outcomes of her research. It takes her a full year to complete each exhibition.

On this journey of a lifetime, she has had influential encounters with a range of fellow travellers, past and present. The list begins with Turner, Casper David Friedrich, and Emily Kam Kngwarreye. It goes on, and grows as we speak: Rubens, Cy Twombly, and Sigmar Polke. Some of these artists deal with notions of the sublime, others with the physicality of paint and the roughness of canvas. All tackle the never-ending possibilities of colour. She embraces all of these.

In our conversation we discovered we’d both seen a documentary by David Hockney where he unrolls a long Chinese scroll across an equally long table, and describes the story it tells as if it were a film unspooling. I like to think of each painting in this exhibition as a still from such an unfolding narrative, and of each exhibition, created day by day, and year by year, as similarly part of the same epic tale.

For her MFA thesis at The Victorian College of the Arts, Davenport wrote eloquently about “The Space Between the Painting and the Viewer.” If you are reading these words while still in the gallery, I encourage you to think about that concept, and to occupy it.

She was also fortunate to have the great artist, writer, and academic Barbara Bolt teaching her. “She could convey a huge amount of information very concisely and in an almost Zen-like way,” Davenport tells me. “I’ll never forget she once came into my studio and declared “Too much treble and not enough bass! And then she disappeared to the next student.”

Barb would be proud of the way her advice has led to these pitch- perfect paintings. This anecdote prompted my final question about whether, as she painted, she listened to music? “Birdsong is all the music I need. From my bush studio I can hear it at all times of the day. Outside, the birds and the insects are carrying pollen… if you sit quietly enough and listen there is a hum, and you can feel in that moment that all is well.”

Dr Peter Hill Artist, Writer, and Independent Curator Enterprise Professor University of Melbourne

ARTIST PROFILE:Jo Davenport completed her Masters degree from the Victorian College of the Arts in 2011 and quickly gained the attention of both curators and collectors alike soon after. In 2013 she was included in Wangaratta Art Gallery’s major painting survey Action/Abstraction, showing alongside artists such as Sally Gabori, Todd Hunter, Ildiko Kovacs, and Aida Tomescu. Davenport undertook a residency at the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery in Hill End in October 2015 and held a major solo exhibition at MAMA Regional Gallery in Albury in 2016. In the same year her work Sunshine and Rain was acquired by Artbank. Most recently she has been an active member of Earth Canvas, a collective of respected artists working with regenerative farmers in NSW.

Davenport won the Paddington Art Prize (2024) and has been a finalist in several prestigious awards including the Paddington Art Prize (2024, 2023, 2017), the Len Fox Award (2024), the King's School Art Prize (2019), the Langridge Painting Award (2011), the Shelmedine Acquisitive Art Award (2010), the Alliance Francaise Award (2010) and the Pigment Gallery Award (2010). She has also been a  finalist in the Chippendale World Art Residency Landscape Prize, Tattersall's Club Prize for Landscape, and the R M McGivern Prize, amongst others.She has staged major public solo exhibitions at MAMA (Murray Art Museum Albury), Bathurst Regional Art Gallery and was curated into a group show at the Wangaratta Regional Gallery. Her work is held in the collections of Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, Leeuwin Estate Art Collection, Artbank, Hong Kong's Norman Foster Club House Tai Po, Wangaratta Regional Art Gallery, The University of Melbourne, Mercy Hospital Albury and ArtStream Investment Group, as well as in private collections in Australia, UK, USA, Hong Kong, France, Canada and Japan. A constant traveller, Davenport has undertaken residencies and research trips globally, drawing on the landscapes of Europe, Asia and Australia to inform her practice. Davenport has been successfully exhibiting with Flinders Lane Gallery since 2012.