Reflections1

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EST LIVING INTERVIEW MARCH 2019

THE DESIGN FILES INTERVIEW MARCH 2019

Catalogue Essay by Marguerite Brown, 2019

Belynda Henry’s work reflects that of an artist completely immersed in her natural surroundings, reveling in the irrepressible desire to interpret the world through making pictures.

For 17 years she and her family have lived at the end of the Dooralong Valley, a 1.5 hour drive north of Sydney. However recently she has moved to a new location in the valley, setting up a studio and building a house that takes in a different range of views. This body of work responds to the everyday encounters with her rural environment, filtered through the lens of perception and imagination.

One of the main inspirations for this series is the abundant bird-life that visits the dam in front of her new studio on a daily basis. Kingfishers, bell birds, fairy wrens, kookaburras, even elusive wedge-tailed eagles fill the skies and visit the dam, their noisy chatter creating the unique soundscape of this particular place.

Henry has an intuitive approach to painting, and leaves behind pre-conceived notions when approaching a new work. So, it was when contemplating the suite of her recently created watercolour, gouache and pastel works that she realised her avian neighbours had surreptitiously entered her paintings. Not in a figurative manner, rather they show up in her palette choices – particularly the kingfisher whose vivid blue hues dominate this series. Also in the way that the local birdlife contributes to the overall visual, aural, and sensory experience of the landscape, along with the way it makes the artist feel.

Pensive, uplifting, serene, joyful, meditative – these emotional and mental states are readily evoked in Henry’s paintings through her use of colour and composition. This body of work sees the artist explore different mediums – namely oil on canvas as a departure from her prominent use of acrylic paints over recent years, where she harnessed their soft opaque effects. Part of her current attraction to oils is the vibrancy and intensity of the colours available. The malleability of oil paint is another factor, as her work has taken on an increasingly gestural quality through the use of palette knives as well as brushes.

A major inspiration in this recently adopted approach is the methodology of painter Elisabeth Cummings, whose tough, expressive style and keen sense of colour have made her one of Australia’s most respected senior artists. Like Henry, Cummings also paints the landscape and both artists work in the field en plein air, and then in the studio to finish the final pieces. For Henry, this allows her to access the memory of a place and let it influence the lines and shapes observed in reality, resulting in her unique interpretations of the environment.

Reflection is a new compositional device that appears in Henry’s work for the first time in this series, inspired by reflections of trees and vegetation cast in the established dam at the back of her property. Mirrored shapes consume the canvases, the water’s edge forming the division that runs though the middle. Ordering her compositions in this ways generates an almost Rorschach like quality to the work while presenting a semi-abstracted vision of the landscape. It marks a departure from the receding fields of colour that in earlier works gently coax the viewer’s eye from foreground to distant hills and horizon. In the present series Henry’s more physical, gestural application coupled with mirrored compositions give the paintings and works on paper a surface tension that sends them into more formally abstract territory.

For an artist who has been painting the landscape for over 20 years, this body of work marks the latest development in Henry’s personal style and continually evolving vision. Fundamental to all is the artist’s celebration of the landscape as a place of beauty, and physical, spiritual and emotional solace.