Standing Still, West MacDonnell Ranges, 2024, oil on board, 30 x 60 cm
Standing Still, West MacDonnell Ranges, 2024, oil on board, 30 x 60 cm
A$1,700.00
Framed in Oak
Corinne Loxton
Sky and Landscape Artist
Paintings of the MacDonnell Ranges
On Sacred Ground
Into the Desert
“The heart of the desert beats at a different pace. Geology can’t be rushed. When it occupies your whole field of vision, you feel first impatience, then oppression, and finally that sense of calm that only a blank space can create. The stillness that only the absolute provides.” - Sven Lindqvist
I made the plein air paintings in this exhibition while on a 3-week residency in Central Australia earlier this year.
Deserts have long been spaces of encounter and challenge, places that seem limitless through which we experience our own physical and metaphysical limits. In the desert wilderness we can inhabit solitude and silence, connecting with ourselves, others, nature and the path of dreaming.
At a time of unprecedented focus on what it means to be an Australian inhabiting this land, when the impacts of climate change are being felt across both urban and non-urban communities, where people are experiencing less connection with nature, greater social and physical isolation and increased reliance on technology, my paintings invite a reconsideration of the importance of desert landscapes.
The impulse to travel to the desert came from a very difficult time in my life. In 2020 I experienced a devastating personal crisis that left me unable to paint and in a state of constant anxiety and grief. My whole world, which till then felt mostly secure and explicable, seemed to have been turned upside down - I was adrift in uncertainty and distress. For many months I wandered the bush below my home in the Blue Mountains, trying to find clarity and comfort. I could not concentrate or sleep and my body was racked with fear. Amidst this struggle I experienced consolation from stories and wisdom texts from the desert. Somehow the barren, vast and harsh landscape of the desert had acted as both a haven and a catalyst for personal recovery and renewal in others. So, I wanted to go there, to experience first-hand its transformational power.
It was with some apprehension in April 2024 that I travelled to paint in the MacDonnell Ranges near Alice Springs (Mparntwe).
Having grown up in Cape Town surrounded by mountains and the sea, and now living in the Blue Mountains, I feel at home in rising mists and clouds. I love being in and around water and the solace of mountains, still trees and bushland. As I anticipated bringing my artist’s gaze and brushes to the vast and dry landscape of the desert, I feared encountering dislocation and immobilising confusion. While my intention was clear - to explore the desert’s unique character and to engage with some of the associated metaphorical, symbolic, and allegorical meanings, yet I felt acutely aware of my tenuous relationship with that landscape. The discomfort of being a post-colonial of not one, but two countries was not lost on me. I carry my own, idiosyncratic interpretative lenses, thus I risked subjectively distorting or reducing the landscape to preconceived notions and missing the specifics of the particular place. Given these concerns, I felt the only authentic way of making paintings there, was to let go of my conscious assumptions, to simply be present and respond intuitively.
When I first arrived, the sky boasted puffy clouds, it was hot, and the air was incredibly dry. The rivers and creeks flowed following flash flooding, and unexpectedly verdant grass covered many slopes. The insects were active, buzzing and humming at my flyscreens, enticing the local geckos, with bulging eyes, to scurry in pursuit.
After exploring for a few days, I picked up my brushes to start painting but rather than moving seamlessly into creative flow, I heard competing voices in my head judging, questioning, and doubting. It was as Tim Winton describes in Island Home, “In an uncompromising landscape like ours, a person suddenly confronted with their essential smallness will often panic, become angry, disoriented, afraid.” Together with a sense of urgency to get on with it I was tempted to fight my rising performance anxiety. If this wasn’t enough, the external physical circumstances also presented challenges – the flies, heat and sun, the gusty wind, the flimsy easel, the magnitude of the landscape, the dimensions of the painting boards… I was on the brink of freefall.
Like many desert pilgrims before me, the unfamiliar environment had brought me face to face with my vulnerability. The ancient landforms and spaciousness of the place confronted me with my own fragility, the limits of my capacity and ultimately, my finiteness.
Thankfully, I was able to soften back into self-compassion and trust. Rather than push myself to meet arbitrary goals, I slowed down and noticed the shimmering light across the rocks, the coolness of the water and the scurrying of the spinifex pigeons. I felt drawn to deep gorge shadows, ghost gums standing serenely in creek beds and the wide sky.
As I embraced attentiveness and curiosity, I began to sense the movements of my own spirit and to feel both present and held. The demand to make the ‘perfect’ picture seemed to disappear and instead I became absorbed, experiencing ease, calm and even delight.
As I became immersed in my process, the days began early, in the chill breeze of morning. Often, I worked for 6 or more hours, losing myself and all internal dialogue in the moment-by-moment experience of painting.
At night I began to dream in brush marks of rich colour. Burnt sienna tinged with magenta, cobalt blue, umber and indigo… my dreams filled with strokes of paint, forming as though by magic in my mind’s eye.
Then, even more bewildering… I began to dream that I embodied the mountain range, that my body as I lay on the bed, formed the bluffs, crests and valleys of the MacDonnell Ranges, that I was the mountain, and it was me.
As I remember this experience it fills me with wonder and gratitude.
One of my hopes in travelling to the desert to paint was to connect with nature, to explore my relationship with the centre of this ancient land. I encountered silence and space, the gentle, faithful companionship of the earth, the creatures, and trees. The desert’s symbolic resonance continues to speak to me; the beauty, often harsh or scarred, its persistence to adapt and survive extremes, its provision and scarcity.
Painting en plein air in the desert seemed an imperative, a deeply personal journey, a pilgrimage of the soul. The works pay homage to nature’s knowing, abiding spirit and human experiences of struggle, endurance and hope in that environment. As you view them, I invite you to connect deeply with the landscape, your self and our shared humanity.
Virginia Spate argues that “Paint – an inert material – somehow creates in one the sense of being intensely alive, and of being part of the aliveness of the world”, and so my hope is that by a mysterious alchemy, these paintings carry within their brush marks, colour and form, the power to connect you with the heartbeat of the desert.
Presenting this work, I acknowledge the Traditional Owners of Mparntwe (Alice Springs), the Arrernte people, who have continuously and sustainably inhabited this land for tens of thousands of years. I pay my respects to people, the cultures and the Elders past, present and emerging.