My painting has been following a dynamic of its own for the past couple of years. I well remember when my art history teacher at TAFE asked when I was going to move on from works based on family history and the Hawkesbury River and I had to say I did not know. My painting then was one aspect of my auto-ethnography. I wanted to reflect on the past through writing and painting. I am still writing various elements of that story. For some reason the visual field fits into photography rather than painting. I have never once painted a decent picture of the Hawkesbury but I am enthusiastic about the photos.
Many of the river photos are on my Images site.
http://annettehamiltonimages.com
In another place, around my house in Katoomba, I planned to develop a project on the “Seven Valleys”. These would be landscapes on various scales including the extraordinary formations of eroding stone in the Capertee and Wolgan Valleys. The past and present here reflect the intersection between the use of the land as pasture and rural activity on the one hand and the “wild” untouched mountainscapes.
So far I have mainly worked in the Megalong, Hartley and Capertee Valleys. Each has its own qualities in terms of shape, light and palette. Plus there are vistas along Cox’s River towards Jenolan Caves.
My fascination with deserts was revived following a visit to Broken Hill with my daughter. This was a short trip at the end of a fearful drought. There was limited water in town and the air was full of metal dust that made me cough for a week. The pictures I have painted from that trip reflect the depth of shimmering colour of the far interior and the limitless unfolding of space itself leading west to the Central Desert where I spent formative years in the early 1970s. I have done a series of acrylic sketches of these landscapes, and one or two larger works on canvas, none of which have quite conveyed the colour and space I was after.
As far as approach and technique is concerned, apart from works on canvas in acrylic and oils I also like working on paper with different media. I like working on A3 on heavy-weight water-colour paper.
Multi-media paper allows for the use of solvent based markers which I experiment with at times, although they don’t feel as comfortable as paint on a brush (or palette knife).
A current writing project is a reconsideration of Australian landscape painting, with a particular focus on the work of women painters. This is at a newly formative stage and still requires a lot of research.
DEVELOPING WORK: THE PARIS 13 PROJECT.
Recently (2024) I began a project called ‘PARIS 13’ recording the unexpected visual experiences I found during a six week stay in the 13th Arrondissement, a distant part of unfashionable Paris, seeking ways of reflecting that in painting. This is a complete departure from my artistic practice to date, and turns to the challenges of an ultra-urban essentially denatured image-making. The first steps of this work are being taken over the up-coming summer break, with the intention of returning to the 13th Arrondissement sometime early next year to take these ideas forward.
Some of the 13th Project photographs will soon be available on my Image Field site here: http://annettehamiltonimages.wordpress.com
Annette Hamilton - Artist 