Hill End, and old mining town deep in the countryside near Bathurst NSW has provided endless inspiration to artists for over half a century.
I don’t know if there is a published review of the work of Australian painters who have worked at Hill end but there should be. I spent a wonderful weekend there at a painting workshop with Luke Sciberras which provided just the tiniest taste of the fascination this place has for the working artist. I loved the effects of the changing light playing between grass, bush and buildings, and the calm and graceful wallabies grazing here and there like hallucinations as you see them from a distance.
I have long been fascinated by corrugated iron and other vernacular building materials. Hill End is a splendid place for looking at the creation of the early built environment through rough timber and corrugated iron, and the beautiful shapes and textures which resulted. The extensive network of timber fencing, old and collapsing, creates a visual passageway across the cleared fields. Over decades these buildings and structures have embedded themselves into the landscape offering limitless scope for semi-abstract paintings based on their graceful yet aleatory forms.
Corrugated iron nailed onto a wooden framework allows for addition, subtraction, decay, absorption into the landscape. The shapes and forms are angular and the textures striated. This makes it not so easy to paint.
At Luke Sciberras’s workshop in 2015 I began an acrylic sketch of a domesticated hillside with a corrugated iron building on it. It was one of the hardest images I have ever tried to capture and although I kept the sketch I never even started the studio painting from it.
Annette Hamilton Artist 