“Ross River Paperbarks”, 2016

James Brown

“Ross River Paperbarks”, 2016

Oil and pastel on canvas

Size: 75 x 75 cm

Isabelle and I begin our mornings with walks along the pathways that edge the Ross River in Townsville—our home in Australia's tropical north. A memorable spot along our route is the line of paperbark trees shown here, leaning slightly outwards over the riverbank. It's a "special" place on the way to a grove of mango trees where a mob of wallabies often gathers.

My memory of these trees is not centred on the trees individually, to my eye, these paperbarks coalesce into a gently curving screen—a tapestry of pale ochre-pink trunks, through which glimpses of the sunlit river shimmer.

This painting captures the experience of looking through that screen. It's about the effect of visual layering—the way the blurred, composite image of the trees interacts with and pictorially frames the glimpsed gaps of water beyond. This visual play with spatial depth is heightened by a deliberate transition in focus from the left side to the right: the trees on the left are rendered more out-of-focus than the two on the right. By intention, this shift in clarity represents the act of walking forward, the trees on the left representing the immediate past, gently fading from view as I move towards the immediate present on the right.

While not initially conceived as an experimental exercise, reflecting on my numerous iterations of this same scene reveals a deep underlying interest. This series, and this painting in particular, seem to be driven by a subconscious desire to capture the experience of “gazing without truly seeing.”