It was Spring, still cool and wet, and I was bushwalking with friends up the track leading to the cross atop Mount Macedon. A weekly brief respite from children, our shared hike is an opportunity to immerse ourselves in bushland, expansive sky and views. As I walked, the beauty of the Mount struck me and the ideas for this exhibition began to form.

I wanted to paint more landscapes and to do so outside whenever possible. These works started as words scribbled in notebooks that I carry with me always. Ideas are refined and ruminated on, words become sketches, sketches the basis of the fully realized paintings.

The paintings depict outdoor scenes from my daily wanderings around the Macedon ranges, coastal hideaways in southern New South Wales and still-life scenes created in my home studio using foliage and blooms collected from my own garden or those of friends and family.

When I first settled on the title of the body of work “In All Weather” I did not imagine it would be less about weather and bushwalking and more about the tension between being a mother and an artist. As I look at the completed body of work now it is clear to me that these works reveal something deeper and more personal. Maybe it’s signified by the re-emergence of the figure in my paintings that indicate this. My son napping on the couch in the studio amid lush and heavily patterned textiles, a hint of a tanned arm in a deck chair and a self-portrait of myself on the floor resting for just a moment. There is no escape from motherhood, nor can an artist separate her creative identity. You could say that an artist and a mother both weather life, the good and the bad, all day and night, rain hail and shine.

~ Elizabeth Barnett (2018)

* Click on images below to enlarge.