Steve Burley Hillside landscape

This work is about time spent at Mount Alexander and a memory of the ordinary ‘thereness’ of the surrounding bush.

Back in the studio, I blocked in a large portion of the painting over a couple of days of 40-degree summer heat. It was a type of meditation, no sketching, no mapping, working intuitively with broad brush marks for the ironbarks and lyrical calligraphic line work for saplings. Thin washes and thick swathes create a very tactile, frontal view of the sharply rising hillside. The trees are almost figurative. I wanted to make a story about their restlessness. Bushfires were an ever-present threat.

- Steve Burley, 2014