ochre lawson

The wilderness is at the heart of everything I create. I grew up in country Australia, where I roamed the wetlands and native bush, drawing and painting the natural landscape from a young age. My love of the bush led me to become an environmental activist throughout my 20’s, and this time spent protecting native flora and fauna has informed my art work ever since.

My art practice is primarily painting and drawing with inspiration coming from nature in all her forms. Drawing and painting from life (en plien-air) is elemental to my practice as it gives an energy and a mark that comes from the immediate atmosphere and landscape and when back in the studio the memory of place once its been drawn is forever retained.

I aspire to an aesthetic, emotional , physical and spiritual response to nature through mark making, the quality of line, movement of atmosphere, colour and form, as opposed to a purely literal representation. I am particularly interested in non-literal colour as a representation of the inner emotional response to the landscape and the more theoretical concepts of colour and simplification of form.

I am especially interested in portraying old growth forest and wilderness landscapes because the energy in this landscape has an ancient quality and the forms and colours have a diversity that a regrowth forest lack. I strive to travel to these relatively untouched places to record what is increasingly being lost from the world forever.

The Romantic 17th century philosophy exploring the sublime quality of nature, the vastness, infinity and remoteness that wildness can inspire, are ideas that I strongly subscribe to in my choice of subject matter and my emotional response to wilderness.

– Ochre Lawson