Description

Title: Bushfire Sunset
Artist: Mariko Gray
Material: Acrylic on Wood Panel
Year: 2025
Size: 14″x11″

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This artwork was exhibited at Mosman Art Gallery from Saturday 15 February 2025 – Sunday 16 March 2025

It’s my first time working in this style on wood panel and I’m really happy with how it came together. Until now I’ve been working on two series, “Disconnect” and “Reconnect” which are all works on paper. I’ve mostly moved away from realism and begun focusing much more on abstraction. For one thing, I realised the process of realistic painting causes me a great deal of stress and I just wasn’t enjoying it. I spent far too much energy worrying about every imperfection and it was putting me off making art. Another issue I’ve had was my horror for cleaning paint brushes. So I’ve come up with an abstract process that solves both! I begin by blobbing paint directly onto my surface and spreading it with disposable paper towel. Once dry, I then come in with a pen or paint marker and begin tracing over lines I find in the underlying texture. I find it very meditative, and with no expectations for the outcome, it’s much more relaxing!

Overall, this style of working reflects the state of my mind to a large degree – there’s chaos here, and yet I still set about trying to impose order on it, resulting in outcomes that are often unpredictable. With “Bushfire Sunset” however, there’s also an interesting effect related to my eyesight. At face value, the composition and shapes resemble a fire burning on a hillside, with the landscape, flames, and sky reflected in the water below. However when I take my glasses off and view it with my uncorrected short-sightedness, it becomes very Monet, the flames disappear, and I end up seeing a sunset instead. This is why I called it “Bushfire Sunset” and the transformation that occurs with different levels of eyesight makes for an interesting metaphor about how we might view the world.