Elaine Green’s fifth solo exhibition with Anthea Polson Art continues her fascination with landscapes veiled in mist and overhead shifting clouds. The now Tasmanian based artist’s works resonate an immersive experience of place. Akin to 19th century Romanticism, they manifest intangible qualities. She relays that nature’s atmospheric poetry can never be adequately expressed in a formal tradition and that her paintings are more about sensory encounters. “Misty mornings especially fascinate me, perhaps the predilection is rooted somewhere in my Scottish heritage. It is the ephemerality of clouds and mist and what might exist beyond that intrigues me,” Green tells. “Mist brings a serenity to the landscape, softening and simplifying the vista. I feel it adds a mystical moodiness.”
Images in the exhibition reference solitary visits to locations around Tasmania, including King River in Strahan and Cataract Gorge in Launceston. Much further afield, a few works recall Green’s time exploring Scotland’s Isle of Skye. “I feel a real connection to that region as my DNA is 65% Hebridean,” she divulges. Also illustrated is the ‘hushed’ view of green hills seen from her Stanley home studio. “The environment of the area where I live is very peaceful and inspiring, but sometimes I simply paint imaginative places that I would also like to be in.”
Green responds to the aesthetic promptings of a work in progress, allowing her brush gestures to govern the emerging image. It is a thoroughly intuitive process. “Creations born of experience and memory of place, my works begin as abstractions; manipulating oil paint, exploring spaces that exist only on the canvas, blurring and rubbing back, adding and reducing until eventually a narrative is revealed,” she explains. “The moment I stop holding my breath I know I have come as close as possible in depicting the feel of a place.”
Everything is mutable in the art works created during Green’s ‘quiet moments’. Forms coalesce and dissolve emulating cloud formations and drifting mist. The viewer enters lofty rarefied realms that offer transcendence; a state of alignment with evanescent Nature, far from the everyday world of routine and objectivity.
JACQUELINE HOUGHTON
Elaine Green holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts Degree, SCU, Lismore 2015 and a Diploma of Fine Arts, Murwillumbah TAFE 2011. She has received numerous awards and been a finalist in an extraordinary number of prizes, the most recent being: 2024 Finalist, Tidal Art Prize, Devonport Regional Gallery, Tas; 2024 Winner, Steve and Eva Kons Award, TASARTS; 2024 Finalist and Encouragement Award Recipient, Bay of Fires Art Prize, Tas; 2024 Finalist, The Doyle’s Art Award (landscape), Qld; 2024 Winner, Circular Head Art Award, Tas; 2024 Winner, People’s Choice, Harden Landscape Art Prize, Tas.
Receive e-mail updates on our exhibitions, events and more
Subscribe Now