Echo of Landscape
Catalogue essay by Tony Magnusson 

29th November 2022 - 17th December 2022

When Jo Davenport journeyed to Fowlers Gap in the arid zone of NSW’s far west last autumn, she was confronted by what she found. Having enjoyed childhood holidays in the area during the mid to late-’60s, she remembered “a finely balanced landscape” teeming with wildlife.

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“Dad was interested in rock art and geology, and as children we were always heading out to explore the desert or opal fields,” says the award-winning Albury-based artist.

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“We began holidaying at Mootwingee, now part of Mutawintji National Park, around the time the University of New South Wales acquired the lease for nearby Fowlers Gap in 1966 and transformed it into an arid zone research facility and sheep station.”

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Returning all these years later, Davenport found the rock-strewn landscape to be tough and unforgiving, despite the recent rain.

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“All the dams were full; the creeks were running and there was regeneration in the form of inch-high saltbush everywhere. It’s breathtakingly beautiful in parts, but clearly an environment in need of love and care. The degradation of the land is hard to ignore.”

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Unsure how to define what she saw in paint, Davenport completed numerous pencil sketches on site, which she then used as references for a series of paintings made back in her Albury studio over winter and early spring.

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Echo of Landscape, the artist’s seventh solo exhibition with Flinders Lane Gallery, comprises twelve works on French rag paper made with acrylic, oil, oil stick and gouache, and four oil on canvas paintings.

With this body of work, Davenport is careful to note that she is painting what she wants to see as much as that which she actually encountered at Fowlers Gap, which lies 112km north of Broken Hill.

“My work explores the transformative potential of landscape – that feeling of joy and wellbeing you get when you’re standing in nature. And I feel the goodness of the land in terms of colour.”

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Dynamic, vigorous, even raw in parts, these abstracted evocations of a place drastically altered by more than 150 years of pastoral history are realised in a palette that extends from Davenport’s more familiar hues of yellow, pink and grey to burgundy, brown and a deep cobalt blue.

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The latter – a new colour for Davenport – came courtesy of a pot of Majorelle Blue purchased in 2013 while visiting expat French artist Jacques Majorelle’s celebrated gardens and Cubist villa in Marrakech.

“Majorelle Blue is the hero of the villa and gardens, which were bursting with life,” she recalls. “Like Fowlers Gap, Morocco has a dry, arid environment, but this garden was well cared for and its plant life suited the conditions. So I’m using this shade of blue as a way of picturing the landscape as I wish it to be – regenerating.”

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As a barometer of the artist’s affective response to Fowlers Gap, the rich colours signify intense and sustained engagement as well as a desire to map what she calls “the lifeblood of the landscape”.

“I always think it’s a good idea to finish a painting while it still has a breath,” says Davenport. ”Even though these works might look like they have been painted quite gesturally and quickly, they have actually taken much time. I build my paintings slowly and deliberately, and each of them is imbued with the passage of time.”

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Powered by bold, active brushwork, these rich, vibrating fields of colour occupy a threshold space between the apparent and the implied, between what we perceive and how we interpret it.

“Ultimately, these paintings are about how nature will take over Fowlers Gap and re-wild the area,” says Davenport.” I’m painting what I want to see – my felt experience of the landscape.”