The Seafarer’s Dream
New paintings by Natalie Anderson
Exhibition Dates: September 1 - 29, 2024
At Salt Contemporary Art
33-35 Hesse St Queenscliff, Vic
‘This year, I will paint the trees’, I thought. I have an abiding love of the ubiquitous Australian eucalyptus tree and have been meaning to paint them for ever so long.
As you may notice - that did not happen. I also love to paint still life - they didn’t make it either.
It is endlessly fascinating to me that so often, what I set out to paint is not at all what flows through me to my brush and onto the canvas. Like a separate stream of consciousness, answerable to no one, my painting mind (some may name it the monkey mind) will override my best intentions. And tho I am not in a dream state when I paint - it is often only when I step back and warm myself by the fire in my studio, that I realise how far off the chosen track I have once again happily strayed.
Perhaps I should not be surprised that my wandering mind lead me straight back to the sea.
I read a lot, I dream a lot and for me the lines of memory, imagination and dream are often blurred. Some of the books I have read this year have taken me on journeys far out to sea and got me wondering about the life of a mariner. I started to wonder what life at sea would mean. Not just a Saturday sailing with friends on Corio Bay but weeks maybe months on end out in the pelagic zone, solitary and alone. What would I miss, what would I remember of home and what would show up in my dreams out there at sea.
In these paintings I take another look at distance, separation and longing; of how much we need the safety of home, balanced with the urge for connecting directly with things we have no control over. Some call it ‘rewilding’, pushing past our comfort zone and being ‘all at sea’. There is something intoxicating to me in imagining being in complete isolation from the connected human world and our collective exhaustion. The world is in such turmoil that fundamentally, this is about ‘escape’ I guess.
So, escape with me to nocturnal seascapes, shipwreck places visited long ago and the heightened sensory experience of colour and light in dreamlike morning dips. Where water morphs from syrup to foam and shadows grow long before our eyes. I wanted this work to be both quiet and wild; familiar and slightly disquieting; immersive yet just out of reach. Just as in dreams, the threads holding these works together is gossamer thin and, in the end, they are probably more about my monkey mind than anything profound. But I hope they evoke something a bit intangible in you the viewer, a bit like that fleeting feeling we all get of de ja vu - were we there, did it really happen or was it a dream? - wherever that was and whenever that was - I think I loved being there, even if it was just in my dreams.