Why I Paint Landscapes: Reflections Ahead of 'Found' at MRAG
As I prepare for the Found exhibition at Maitland Regional Art Gallery, I’ve been thinking deeply about why I paint landscapes—what keeps drawing me back to the land, brush in hand, and why this practice still feels urgent and alive.
It’s never been about creating pretty pictures. I’m not interested in making scenic postcards or decorative backdrops. For me, landscape painting is about memory, identity, and the shifting sense of belonging we attach to place. It’s about how the land holds stories—both personal and collective—and how painting can capture moments that are constantly slipping away.
I paint what I see, but more than that, I paint what I feel in a place: the way the light changes in a single hour, how the wind moves through the grass, or the way a shadow cuts across a valley and reshapes everything. These are the things that can’t be captured fully in a photograph. But with paint—thick, gestural, layered paint—I can hold them. I can make them stay.
One of the big questions driving my work lately is: what will this landscape look like in 10 years? The valley I often paint is under pressure. Housing developments are creeping in, swallowing farmland and open skies. I find myself wondering: will this hillside still be here, or will it become another row of rooftops? There’s a kind of quiet urgency in that. I paint these places because they matter—to me, to the people who live nearby, and to the history they carry.
I often choose the panoramic format because it feels closest to how I see the landscape—vast, immersive, impossible to fit inside a neat little frame. Panoramas invite the viewer to step into the work. You’re not just looking at a scene; you’re inside it, surrounded by it. That’s how it feels to be out there painting on site, and I want that feeling to carry through to the viewer.
In terms of technique, I’ve become more and more drawn to impasto. Thick paint, laid down boldly, feels honest. It gives the surface weight—almost like skin. There’s a rawness to it. As the light shifts across the work, shadows move and textures reveal themselves. That movement echoes the living, breathing nature of the land. It also reminds us that landscape isn’t still. It’s in a constant state of becoming.
I paint en plein air because I want to be in direct conversation with the land. I want to feel the heat, hear the magpies, see the snakes and squint into the sun. That immediacy finds its way into the brushwork—nothing too precious, nothing overthought. Just presence.
My work sits somewhere between tradition and change. I feel connected to the long line of Australian landscape painters—Streeton, Heysen, McCubbin—but I don’t want to romanticise the land or pretend it's untouched. This isn’t the Australia of colonial myth. The land is marked, shaped, threatened. And it’s still beautiful, still worthy of reverence and like the Neo-Romantic painters, I’m drawn to the grandeur of the Australian environment—but I hold that awe alongside an awareness of its fragility.
Ultimately, I hope my paintings invite people to pause—to look more closely, to feel something, and to remember what these places mean to them. Because when we lose a landscape, we don’t just lose scenery—we lose stories, relationships, and a sense of who we are.
So this is why I paint. Not to hold on forever, but to witness—before it changes, before it’s gone.
I hope to see you at the opening June 25!
Yours in art,
Rebecca
Sketchbook which maps the locations I recently painted.
