Lysterfield Landscape (1992) Tablo Tom Aberneithie tarafından

As an Anglo-Indian boy, growing up in the 1970s in the fringe suburbs of an increasingly expanding Melbourne, my identity dominated everything. After being inspired about art history during high school, I went on to study it at Birkbeck, London where I continued to be interested in the idea of nationalism in art being expressed through metaphysical associations with the aesthetics of a nation’s landscape. Danube school painters such as Altdorfer and Huber struck a particularly resonant chord as these first, purely landscape images, seemed to project more about humanity than an appreciation for nature’s chaotic beauty.
Beauty, nostalgia and nationalism seemed to converge before me then in 2017 when I visited Melbourne again and ‘landed’ on this scene. The landscape around Lysterfield, just outside Melbourne, remains in the belt where town meets country: the area where identity is blurred. I chose to paint this scene en plein air using ‘electric’ colours intended to amplify the land’s windy whisper.