Painting the Places We Almost Stop Seeing

There are landscapes that announce themselves.

Mountains, dramatic coastlines, waterfalls—the places we stop the car for, photograph and remember.

And then there are the landscapes we simply live in.

For me, the Highveld is one of those places.

A long road disappearing into the distance.

Eucalyptus trees standing beside it. Open veld stretching beneath an enormous sky. The particular quality of morning light falling across dry grasses.

These are things I have seen so often that it would be very easy to stop seeing them at all.

And perhaps that is one of the reasons I want to paint them.

Learning to look again

When you decide to paint something, you can no longer glance at it.

You have to look.

Suddenly a eucalyptus tree isn’t simply a tree beside the road. I begin noticing the colour within its trunk, the way its branches break against the sky and how the light catches some leaves while others almost disappear.

The veld isn’t simply brown or green. It contains dozens of small changes in temperature and colour.

And the Highveld sky seems even larger when you have to decide how much of your canvas to give to it.

Painting makes me pay attention to things familiarity has taught me to overlook.

It doesn’t need to be spectacular

I think there can be a temptation, particularly with landscape painting, to search for the spectacular.

But I’m becoming increasingly interested in something quieter.

I don’t want to turn the Highveld into a landscape it isn’t. I don’t need to give it dramatic mountains or impossible light to make it worthy of a painting.

There is beauty in its openness.

There is beauty in a road that seems to disappear into nowhere.

There is beauty in eucalyptus trees we have driven past hundreds of times.

And there is something deeply familiar about the enormous sky stretching above all of it.

Perhaps familiarity has its own kind of beauty.

Painting home

As this painting develops, I’m working slowly with the light and atmosphere.

It is still very much a work in progress. There are areas that will change, passages that will become quieter and others that will need more life.

But I’m trying not to rush it.

I want the finished painting to retain the simplicity that made me want to paint the scene in the first place.

Not a grand landscape.

Not an exotic one.

Just a quiet piece of the Highveld.

And maybe that is what I am increasingly discovering through my work: we don’t always have to travel somewhere extraordinary to find something worth looking at.

Sometimes we simply need to look properly at the places we thought we already knew.