Sightlines

Julie Purdie’s paintings begin from a simple premise: that seeing is an act of continual selection. The eye edits as much as it observes, privileging one detail while allowing another to dissolve into the periphery. What we experience as a coherent image is, in reality, a construction assembled from fragments.

It is a process Purdie understands from two complementary perspectives. Alongside her practice as a painter, the Eora/Sydney-based artist has spent more than two decades as a clinical optometrist, studying the mechanics of sight with the same sustained attention she brings to the landscape. Sightlines, her first collection with Michael Reid, sits at the intersection of these two disciplines: the imaginative pursuit of depicting the visible world and the scientific study of how that world comes into view.

The eye, as Purdie explains, “prioritises colour and detail within the fovea while the periphery remains less resolved.” The translucent geometric forms that hover across her compositions give visual form to this idea.

Within these forms, subdued tones become strikingly luminous. A hillside takes on a honeyed warmth when isolated within a translucent plane. A grey sky acquires unexpected radiance beside a neighbouring field of amber.

These interventions belong, in part, to the language of hard-edge painting, recalling the investigations of Josef Albers, for whom the nested square became a vehicle for exploring the endlessly unstable nature of colour. Yet where Albers pursued these ideas within the self-contained language of geometric abstraction, Purdie discovers them in the mutable conditions of the Australian landscape.

The fields, ridgelines and expansive skies that recur throughout Sightlines are drawn largely from the Hunter Valley, where the artist is based, and are often observed in the fugitive light of golden hour.

Beginning with digital and paper sketches made on site, Purdie develops these observations through long-exposure photography and camera movement before translating them into acrylic and oil paintings. Sgraffito, masking and layered applications of paint echo the successive stages through which visual information is gathered, filtered and resolved.

Purdie was a finalist in the 2025 Mullins Conceptual Photography Prize and the 2024 National Emerging Art Prize, and has been a multiple finalist in the Newcastle Club Foundation Art Prize, receiving the Staff Choice Award in 2024.