Melanie Waugh

Melanie Waugh is a painter of landscapes, but not the polite, manicured kind. Her brush strokes are quick and confident, capturing not just a scene but a sensation—a moment when the air is thick with heat, or the earth, newly wet, clings to your boots. Her recent work, exhibited at Michael Reid Southern Highlands under the title High Country, is rooted in the rugged terrain of Cathedral Rock National Park. Waugh’s paintings are not about nature as an abstract concept; they are about specific places that hold the weight of personal history. “I like painting places that are familiar to me or special to me—places where I go to breathe,” she says, and the viewer, too, feels drawn into this inner geography.

Waugh grew up in Gleniffer Valley, near Bellingen, where her parents had settled in the 1970s. They were part of a generation that fled the city in search of a simpler life, and their daughter inherited this sense of escape. As a child, Waugh roamed freely, her days punctuated by the rituals of swimming in the Never Never Creek and biking through the bush until dark. “I’d spend the day swimming and exploring by the river with lots of other kids,” she recalls. This idleness—the sort that allows for deep observation—formed the basis of her early education in seeing.

At the National Art School in Sydney, where she enrolled at 17, Waugh found herself absorbing more than just technique. The curriculum was grounded in tradition, in the fundamentals of drawing and painting, but what she took away was a deeper understanding of how to translate the world she knew into the language of art. She emerged with a clear-eyed sense of what mattered to her—a commitment to the materiality of paint, to the physical act of making. Yet, even with this grounding, she hesitated to pursue a career in art. She spent years working at an art supply store, drifting through various forms of employment, before deciding to focus solely on painting.

In recent years, Waugh has returned to the Gleniffer Valley, to the house where she grew up, finding in this familiar environment both inspiration and solace. The move has altered her practice, making her brushstrokes looser, her palette softer. In High Country, she does not paint from a distance but from within the landscape itself, attempting to bring the viewer into the immediacy of the place. Her goal, as she describes it, is to use “as few brush strokes as possible to create the scene,” a method that strips away the inessential to reveal the core of her vision: a deep and unspoken connection to the land.