The Golden Hour

Northern Rivers-based painter Lucy Vader transports us to halcyon days in sprawling pastures with her latest series, The Golden Hour. We are delighted to welcome this singular artist back to the Southern Highlands with the opening of her luminous new show in our upstairs gallery.

Depicting rolling paddocks dotted with grazing animals and happy birdlife, Vader’s pastoral scenes come flickering into view with dazzling exuberance as gutsy sweeps of paint break open to undercurrents of pure colour. These areas of neon-tinged abstraction appear like flashes of prismatic light in the landscape, as though refracted by clouds or washes of rain that soak the fields with lushness and vibrancy. For a moment, the figurative seems to glitch and give way to vivid, emotionally charged tonal undulations.

The Golden Hour is an expressive celebration of Vader’s home in Northern NSW, reflecting her complex relationship to an environment that can be, by turns, bucolic and wild, always subject to mercurial elemental shifts.

The sense that Vader’s landscapes are on the cusp of transformation is echoed by the energy and immediacy instilled by her gestural painting approach. Throughout The Golden Hour, the artist vividly captures precise points in time when the landscape is alive and the light becomes magical.

To speak with a Gallery representative about paintings in this exhibition, please email willkollmorgen@michaelreid.com.au