Debbie Mackenzie

Deb Mackenzie’s paintings are shaped by a lifelong relationship with the Victorian landscape. Raised on the Mornington Peninsula and drawn repeatedly to her family’s century-old beach shack in Peterborough on the Great Ocean Road, she works from a rich reservoir of remembered places and recurring sights: rolling pasture, still waterways, weathered trees and expansive skies.

These landscapes have occupied Mackenzie’s imagination for decades. Their forms reappear throughout her work, refined through observation and recollection into compositions of remarkable clarity. Glassy inlets reflect passing cloud formations. Roads disappear over distant rises. Broad paddocks stretch towards horizons animated by weather and light.

After an early career in graphic design and advertising, Mackenzie turned to painting and quickly established a distinctive visual language. Her work draws upon a tradition of Romantic landscape painting that finds significance in the experience of the natural world. Vast skies dominate many of the compositions, lending them a sense of scale and perspective that recalls the enduring power of landscape to arrest attention and quiet the mind.

“My practice revolves around my desire to capture the incredible beauty of the Australian landscape where I live and further afield,” Mackenzie says. “I am uncontrollably immersed and captivated with the peace it brings me.”