Busy / Quiet

Elizabeth Beaumont’s studio is an iron shed nestled amongst the undulating hills of the Southern Highlands, the landscape she calls home. From the outside, it could easily be mistaken for a machinery shed. Within lies a world of restless experimentation: worn books with softened spines; illustrated field guides to Australian native botanicals—including a volume devoted entirely to the acacias of New South Wales in a vivid yellow cover; shelves of pigments; improvised palettes; and canvases that lean against walls or hang overhead in various stages of becoming. At the centre of it all stands Beaumont herself, brush in hand, Blundstones on.

Elizabeth Beaumont was among the first artists to exhibit at Michael Reid Southern Highlands, when the gallery’s program was still in its infancy. Her debut solo exhibition, Everlasting, marked an important turning point in her career. Its immediate success gave her the confidence to commit fully to painting. Since then, she has presented two further solo exhibitions and appeared in several significant group exhibitions, each body of work revealing an artist growing steadily more assured in her language of abstraction.

Each of Beaumont’s paintings is anchored by mark-making at once broad and fluttering, and tonal decisions that celebrate the honey yellows and rich earth spectrum of her local landscape. The painterly arabesques and flecks of pigment suggest a place in flux, rippling with life.

One of the great strengths of abstract painting is its capacity to preserve the movements of its creation. Every gesture, revision and hesitation remains embedded within the finished surface. Rather than pursuing a figurative likeness, abstraction allows an artist to distil experience to its essentials: travelling lines scoring a canvas, layered colour, and the multitude of associations these simple elements can evoke.

For Beaumont, the Australian bush is an enduring source of inspiration. Across these twelve paintings is the unmistakable feeling of moving through it: brushing past flowering shrubs, breathing the scent of eucalyptus, stepping into shafts of light beneath the canopy. Hers is not a landscape observed from afar, but one experienced from within.