Harbour Held
- Melanie Waugh
- 31 Jul—31 Aug 2025
Following the luminous success of Due North, Bellingen-based contemporary painter Melanie Waugh returns with Harbour Held, a radiant new body of work that anchors her expressive brushwork and coastal sensibility to Sydney’s iconic harbour landscapes. These new paintings, completed during the cooler months, return to the cherished inlets and headlands of Eora/Sydney—from Cremorne Point to Shelley Beach and Cottage Point—where sandstone pathways wind through coastal scrub and brilliant green fronds burst from the foreground. “Sydney Harbour is a favourite subject of mine which is probably confusing to a lot of people because I don’t live there anymore,” Waugh says. “I return to it over and over again and yet the subjects seem endless.”
Inflected with memory, the works incorporate more recognisable manmade structures—“a lighthouse, a bridge, a cemetery”—yet remain tethered to the shifting shoreline light and lush vegetation of the New South Wales coastline. These are scenes rendered not with photographic precision but with emotional clarity. As Waugh puts it, “The real reason I paint the nooks of Sydney Harbour I believe is because of the nostalgia it holds for me, having left the city after 23 years.”
Waugh’s practice is instinctive, process-driven, and rooted in drawing. “I have always known how to draw and did a lot of watercolours as a child,” she recalls. “It was the natural progression to move from drawing to painting… I didn’t need anyone else to help me and could pack it in my backpack.” She works in oil alla prima, beginning most studio sessions by stretching her own canvases—“which prepares me to get in the zone to paint”—and completing each work in a single burst. “At heart I’m a plein air painter,” she explains. “It’s quite frantic… I don’t wait for layers to dry.” Working rapidly with large brushes, solvent, and palette knives, Waugh paints from memory, plein air sketches, and photographs, seeking not to replicate a scene but to distil it.
