Harbour Held

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.

In this latest series, Waugh turns her attention to the cherished inlets and headlands of Eora/Sydney, from Cremorne Point to Shelley Beach and Cottage Point, capturing the region’s shifting shoreline light and lush, sculptural vegetation in her signature gestural style. These are scenes rendered not with photographic precision but with emotional clarity, inviting viewers to inhabit the artist’s experience of place, immersive, responsive, alive to nuance.

Across the exhibition, sailboats skim across aquamarine water, sandstone pathways wind through coastal scrub, and brilliant green fronds burst forward from the foreground. A red lighthouse, perched on a cliff edge, gazes over the glittering surface of the harbour. A white beacon is glimpsed through strappy leaves and dappled light. These are views familiar to many, yet rendered afresh through Waugh’s loose, intuitive application of paint. Each brushstroke carries the weight of both memory and immediacy.

Waugh’s practice is process-driven. Working from plein air sketches, photographs and her own recollections, she paints not to replicate a scene but to distil it, to capture something of its mood, tempo and quiet exhilaration. “The intention was to combine composition, tone and the application of paint so that I become completely immersed in the puzzle that is painting,” she says.

Her paintings embrace nature’s slower, salubrious rhythms. They hum with warmth and movement, yet they are grounded in a kind of contemplative stillness, the hush of a moment held, the feeling of standing before a view and being quietly, wordlessly stilled by it. “It is thrilling to stumble upon a view such as a gum tree at the right time of day where glimmering light falls perfectly on a branch,” Waugh explains, “and then if I am able to use the action of just one brushstroke to capture this moment, it brings me an enormous amount of satisfaction as an artist.”

This new body of work deepens Waugh’s relationship with the east coast landscapes that have long inspired her. While previous series such as Due North travelled northward to Byron Bay, Harbour Held returns south, drawing focus to Sydney’s inner waterways and the enduring allure of its harbour. The result is a painterly ode to water, light and place, to the leafy enclaves and sea-worn tracks that line the edges of the city, and the personal histories we attach to them.

These are paintings full of affection, movement and memory. In their shifting play of colour and form, they remind us of the great beauty in simply looking, pausing and holding a view, however briefly, before it slips away.