Homecoming

The historic Rocks district is Eora/Sydney painter Emily Gordon’s most enduring muse: a place that has seized her creative imagination and compelled her to the canvas for years, the last six of which she has spent as a represented artist with Michael Reid Northern Beaches.

In this time, Gordon has cemented her name as one of the most closely followed and widely supported artists in the stable. It is a profile built piece by piece, and brick by sandstone brick, across a growing catalogue of pictures that together form an oeuvre devoted to this glittering city.

The gelato-coloured rooftops, the warm sandstone facades, the arching spine of the Harbour Bridge: these are sights that have long been marvelled at and committed to paint by an important lineage of Australian artists, perhaps most notably Grace Cossington Smith and Dorrit Black.

Like Cossington Smith, it is the distinctive character of Australian light that provides the organising principle of Emily Gordon’s work. Light cuts across the Victorian facades, throwing interesting shapes and shadows; the pale sandstone takes on a burning golden hue, simmering bronze against peach-coloured skies.

Gordon is a master at capturing this light, and in ‘Homecoming’ we see her gift in outstanding form. If these scenes offer more than the pleasure of recognising a certain pub, house or street; if they quicken the senses and cause that little flutter of the heart, it is perhaps because Gordon herself was just as excited to see them again, and to become reacquainted with a place she knows so intimately.

“Homecoming is quite literally the tale of coming home,” she says. “After a two-year hiatus, creating in makeshift workspaces, our family returned to our home in the north end of the Sydney CBD, and I was reunited with my wonderful studio, with its big western window.”