Notes From My Travels

Lucy Vader, alongside Melanie Waugh, opens the new Michael Reid Southern Highlands gallery with her inaugural exhibition Notes From My Travels. This most recent exhibition has been a triumph, with each painting surviving the recent catastrophic floods of Lismore. What we see in Lucy Vader is an artist who has incredible tenacity and has honed her exquisite painting skills with clear visual articulation. She has spent considerable time refining her visual language into one that manages to avoid any resemblance of streamlined landscape painting. Unsurprisingly for someone whose family has farmed for generations, Lucy Vader conveys a landscape that has been both seen and felt. She applies paint in thick, sumptuous layers blurring the boundary between abstraction and representation. Stand close to one of Vader’s works and her brushstrokes draw you into a richly textured world of deep colours – green, yellow, red and blue. Move away from the canvas and wide, grassy paddocks emerge, frequently populated by sheep – golden and camouflaged against parched yellow land, or with bright white fleeces that contrast with rain-restored grass.