Rainforest & Metaphor
The Forest Painted
The perpetual aridity in Australian landscape has been celebrated over its treasured luxuriance for so long, that it starts to seem ominous, if not perverse. On the same note, maybe one day the medium will become part of the message the way 'real' life intended. Perhaps the whole-hearted use of colourfully seductive, liquefied mineral toxins to give homage to natural environments, will begin to look like an irony.
New media choices and technologies burgeon, but the hierarchical dominance of paint remains deeply ingrained. The effective relationship of paint to the images it is used to convey, continues to be disregarded, in sickness and in health.
As a rule painters belong to the legions of artists still blissfully unaware of the true significance of both the substances and the methods they are using to make their artifacts.
Art critics have traditionally fared even less well in the matter of substance/process literacy, hence the tiresome but unabated Art vs. Craft issue. It's enough to discuss 'concept' never mind substance and its meaning. Stick to the topography never mind the geology! Maps, not soil, and where we're going, not how we are growing, that's what matters! But they always leave the painters thinking they're at least on safe ground.
Sylvia Ditchburn persists with oil paint to ascertain her Eden the way Eve (it is hinted) might have latched on to the apple. Subsequently it is hard to avoid being drawn to analogies between method and subject. One looks for dense layering, varietal richness, interdependence of elements, in a way that suggests fragile complexity of interrelationships in the visual field.
The first works in her Rainforest & Metaphor series seem