Adam Pyett: New Paintings

“For this exhibition I have continued to paint landscapes. Landscape painting seems to be best suited for me to be able to explore the main subject of my work which is the craft of painting. While making a painting my main focus is on doing what is best for the painting rather than doing what most accurately depicts the landscape subject. In this body of work I have continued my practice of making a graphite pencil drawing in the bush and using that as the reference to make a painting in the studio. Throughout the process from drawing to finished painting I am distilling what I see in the landscape. I want the finished painting to be essential rather than accurate.

The landscapes depicted in this exhibition are from either close to my home in the Macedon Ranges, Victoria or from the Flinders Ranges, Ikara, South Australia. I camped at the Flinders Ranges several times as a child accompanying my dad, Chistopher Pyett. He used to teach Fine Art, Painting at Monash University and each year for a few years would take students to the Flinders Ranges to make work. These trips were obviously quite formative for me and I have vivid memories and a great fondness for the remarkable landscape of the area. I visited the Flinders Ranges for the first time in many years in 2023. It is such a beautiful place with a very distinct light, I plan to return many times. Closer to home the tall eucalypts and distant hills continue to be of interest. For a while I have been using the tall trees to look through, often without painting the top or bottom of the trees. This lets me treat the sky and hillside behind the trees more as pattern.

When standing in a landscape the scene can seem to be of impossible complexity. Part of the act of drawing and painting is about distilling the complexity of what your eye sees. When the painting is seen by someone else, they must interpret it and reconstruct the scene. I like to allow some of the complexity to remain so there is still a puzzle to be solved.” – Adam Pyett, 2024

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Pyett’s work has been recognised in numerous curated exhibitions including ‘Australiana: Designing a Nation’ at Bendigo Art Gallery (2023), ‘Margaret Olley from the collection’ (2024) and ‘Margaret’s House’ (2020) at Tweed Regional Gallery and Margaret Olley Art Centre and with a solo survey exhibition, ‘Still Life Painting’ at Geelong Gallery (2017). He has been a finalist in the Len Fox Painting Prize, John Leslie Art Prize, and the Geelong Contemporary Art Prize. His work is part of the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria, Monash University Museum of Art, Geelong Gallery, Art Gallery of Ballarat, Tweed Regional Gallery and Artbank, in addition to private collections in Australia and the USA.