“In this body of work I have concentrated on making landscape paintings where the painting is more important than the landscape. In a painting the sky need not be blue and the leaves of a tree need not be green. The relationship between colours in a painting is the most important thing.
My practice is to make drawings from life using graphite pencil or charcoal but without using colour. I then make paintings from the drawings. This process imposes a separation between the colours I see when drawing the subject and the colours I choose when making the painting. The relationship between colours in a developing painting is the biggest influence on the colours I choose.
Another important element in my landscape paintings is memory. After using a drawing to start a painting I refer back to the drawing less and less as the painting progresses. My memory of the original scene as well as countless other memories of trees, cloudy days, sunny days, mornings, afternoons, distant hills, dry grass etc. combine to inform the development of each painting. When working on a painting I’m always looking for it to evoke a memory of sunlight and shadows on a tree or a distant hill or a cold morning or whatever. Once I see it I stop.
There is an internal logic to a painting. For example the feeling of sunlight on leaves is achieved by creating the right relationship between the colours used for the leaves against those used for the sky and those used for the shadows. The relationship between the colours in the painting is more important than the colours as seen in nature.
Making a painting and pushing it towards being finished is an act of balancing my memory of the scene with the colours in the painting and all the while trying to make a successful composition. A painting works when it is rewarding to look at rather than when it accurately represents the subject. The most important thing is always the painting.” Adam Pyett, 2020
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Recent Paintings is Adam Pyett’s second solo exhibition at Jan Murphy Gallery. Pyett graduated from Victorian College of the Arts with a Bachelor of Fine Art in 2014. He has a forthcoming solo exhibition at Tweed Regional Gallery (2020) and his work has been previously recognised with a solo survey, Still Life Painting at Geelong Gallery (2017), inclusion in Ballarat Art Gallery’s Romancing the Skull (2017) and Painting More Painting at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2016). His work is part of the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria, Monash University Museum of Art, Geelong Gallery, Art Gallery of Ballarat and Artbank, in addition to private collections in Australia and the USA.
Image: Morning sunlight2020, oil on linen, framed, 102.0 x 92.0 cm
