ABOUT THE ARTIST

Australia. Red earth. Chalk-white beaches. Turquoise seas darkening in storm. Australia's landscapes made me paint.
   Everything is so dominating. The colours so stark. The light so white. Nothing cautious or hesitant. When it rains, the skies open and it is as though thousands of buckets of water are poured over us with immense force. A day, two days - the rain can continue uninterrupted. Yet much of the country gets no rain at all. In some regions, it has not rained for seven years. Everything is brittle, tinder-dry, flammable.
I spent eight months in a little town by the sea 1,000 kilometres north of Sydney, and was captivated. The countryside is not the only inspiration. The aborigines' art is dominated by earth tones: ochre, sand, soot.

Intricate dot patterns and lines form symbols that only aborigines may interpret. A life might be depicted, or a path indicated to a spring in the hills. Poisonous snakes are portrayed to disarm their threat and win their friendship. Aborigine art is a solid inspiration, but I seek my own signs and paths, and own my own colour scale.
   Everything I paint is nourished by Australia's rural landscape - wallpaper fragments from an abandoned shed or the beach in the morning before the tide reclaims the treasures washed up overnight. I draw lines in the wet sand that are soon erased, letting me admire the new patterns formed on the bottom. Continuous, never-ending, harmonious shapes.
Agneta Karlström Loughran

Exhibitions

• 2006 Waywood Gallery,
Byron Bay

• 2006 FEVA, Community
Centre, Byron Bay

 

 

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