Juan Ford Whitewash

This work comes from a series I’ve been working on since 2007, inspired by ruminations on landscape I’ve had during a series of trips to the Australian outback – in this case, while driving part of the Darling River Run (Bourke to Wentworth, via four-wheel drive tracks).

I pondered the difficulties, even the peculiarity, of painting the Australian landscape. Why even do it anymore? For being in the bush is nothing like being before even the most faithful painting of it. I can’t hope to obtain the deep connection Indigenous owners have to their land. Yet I do respond to this land and love it; I want to protect it, not exploit it. How could I paint all this?

So I determined to pour paint over our native flora, to ‘paint it’, literally. Pouring paint on native flora is an absurd act, analogous to the way that mere painted representations of our landscape are absurd.

Juan Ford, 2012