John Waller

My work is derived from the Australian landscape for which I feel a deep connection, and encapsulates a dualistic exploration of the landscape remembered, and the physical process of painting as an ongoing dialogue between surface and memory. Each of my paintings begins with a drawn figure, over which geometric shapes are then overlaid. Pigments are applied; scraped, daubed, pushed, and stretched, the process a continual act of layering and editing, contributing to a layered aesthetic of space and time. As a boy growing up in Mildura, I was free to roam under the vast hot sky far away from the irrigated symmetry of the orange groves and out to the windswept sand dunes, where ancient artefacts and the skeletal remains of extinct fauna would sometimes become visible under the constantly shifting landscape. These memories remain with me today and continue to inform my work. As an adult I was fortunate to have the opportunity to work with the indigenous artists of Lajamanu in central Australia. The experience of flying over the boundless outback terrain in a single engine plane brought another perspective to my experience of the Australian landscape. Today, working from my Fitzroy studio, I have a wealth of inspiration to draw upon and continue to explore the potent relationship between landscape, memory, surface and colour, how I respond to that, and that others might relate to.