Above: Julie McCurry, Ben Ricketts Jamberoo, 2023. Oil painting, 40 x 50cm. $850. Courtesy: the artist.
Julie McCurry’s work Ben Ricketts Jamberoo was selected by Lethbridge Small Scale Art Award as a finalist in the Salon des Refusés section last year, unsurprising given the intensity of hue and expression of application it possesses which belies its diminutive size. The artist uses oils for her landscapes, giving McCurry the freedom to create a sense of depth and mood, here used to survey the undergrowth of a patch of trees in the Ben Ricketts Environmental Preserve near Jamberoo in New South Wales. Vivid burgundies caress the undersides of the branches, while the brilliant blue sky appears to peek through the foliage. McCurry usually starts her works observing the landscape en plein air, at this point using gouache to capture the dramatic colours of the Australian bush. The artist says she prefers not to use photography to record her subjects. “It stifles my freedom to use memory and sensation of being in a place”. From her impressions she creates fully-fledged recollections of her time in the landscape, informed by visual cues as much as by her experience of being within that moment. Ben Ricketts Jamberoo is not merely a depiction of a landscape, it is an encounter with the natural world, mediated through McCurry’s brush.