The work: Justine Wahlin, Mountain, 2023. Acrylic painting on canvas mounted on board, framed, 74.5 x 47.5cm. Courtesy: the artist.
“I know a painting is finished when it evokes a feeling in me or shows me a place I am yet to see,” says Sydney-based artist Justine Wahlin, whose luminous works straddle the boundary between abstraction and figuration. Always beginning as a meditation on colour and form, the artist’s paintings slowly coalesce into views upon the landscape of a strange world, familiar, yet also totally alien. The piece Mountain is part of an ongoing process of clarification and development from an initial work, River Through the Built World, which resolved itself into what was almost a bird’s eye view over unfamiliar terrain. Mountain sees the artist zooming in on this brilliantly hued topography. “As it formed”, the artist states, “it signalled to me a time in my childhood where mining towns led to the sea”. The colour pink has a commanding presence in the work, replacing the blue of ocean or sky. This pink is contrasted with the ruptured passages of blue, red and gold, demarcating human intervention into this reality’s natural forms. Even this alternate universe is not safe from the unceasing march of humanity towards expansion, but this blush landscape sees these changes with an overarching sense of hope writ large across the horizon.