Above: Sherylle Dovaston, While I Was Waiting, 2023. Mixed media painting, 81 x 106cm. $2150. Courtesy: the artist.
Perth-based artist Sherylle Dovaston describes her aesthetic methodology as “convergence”, where the artist brings together memory and sensation through the medium of paint. In While I Was Waiting, a mundane moment is made remarkable, as physical reality tangles with sensory perception. The artist clearly remembers the experience, had while waiting at an unremarkable rest stop during a long journey along the Western Australian coast. She was diverted from thoughts of her destination by the view – bursts of rosy pink where blooming Melaleuca Ryeae dotted the dunes along the roadside. The artist took a moment to appreciate the scene, one that would likely have been missed as a blur through a car window had she not stopped to admire it. By forgoing a realist approach, the viewer is treated to the scene as the artist truly viewed it, through the lens of her own experience. The sea of flowers, some fading with age, rise and fall across the endless landscape, all details subsumed by the riot of colour. The dunes snake back and forth, the movement of the sand caught by the artist’s organic approach to mark making. Dovaston does not want to record a landscape, but rather a singular experience within the landscape, glowing and awash with life.