Exhibition, fourth in the seasonal cycle
Paintings of the Wet Season
Oils and mixed media made during the summer rains
The canvases in this room were painted across one rainy season, not assembled afterwards from sketches. The artist worked from a shed on the edge of a grazing camp, setting up whenever the light changed and the rain moved across the pasture. What is hanging now is the record of that stretch of weather, kept in the order it was made.
- Medium
- Oil and mixed media on canvas and board
- Made
- Over a single summer rainy season
- Hang
- Plain grid, eye level, read left to right
Storm light over pasture, the subject the whole sequence keeps returning to.
Weather as the subject, not the backdrop
Most of these surfaces were built wet-on-wet, one passage laid into another before either had dried. That method leaves the brush marks doing the work a sky would normally do: dragging, thinning, letting an edge bleed where the rain came in. Nothing here was tidied up later. Where a canvas looks unresolved, it is because the weather that day was unresolved too.
The gallery hangs the paintings in a plain grid at eye level rather than spacing them as single pictures. Seen in sequence, the colour shifts read as a slow change in the season, from the first hard downpours to the softer light that follows. A small caption beside each canvas records the maker, the medium, the year and the place it was painted.
What to look at closely
- Edges where one wet passage was pulled into the next, leaving a soft seam rather than a drawn line.
- Thin, scraped areas of board showing through, usually where the light was changing fastest.
- The green-grey range that only appears under cloud, distinct from the warmer tones of the dry months.
The online room mirrors this hang canvas by canvas, and the zoom view keeps the brush marks and canvas grain visible after the physical show comes down. See the full record in the exhibition archive, or read how each show is documented in the gallery's programme notes.