Sue Smalkowksi: 'From One to Another'

Sue Smalkowski’s art is a personal response to varying Australian landscapes and while Sue lives by the beach on the South Coast of NSW, she travels widely for inspiration. This current exhibition is a conversation – between nature, between Sue and the viewer.

Sue’s paintings render, in oil, watercolour and ink, nature’s ever-evolving, visual vocabulary. While there is an aesthetic response to lines, composition, brushwork, shadow, light, colour, contours and textures, there is, simultaneously, a deeper, emotive form of communication between the artist and the viewer.

“From One to Another” invites both artist and viewer to reciprocate the rhythms and rhetoric of the natural world. Sue’s discerning and constantly evaluative artistic eye allows her to portray larger visual fields. Artworks traverse depictions of desert sage brush clustered by red rock, to the lightness of elevation and melting snow during a warm winter in Kosciusko. We are immersed in afternoon shadows cast in the bushland of the Wodi Wodi Track and the soft light of daybreak evoking quietness and solitude in central Australia’s Kings Canyon. From one locale to another.

The viewer’s eye follows pathways created by brushwork or shadowing, sensing the constant movement of the natural world, seeking a connection to nature’s rhythms; its cadences, its resonances. The multilayered stories that each of these paintings reveal, begins with the artist and is, in turn, thus divulged to the viewer. It is a reverberating conversation; one that constantly evolves and regenerates. These paintings are never-ending stories. Each time the art is viewed, in a new light, in a new space; a differing nuance is evoked or perceived and nature, as it is captured on canvas, becomes our teacher.

In this sense, Sue’s latest collection keeps the viewer travelling geographically and cerebrally – compelling the viewer to reconsider the interconnectedness of desert, coastal, highland and bush topographies. These paintings encourage viewers to partake in a personal communication with forms of nature that are ever-changing and ever-communicative. “From One to Another” embraces an appreciation of, and a simultaneous sharing and respect, for varying topographical terrains: an artist’s visual chronicle of, and homage to, an interconnected nature.

– Dr Robyn Morris