John Waller

From the artist: 

My paintings are derived from the Australian landscape for which I feel a deep empathy. I am concerned with the craft of painting; the immediate quality of media, particularly oil pigment, and its evocative textures. 

As a boy growing up in Mildura I was free to roam under the vast hot sky, far away from the irrigated symmetry of the orange groves and out to the windswept sand dunes, where ancient artefacts and the skeletal remains of extinct fauna would sometimes become visible under the constantly shifting landscape. Each of my paintings begins with a figure. This figure lies under the subsequent layers of paint that are applied and scraped back multiple times, building, swirling and then fading across the surface of the canvas. Sometimes the figure is just a memory in the finished story.