Artist in Residence, 2023

Contemporary Art Spaces, Mandurah, Western Australia

I have been fortunate to be able to immerse myself in creativity at the CASM studio for three full months. I began this residency with an open mind and no specific goals in place. I only knew I was interested in our deep connection to the natural world. The precious time here has helped to crystallise my vision in terms of what I want to paint, and has resulted in several new threads of work to follow.

Landscape, wetlands with green vegetation and pools of water, blue sky mostly covered in white clouds. A boardwalk;k with a small white and tan dog walking towards the viewer.

My starting point was the beautiful Lake Goegrup wetlands near my house. This is my place of peace and where I walk every day with my dog.

A magical encounter with an Osprey led me to think of painting my experiences in nature. I think landscape painting can be more than the representation of what I see before me. It can be transcendent, can translate the feeling of being there, the presence felt, the spirits that might lie behind it all and the combination of feeling, thought and understanding inside the first-hand experience. There is also the fact that it is not just me visiting this place; I am being visited too, by the creatures who live there.

Osprey standing on a branch, with a fish in its claws, looking at the fish about to take another bite. The background is out of focus trees tree tops, with the light transformed into bubbles of light.

To maintain a close connection to nature, I painted en plein air at the lake or on the coast and made a collection of small works in oil on paper, which I completed in the studio. I mostly went out on cool or cloudy days, or at dusk, in order to avoid the summer heat.

A painting of a landscape in portrait orientation. It shows wetlands with a pink sky and pink light reflected in the water. The background looks misty and there is land on the far side of a lake.

An encounter with an osprey informed the next part of my work. Walking with my dog at the lake, I received these blessings from the great spirit: an osprey was hovering above the water looking for fish, I saw her dive, hit the water and return to the air. Then she flew right over our heads, as if she recognised us, observing us.

She flew up again, hovering, and right beside her in the sky was the waxing moon. Flapping her wings in and out, with each turn of the wing towards us the underside feathers caught the sunlight and flashed white.

We walked on to the other end of the boardwalk and just approaching the tree where she usually sits to eat her catch, suddenly there she was, fish in her claws, landing right above us! I watched a while as she tore pieces off the fish. The fish scales floated down around like sparse snowflakes, sparkling in the sun.

An osprey in flight, looking down. The wing tip on the left goes off the edge of the canvas. Under the right wing is a waxing moon and the sky is moving in brushstrokes of white and blue-purple-cobalt. with a pink underlying colour.

The osprey was almost always there when I visited the lake, and this led me to wonder about my place in nature and how the osprey perceived my presence. I wondered what it would be like to touch the Osprey or even to become the osprey and see through its eyes.

I started to explore these ideas through some small studies about drawing closer to other beings with the sense of touch and the empathic desire to see from the perspective of nature.

A hand touching feathers, with and rich umber in colour. We do not see the whole bird but it is the osprey.

A female figure lies sleeping. She is wearing a dress of white feathers and she has osprey wings of rich umber.

All of the studies, paintings and thoughts that came out of this residency have given me a rich seam of potential future creativity. I feel so lucky to have had this chance!

The Kennedy Prize 2023 Finalist

©Eveline Ruys