Late last year Ondine Seabrook found herself on an unplanned month-long holiday in the place where she grew up, Sydney’s Northern Beaches. She didn’t intend on painting. Her time was spent just being; observing the changing light of the day, the shifting tides of the sea from morning to evening, the morphing shades of the coastal landscape in response to the sky. It had been a long time since she’d rendered her home turf with a brush, but just being there, absorbing those familiar surrounds, lit a spark of inspiration.
A few months later, Ondine embarked on a painting trip to the Menindee Lakes just outside of Broken Hill with a couple of her fellow artists. The lakes were full for the first time in years with what she describes as an “otherworldly milky-coloured water – and full of life.” Not a typical sight in the middle of the Australian desert. There she observed the light of that strange oasis shift in subtle waves, producing a spectrum of unearthly colours, just as she had seen during her stay by the sea.
Back in her studio, the unifying threads between these two vastly different landscapes slowly emerged. The familiar began to harmonise with the unfamiliar through the visual effect of light on water and the colours born of the interaction. Sunset Strip, Ondine’s fourth solo exhibition with China Heights, represents a dialogue between two seemingly disparate worlds – a rhythmical dance of desert and sea.
Using snapshots to jog her memory, the artist divulges her emotional response to these anomalous landscapes through her signature soft, gestural brushstrokes and intricate colour work. Burnt oranges, sunset pinks, washed blues and shots of brilliant red are layered upon darker backgrounds, which she says “allows for bold and hazy colours to simultaneously pop and fade, creating a very specific atmosphere and mood.”
The interplay of light, colour and land remains the key study throughout Ondine’s work. Just as nature dances between states of light and shadow, wildness and repose, Ondine approaches the canvas with a bold yet sensitive hand. She’s drawn to places that evoke a complexity of feeling, a sense of wonder, and her impressionistic portraits of those places seek to do the same. “I always let the painting take life of its own. It becomes a balancing act between colours and marks. Like nature itself always changing in the moment. Through this process the work becomes less realistic and more a reflection of how I see the world.”