When the rains finally came in January everything changed.
For years, the land around Walcha had been scorched by drought – old trees and native grasses had died off as they were stripped away by the heat, the unrelenting dry reducing everything to a desiccated shadow. For Ross Laurie it had felt like the end of everything: the land had been stripped back to its bones, a lack of colour was the whole world.
To paint there – and in that time – was therefore an act of responding to the seemingly never-ending drought, a place where farmers and graziers struggled to make a living, yet a land not without its own beauty.
– Dr Andrew Frost, 2020 (catalogue essay)
