Not many can say they have touched a cloud, but Amanda Penrose Hart recalls the day one dissolved between her fingers as she reached beyond the window threshold of her Grob sailplane glider—an instant of contact with something simultaneously ‘present and immaterial’1. This paradox lies at the heart of White Water, a recent series of work that capture another incarnation of her deeply felt relationship with the Australian landscape. Her compositions—marked by escarpments, riverbeds, the curvature of gravel walking tracks, stone and deciduous branches—are anchored by a sky that often overwhelms the frame. Clouds become more than meteorological phenomena; they are emblems of transience, mirroring the fleetingness of memory of one’s sense of belonging to place. Clouds refract and reflect light, revealing or concealing the horizon, arriving in formations that are at once soft-edged and hard to hold—can appear dolloped haphazardly, or barely whispered into form. In this mutability, they echo the shifting terrain of one’s interiority, a sense of self shaped not by fixed coordinates but by lived experience.
Painting en plein air situates Amanda in direct conversation with these elements, allowing the landscape to reveal itself slowly, across hours or seasons. Her clouds are not decorative; they are meditations on impermanence, painted with palette knife and memory alike. They cast shadows that transform land and water yet hold their own shifting palette—iridescent mollusc pinks, mustards, mauve and stark greys— until the sun breaks through or disappears beyond the horizon line. In this way, place is not merely observed but lived, built from these fleeting interactions between body, light, and air.
As Amanda has noted, her paintings are about ‘where I am at the time,’ both geographically and emotionally, an atmospheric theatre between the earth and sky. Art critic Dr Andrew Frost has remarked on her ability to create a ‘familiarity with landscapes unseen’2, a reflection of how clouds can evoke recognition even when the land below is unfamiliar. There is, as naturist Bernd Heinrich suggests, an instinctual dimension to this kind of place-making- felt by one’s sense of self—a knowledge that precedes explanation.
And as author Patrick White observed, the universe is a place where beauty is sustained not by explanation, but by awe. In Amanda’s work, this is held in the clouds: transient, suspended, and yet utterly tethered to the earth below. They mark not only what we see, but how we feel the places we move through—how we carry them, and how, sometimes, they dissolve just as we begin to hold them.
Teah Linnegar, 2025
Footnotes:
1. Dr Sarah Engeldow, catalogue essay, Dragonflies, King Street Gallery on William, 2023
2. Dr Andrew Frost, ‘Place and Idea: On Amanda Penrose Hart’s landscapes’, catalogue essay, Un bel dì vedremo; One fine day we’ll see, King Street Gallery on William, 2019
