Ross Laurie

Ross Laurie’s terrain is one of deep habitation. On the family farm in Walcha, repetition of action should lead to a certain intimacy with the land and yet the process of his painting is at deliberate odds with mere depiction. In a shifting light, nothing can be habitual. The new paintings are as close as he has ever come to landscape but, as he explains, they are not about grasping the ‘fact’ of the world. The tree is not green. The sky is not blue. And the black earth swallows the clouds like a snake in a creation myth. Laurie’s description of the land he knows is riven with inversions: “As the country on the farm and around this area is rarely flat, one looks across multiple horizontals/ diagonals. This allows for a certain type of vertical, horizontal diagonal play, which to some degree gets to the core of the paintings.”

– Anna Johnson, 2016 (catalogue essay)