Amanda Penrose Hart’s pictures capture that sense of strange familiarity we have with place – we sense it perhaps more than know it, yet its emotional resonance is acute. We are continually drawn back to a landscape that’s taken from life.
Hart’s canvases depict landscapes around New South Wales, some near to her studio in Sofala, others around the central west of the state, others in the Southern Highlands near Canberra and Lake George. Penrose Hart is an en plain air painter, driving around in search of a location, using her instinct rather than a GPS to guide her, always on the look out for a scene that’s compelling enough to make her stop and set up her large-scale canvases.
– Dr Andrew Frost, 2019 (catalogue essay)
