Kathryn Dolby Brings 'the outside in' With Contemporary Painting

If I’m not painting, I spend a lot of time walking and driving through the landscape in the Northern Rivers, on Bundjalung country. Walking from my home studio, past long lines of macadamia farms and tall, leaning, ever-green trees that appear to be reaching their arms out to touch. 

 

I remember musing with an artist friend, about why we paint the clouds, the trees & the natural world. We both said quite simply ‘to bring the outside in’. I also think about how I take the ‘inside out’ by personifying the trees and imagining them as emotive, relatable characters filled with metaphor and symbolism. As I move through these familiar landscapes, new compositions catch my eye and pops of colour appear where light touches. 

On the morning before my recent exhibition at OTOMYS ‘Feeling Into Form’ opened, I visited the Ian Potter centre, NGV with my dad, where we looked for hours at the paintings of Grace Crowley (who is my great, great aunt). Her later paintings result in vibrant blocks of colour, which find balance and unity in simplified forms. One of her compositions in particular (Abstract Painting, 1952) held my eyes for a long time.

 

I began drawing a small composition from within the composition of her painting in a small journal. I wasn’t sure at the time why this particular grouping of shapes was so intriguing to me at the time, until I returned to my studio a few days later and noticed a photograph I had taken of a passageway of the macadamia plantation I walk past regularly. It features exactly the same shape I had been drawn to from within Grace’s painting. 

One of the books I keep returning to is ‘The Creative Act: A way of Being’ by Rick Rubin. It’s a liberating text full of gentle reminders to trust your instincts. He speaks about how ‘the material exists hidden within’ and how ‘the work reveals itself as you go’.

 

Another special book I bought recently which also features Grace is ‘Odd Roads to be Walking’ by Paul Finucane and Catherine Stuart. The text profiles 156 women who shaped Australian Art. I’m filled with admiration for these women who, despite incredible odds, paved the way forward for future generations, regardless of the stereotypes about gender. ‘This transformation was not a chance occurrence but came about through the collective vision, energy, determination of a cadre of women who challenged the status quo and changed the artistic landscape.’ 

Last but not least, I’d like to mention a local artist whose work has excited me recently, with its simultaneous playfulness and intensity is Adrienne Kenafaker. ‘Working across the mediums of sculpture, performance and installation, she investigates the potential of objects as physical, psychological and extra sensory archives of emotion, story and place’. Her work was recently exhibited in a solo show at a wonderful new gallery in Lismore ‘Flying Arch’, directed by Jordan Rochfort. Definitely worth a visit if in the area! 

I have an enduring desire to bridge the gap between abstraction and representation and to follow these instinctive threads that inspire and unravel into bodies of work.