A Sense of Fulfilment: Colin Pennock

In A Sense of Fulfilment, Colin Pennock draws on two encounters with the same setting – the first as a young man, the second in his sixties. His initial experience at the Cloister of Saint-Paul de Mausole in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where Vincent van Gogh spent a year convalescing in 1889, was one of sublime, solitary communion with the landscape, seen from the window at which van Gogh painted Starry Night. Returning forty years later, he found the place altered – the cicada-heavy silence broken by crowds of sightseers, the cypresses no longer standing. Yet something essential to the setting endured: a deep, mineral stillness to which he felt exquisitely attuned.

 

The paintings that comprise this exhibition extend from a series of en plein air sketches Pennock made during a residency in the South of France in the summer of 2025, the artist transcribing his impressions in washes of luminous gouache. Back in Australia, he worked into these with the intuitive impasto mark-making that has characterised his mature practice. Retaining the immediacy of those first notations, the resulting compositions possess a novel lightness, a vibrancy of tone and movement paired with a quiet clarity of vision.

 

Though Pennock has long pursued an associative engagement with his chosen medium, the past decade has seen figurative suggestions of landscape distil from his otherwise abstract gestures. A Sense of Fulfilment marks a further turn towards more descriptive passages. Limber trees appear, limestone outcrops – verdant life set against unmoving rock. Yet even here, these moments do not so much describe the literal likeness of a given scene as his subjective experience in relation to it.

 

“The rustle of an olive grove has something very secret in it, and immensely old,” van Gogh wrote to his brother of the countryside beyond the cloister. “It is too beautiful for us to dare to paint it or be able to imagine it.” It is perhaps to this secret that Pennock attends, transcribing the essence of the landscape as addressed to the self – an essence that abides beneath the flux, like smooth stones beneath the stream.