“A dance between my memory, the paint and the canvas”: Emily Eldridge

Tyger Gallery’s exciting Summer Showcase features the brilliant work of Emily Eldridge.

What you see in the landscape around you may not be the same as what the landscape around you makes you feel, and how you experience it. So landscape painting doesn’t need to mean a photo-realistic capture of a moment in time at a specific place.

Emily Eldridge is a rising star painter whose stunning work focuses on the feeling of being in a landscape.

Working from a beautiful studio surrounded by towering marri trees in the heart of the Wooditjup Forest in Margaret River, south Western Australia, Emily creates landscapes rich in colour with deeply layered texture.

“My first love was the land,” she says.

“I spent my childhood climbing the fig trees on my grandfather's farm in Berry, NSW. Being alone and on the land exposes magic moments shared between self and mother nature.”

“It's these precious moments of noticing how the light hits moving water or how the bark juts out on a trunk with a glow that marks my visual memory.”

Emily’s outstanding works are created from her memories of a place rather than how it is in a photograph.

“I never paint from photographs, only visual memory. I let the feeling and moments with the places I spend time drive the flow of my paintings.”

“I paint standing up, moving over my piece for hours at a time, switching between palette knives, sprays, inks and brushes. It's a dance between my memory, the paint and the canvas.”

A consistent theme in Emily’s work are golden orbs - a universal symbol for energy which offsets the linear shape of the trees but is also an energetic representation of the life force these forests hold.

Emily has four stunning works in Tyger’s Summer Showcase - Flow Against Rocks, Wooditjup Forest, Forest Energy, and Southern Ocean Blues. The paintings combine a palette of southern ocean blues of the southwest landscapes with striking gold, copper and bronze accents.

She says she hopes the works in Summer Showcase remind viewers to feel and experience the landscape, as well as see it.

“It's my hope that people will lose attachments to traditional landscape painting and be lost in a moment of beauty and spontaneity. Perfecting a painting to look like its photograph distorts the way it exists in our mind, we lose our sense of how it made us feel,” she says.

“I hope my paintings will remind people to share precious moments with the land and not be afraid to depict it as one feels it.”

Summer Showcase runs until 3 January at Tyger.

Don’t forget we’ve got extended opening hours this December! From this week we’re open Thursdays 12-4, in addition to our normal Friday to Sunday 10-4 opening hours.

We’ll also be open for Yass’ Christmas Late Night Shopping evenings on 14 and 21 December.