Kelly Casey - Behind the Rugged Steep
Kelly Casey - Behind the Rugged Steep
Kelly Casey, Behind the Rugged Steep
Watercolour and gouache on paper, 69x51cm framed
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Kelly Casey is a Canberra based artist, living and working in the Snowy Monaro region. She works in a painterly style, creating loose and evocative landscape and portraiture. She draws heavily on raw sienna and umber, on prussian blue and the richness of orange, pink and gold oxides.
Kelly’s work features her local landscape; you’ll recognise the washaways and the mountains you see around you – big sky country. Kelly has been a finalist in many national art awards, including the Black Swan (now the Lester Prize), the Doug Moran, the Kennedy, the Basil Sellers, the Bermingham Landscape Prize for watercolour and more recently the Regional Landscape Prize.
“I like to paint. What I like to paint best of all is the landscape around me. It’s become a necessary thing; something essential. It takes time to work into landscape, its ambitious. You need to know who you are going into it, what you’re seeing, and what you want to say. You’ve got to have a palette that fits you.”
As landscapes go the Snowy Monaro is a large, rough, cracked and old place. It’s hot and its cold; it can be wet, but mostly its dry, and the wind can howl like a wild thing.
If you’ve been down here or read the work of Paterson you’ll know it can be productive country, but there is a rawness to it that you don’t find in the north. The rocks have worn through their coverings of soil and the trees are tough, they hang on.I feel a connection to this place, it’s made a mark. I hope in bringing these pieces here, I can share that in some measure.
You’ll notice a looseness in some work, an abstraction or sparsity of line in others – for me this is necessary when working with landscape. The land can be rich, or it can be bleak; it can be lush or harsh, but you can never quite see to the edges and its always in a state of movement. Every second of every day there are natural forces at work, and by way of retort - a myriad responses, adjustments and settlings. To have any chance of grasping it meaningfully I have to shoot for the essence of it, being generous with my interpretation. Sometimes starting out more boldly than is comfortable, other times excising restraint.
I hope you enjoy this work. I hope there are pieces in this set that resonate with you and that as a body of work it does its job in sharing my perspective on landscape.
*An acknowledgement of country
This show was drawn on the open spaces and big skies of the Snowy Monaro – the lands of the Ngarigo and the Ngunnawal. I pay my respects to the elders of the Ngarigo and the Ngunnawal, past and present, and acknowledge their continuing to connection to the lands and waters of this county.
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Artwork is available for collection or shipping after the closing date of the exhibition, August 17th 2025.
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