High Country Wildflowers captures a fleeting moment in the alpine landscape — when the air is thin and bright, and colour emerges against the muted tones of rock and grass. It’s a scene of quiet intensity: blooms scattered across exposed slopes, fragile yet unyielding, holding their own against wind and altitude.
 
Working in oil and wax on board, I sought to preserve that tension between delicacy and endurance. The wax medium allows the pigment to breathe and glow, holding the light in suspension — much like the alpine air itself. Layers are built, scraped back, and re-formed, creating a surface that carries both movement and stillness.
 
My practice often returns to places of resilience — bushland, scrub, wetlands — but in this work, the altitude brings a sharper clarity. The high country has its own rhythm: austere, luminous, and short-lived. Here, beauty feels elemental — pared back to colour, air, and survival.
 
In High Country Wildflowers, I’m less interested in describing individual species than in evoking their presence — how small bursts of colour hold the eye within an otherwise restrained landscape.
 
The flowers become symbols of persistence, of renewal in harsh conditions, of beauty that endures precisely because it is brief.
 
I hope the viewer feels both the fragility and strength of this place — the pulse of colour in open air, the hush between wind gusts, the sense of time slowed by altitude. High Country Wildflowers is a meditation on transience and endurance, and on how even the most fragile things can speak of resilience.
 
Oil and wax on canvas 103cm x 94cm - Framed in flaoting oak.