View a colourful new exhibition by local Blue Mountains artists, Anita Swanson and Clare Delaney. Though their approaches differ, their practices meet in a shared playfulness with gesture, colour, and form.
In this new exhibition, Anita Swanson and Clare Delaney draw on their distinct experiences of ‘landscapes’ and ‘houses,’ transforming them into expressive visual works shaped by a continual process of adding and erasing media.
Anita explores the intersection between the Blue Mountains landscape and the imaginal realm. Working in acrylics with a bold, contrasting colour palette, she builds layered semi‑abstract works through a dynamic process of overpainting with loose brushstrokes and exposing areas of parchment. Each painting captures and communicates the sensory richness – scent, shadow, sound – and otherworldliness of walking through gullies and bush. Figures float, move, and reside amongst the simplified plant and rock forms, highlighting the intertwined nature of the forest and bodies.
Clare loves to paint and mix new colours. She applies paint, scrapes it back, applies it again, works wet on wet, and wet on dry, to build thick textural works. In this series, the iconic subject of the house is revisited. Clare has often returned to this motif, in both 2D and 3D forms. A group of little paper wax houses Clare made early in her career has become the inspiration for these new works: the little house appears figuratively in some of the paintings, in others it morphs into simple box shapes, whilst in others the house dissolve leaving colour, movement and traces of shape.
