Gippsland Art Gallery Director, Anton Vardy, and Curator, Simon Gregg, discuss the Gallery's unique collection of artworks depicting the landscape and environment of South Eastern Australia.

The video features artworks by Peter Booth, Mike Brown, Andrew Browne, Victor Majzner, Annemieke Mein and Tony Lloyd.

Peter Booth's Landscape with Fire and Comet is a powerfully psychological work. It depicts an apocolyptic landscape in which human civilisation has become a smoking ruin. Booth presents a strongly moral message where the actions of humankind lead to its own deminse.

oil on linen, 152 x 274cm

Mike Brown's colourful Untitled painting of the late 1960's is one of his finest pure abstract works. Drawing strongly on 1960's popular culture and the earlier form of Dada, Brown presents an intricate web of colours and shapres exploring in and around each other.

acrylic on plywood, 121.3 x 182.6cm

Andrew Browne's extraordinary work Horizon - the largest yet produced by the artist, surmises his ongoing interests in photography, twilight and liminal states. Spread over four panels, the work is a journey through time and space. Horizon featured in Browne's 2012 survey exhibition of the same name at Gippsland Art Gallery.

oil on linen (4 panels), 81.3 x 1,150cm

The Great Shuffle is the product of artist Victor Majzner's interest in process, seriality and change. The image was formed by placing 100s and 1000s between glass slides and projecting the results. The work is one of the gallery's early acquisitions - it was donated to Gippsland Art Gallery after receiving the George's Art Price in 1972.

acrylic on canvas, 183 x 183cm

Sale-based wildlife artist Annemieke Mein is known throughout the world for her naturalistic interpretations of native Australian flore and fauna, re-created through textile and machine embroidery. Dance of the Mayflies is a fine example of her work, which was presented to the gallery by patron John Leslie O.B.E in 2009.

applique, machine embroidery, fabric paint, silk organza, cotton, taffeta, synthetic fur on cotton canvas on board, 110 x 180cm

Tony Lloyd's shimmering painting Tomorrow Follows Yesterday presents the immensity of nature through a narrow, cinematic lens. The work references Romanticism and 18th century ideas of the sublime, updated with a 21st century twist. The work was purchased from Lloyd's survey exhibition Lost Highways held in 2009, which was curated by Gippsland Art Gallery's curator Simon Gregg.

oil on linen, 95 x 240cm

In his painting In The New Colony, Peter Daverington freely adapts Albert Bierstadt’s 1868 painting In the Sierras but melds it with an unlikely incursion of virtual elements.

Referencing the grid and early computer animation, he introduces a series of floating steps that lead the viewer into Bierstadt’s Romantic utopia. The painting was featured in the Gippsland Art Gallery exhibition New Romantics in 2011.

oil and enamel on canvas, 183 x 183cm

Purchased with the assistance of the Robert Salzer Foundation, 2011

This major 24-panel work is a history painting about art history. It reveals Sam Leach’s interest in seventeenth century Dutch landscape painting. Baroque forest and abstract, geometric landforms combine seamlessly to create a landscape that is both futuristic and romantic.

Other elements make reference to American pop artist Jasper Johns and to German romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, while the title references Thomas Sebeok, a pioneer in the field of bio-semiotics.

oil and resin on linen and wood, 24 panels at 50 x 50cm each; overall dimension 200 x 300cm

Purchased with the assistance of John Leslie OBE, The Robert Salzer Foundation, George Thomas and Deborah Somerville, Mragaret Ziffer and Rob Ziffer, Raynor and Brian Castles, Annette and John Gibson, Dr A.R and Mrs R.L Aitken and other private donations, 2014

This delightful and intimate study of Queen Victoria with her eldest son Prince Albert Edward was donated by Gippsland Art Gallery’s Patron, John Leslie OBE in 2009.

The scene in the work takes place in Quire of St Georges Chapel at Windsor Castle, in the days before the christening of the future King Edward VII of England. The actual ceremony was a major event, full of royal pomp and pageantry, however this revealing study – the only one of its kind – shows a tender and quiet moment between a mother and her son.

gouache on paper, 56 x 42cm

Donated by John Leslie OBE through the Australian Government Cultural Gifts Program, 2009

A generally little-known artist, William Webster Hoare is responsible for one of the finest images of nineteenth century Gippsland in the Gallery’s collection.

The work depicts an unknown location in Gippsland, with a range of birdlife (egrets, parrot, swallows and stork) shown amid a tranquil stream in a ferny glen. The scene is realised with a sharp eye for clarity and detail.

oil on canvas, 35.7 x 26.4cm

Purchased with the assistance of the Gippsland Art Gallery Society, 2004

The elemental power of fire and its capacity to elicit deeply rooted emotions is at the forefront of Peter Gardiner’s art. Fire, and other themes of environmental destruction, have long inhabited his work.

Ravensworth (Swamp Lantern III) is part of Gardiner’s second series of Ravensworth landscapes. The intense heat and glowing red act like a beacon that illuminates the dead earth surrounding it. Based on studies made from nature, the work also draws on dreams and the unconscious.

oil on canvas, 150 x 130cm

Purchased in memory of Tim Wright with donations from the Wright Family, 2012

Juan Ford’s Hot Spot is one of the most arresting and instantly recognisable images in the Gippsland Art Gallery Collection.

Without any land in view it evades the landscape genre, and with its botanical subject largely obscured, it sidesteps the natural flora category. In many respects Hot Spot represents an exchange of blows between traditional art genres, appearing to conform yet eluding them all.

oil on linen, 107 x 92cm

Purchased with the assistance of the Gippsland Art Gallery Society and The Robert Salzer Foundation, 2012

Jason Cordero’s dark vision is psychological rather than empirical. The shapes of the cliffs, the undulating dunes and bruised sky have been formed by states of mind rather than natural evolution.

Nevertheless, The Gates of Longing projects a timelessness that is hard to quantify; we feel the weight of centuries bearing down, of time immemorial. The painting’s title betrays what is perhaps its most intoxicating effect: longing.

oil on linen, 112 x 244cm

Purchased with the assistance of the Gippsland Art Gallery Society, 2010

Polixeni Papapetrou’s The Wanderer, from her 2009 series Between Worlds, is an enchanting image that spans the ages.

In an ingenious feat of artmaking Papapetrou combines Caspar David Friedrich’s iconic The Wanderer above the Mists (1817-18), Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865), and Diane Arbus’ portraits of people on the fringe of society wearing masks from the 1960s. Set at high altitude in the Gippsland Alps, The Wanderer is an image about in-between states; in-between infancy and adulthood, in-between human and animal, and in-between reality and fiction.

pigment inkjet print, 105 x 105cm

Purchased with the assistance of the Gippsland Art Gallery Society and The Robert Salzer Foundation, 2009

A painter of ‘everywhere and nowhere’, Chris Langlois’ evocative landscapes present indeterminate locations caught in random points in time. His meticulous paintings capture the spirit of something familiar, now lost or obscured by memory.

Waterfield No.2 is just such a painting, which calls upon lost remembrances to complete this fleeting fragment of time and place. The work combines abstract and figurative elements to generate a strange tension between what is real and we must imagine to be real.

oil on linen, 183 x 183cm

Donated by the artist through the Australian Government Cultural Gifts Program, 2013

In Simoon, Lesley Dumbrell places a series of blue lines over a series of yellow lines, which converge at the top centre of the image and at two points on the bottom.

Both blue and yellow are set against a red background. While intensely formal and precise in design, the work conveys an equally intense sensation of blazing heat and motion. Dumbrell’s paintings are based on the experience of landscape forms and natural phenomena. While abstract, her works are never completely divorced from physical sensations experienced in the real world.

gouche and pencil on paper, 48 x 63cm

Donated by Georges Australia Ltd, from the Georges Art Prize, 1974

Daisy Leura Nakamarra, who was one of the first women to paint with the Papunya Tula group of artists, is an important figure within Australian indigenous art.

Her brightly coloured dot paintings draw on traditional themes to tell the story of her culture. As a ‘senior law woman’, Nakamarra does not depict imagery relating to Aboriginal ceremony, believing that it is disrespectful to her culture. She advocates, instead, for works that depict native ‘bush tucker’ themes, and for women artists such as herself to limit themselves to secular themes from the women’s sphere.

natural ochre pigments on canvas, 70.5cm x 60.8cm

Donated from the estate of Marjorie Tipping, 2009

In placing a floral carpet over the floor of an outdoor forest, Rosemary Laing creates an odd setting that confuses our assumptions of indoor and outdoor.

Groundspeed accentuates the point at which the man-made or artificial meets the natural world, and in particular, our attempts at recreating the natural world through domestic objects or settings. Purchased in 2002, it is one of the most intriguing reflections of the natural world in the Gippsland Art Gallery’s Collection.

Type C photograph, 110 x 195cm

Woodcutter's Clearing, by Italian émigré artist Charles Rolando, is thought to be based on a Gippsland scene.

Rolando’s style was a curious hybrid of the European-flavoured works of von Guérard, Chevalier and Buvelot of the 1860's and 70's, and the recent development of Impressionism, then in vogue among the younger generation of Roberts, Conder and Streeton. While essentially a studio-bound artist, practicing a fairly laboured and detailed style of painting, his works on occasion contained impressionistic flourishes.

oil on linen, 58.5 x 89.5cm

Purchased with the assistance of the Gippsland Art Gallery Society, 1997

In 1987 the Gippsland Art Gallery received a significant donation of nineteen original works by Sale-born artist Elsie Struss (1909—1985) from her estate. Cumulatively the works provide a thorough overview of her output during her years as a student at the National Gallery of Victoria School of Art (1929—1933).

In works such as Woman with Coat and Hat, she reveals a clear skill for modelling form and tone with paint. Struss’ highly structured pictures were conceived tonally, working outwards from a dark background toward a middle ground, with highlights applied at crucial points to achieve the illusion of depth.

oil on canvas, 94 x 78.5cm

Donated from the Estate of Elsie Struss, 1987