This work captures a fleeting visit to one of South Australia's most quietly spectacular stretches of coastline — the raw, unhurried country between Streaky Bay and Smoky Bay on the Eyre Peninsula.
The painting is drawn to the dunes rather than the water's edge. Pale, wind-sculpted mounds anchor the composition, their surfaces alive with the muted olive, silver-grey and dusty khaki of coastal scrub — saltbush, spinifex and coastal wattle doing what Australian vegetation does best: persisting beautifully. The pastel medium lends itself naturally to this landscape; the soft layering of pigment echoing the way light falls through salt air, never quite sharp, always luminous.
Beyond the dunes, the Southern Ocean sits in extraordinary blue — that particular South Australian blue that shifts between aquamarine and deep cobalt depending on the hour, the cloud, the mood of the day.
Tucked quietly into the composition — easy to miss, impossible to forget once seen — is a small pair of glasses, half-settled in the scrub. Not a found object, not an accident. A deliberate whisper. A reminder that this coast was known, walked, read and loved long before this visit. That the isolation we experience as visitors is not emptiness — it is someone else's deep familiarity. The Wirangu and Mirning people have known this coastline for tens of thousands of years. The dunes, the birds, the particular quality of that blue water — none of it was ever undiscovered.
The glasses ask us to pause. To look again. To consider whose eyes have rested on this same horizon.
A painting made not by someone who loves the beach, but by someone who loves what the land does at its edge — and who understands that standing on it is always an act of standing on something older than yourself.