When we first lived in Katoomba in 2014/15 we rented a spectacular old house on a property called “Cloudlands”. Later we bought a pleasant mid-century fibro house closer into town. I wanted to paint everything about Katoomba: it was endlessly fascinating with its old shopfronts, stunning views glimpsed from every corner, lovely old architectural features, houses from the early part of the twentieth century, cliff faces and views beyond belief.
I enrolled in Visual Arts at TAFE Western Sydney, and wanted to make the documentation of Katoomba in oil-paints my main project for the Advanced degree. In the previous years I had visited the area and made several bright paintings for a series I called “Blue Mountains, Red Mountains”. Most of these were thrown out in the Petersham studio clearance, and no longer exist in any form. Some half-finished paintings are stacked up in a corner and probably never be finished. Looking at them now, I can see why my painting teacher Tim Allen didn’t have much enthusiasm for my work. I thought painting was another kind of anthropology: an ethnology of the view, if you like. Tim was the first of my teachers/mentors to tell me that a painting was a painting. Its value or “goodness” depended on what happened in the painting itself, not what it represented. The sociological/anthropological impulse which impelled my understanding was not apparent to him: he was an artist, and praised paintings that obeyed the invisible laws of painting, which I really did not understand. I have included a few of the early Blue Mountains series elsewhere on this site.
I doubt if I will ever retrieve the enthusiasm I had for Katoomba when I first got there. The more I understood the town, the more disillusioned I became. Now it is only the landscape around it which compels me. However a fellow Blue Mountains painter, Paul Gorjan, has a wonderful grasp of Katoomba and its surrounds, and he has been able to convey some of the beautiful qualities which first attracted me. I hope to write a post about his paintings shortly.
Annette Hamilton - ArtIst 