Joy Elizabeth Lea New Paintings, September 2025

Like many artists before her, Joy Lea has maintained an interest in the Australian Landscape throughout her painting career. Her interest is twofold. On the one hand it is expressed as a deep felt concern for the preservation of the natural environment, [our wild native forests], and on the other it’s making a spiritual connection to the particular country found in the deserts of Central Australia. Both these themes have found a place in joy’s work and have been important in sustaining her arts practice over many years.

 Joy’s engagement with the natural world has seen her make visits to places as far afield as the Kimberly’s, Fowler's gap, the Critchley ranges and the Fink River, to name but a few.

Her experiences during these visits are then recorded as direct studies, painted on site, to serve as an aid memoire, informing the larger paintings, completed in acrylic, back in the studio.

The works we see here on exhibition are the result of this process and represent Joy’s unique and distinctive vision.  

What I find compelling about these paintings is that they are much more than just tonal copies of gum-trees. More than just a snapshot copied from a photograph.

Rather these paintings reflect the feel of the landscape, of actually being there, and then submitting that experience to the reality of the picture. Faithful rendering is a pointless exercise. Instead Joy suggests aspects of the natural world through a painterly language. Landscape elements are implied through her unique handwriting. The gestural mark becomes a vehicle to carry meaning and create movement reflecting how the eye sees. Her mark making is never beholden to realism and not limited to just observing local colour.

Working in the studio allows Joy more time for contemplation and to process the many studies made on site. It’s in the studio where the real work begins and where the studies give way to inventive colour and compositional invention. Her subject is now processed via time and memory and offered to us as a re-presentation, an amalgam of seeing and remembered moments.

 Joy’s approach sits very much in the tradition of contemporary landscape painting practiced by artists like Fred Williams and more recently, Elizabeth Cummings. Fred Williams realized on his return from England in the late 1950’s, that he had to do more than just make gum tree landscapes, he knew that  genre of painting had run its course with the end of the Heidelberg school in the late 1890’s and early 1900’s.

A new pictorial language was needed, one that absorbed the lessons of New York abstraction, and at the same time expressed a connection to the observed world and its remembered experiences.  The work in this exhibition builds on this modernist approach.

Part of an artist’s job is to connect with contemporary thinking and incorporate new developments into their practice. Joy achieves this by painting the experience landscape engenders, then filters that experience through memory of place and empathy for country.

A wide repertoire of mark making activates the surface of joys paintings, both across the run of the picture plane and back and forth into the compressed and fictional space of the picture.

Hers is a unique poetic vision always intuitive and always inventive. Heightened colour and gestural shorthand become the new grammar, holding meaning and tracking pathways, through the landscape, and through the constructed space of the painting.

Richard Birmingham, 2025