# Warwick Fuller 2024 Exhibition

Warwick Fuller, a landscape painter and Blue Mountains local, has been a practicing artist for over 45 years. With a stellar exhibition history in Australia and London, his CV boasts innumerable accolades, including three assignments as Official Tour Artist with [then] HRH The Prince of Wales. Yet it isn’t this that drives the painter.

Instead, it is the landscape itself, or rather, the ceaseless challenge of transforming the intense emotions evoked by the natural world into paint. To craft this into something transferable to a viewer who has no connection to that specific place, but in whom the painting may draw out those same emotions, a shared human experience of awe. And it is something Warwick Fuller achieves in even the smallest of his oil paint sketches.

Never one to rest on his laurels, Fuller took on a new challenge. Armed with five small works painted plein air, and logistic help from removalists and custom framers, a 4-metre wide, 2-metre high vision soon came to life. The result is a homage not only to the landscape that inspired it, but to all the best attributes of humanity: creativity, empathy, ambition, aesthetic sensibility, and love.

Mitchells Ridge Lookout, a lesser-known Blue Mountains vista, was the location of the original outdoor sketches. Fuller returned several times to capture, distil and explore, before producing the enormous work in his studio, with these smaller paintings – not photographs – as reference. Titled Blue Plateau, the work is the centrepiece of Fuller’s 2024 exhibition at Katoomba’s Lost Bear Gallery. This artwork singularly proves that he is an artist who continues to surprise and impress.

Smaller in scale, though not in impact, is the painting that gives the exhibition its name. Divine Light was painted from the artist’s verandah. It is dedicated to the whimsy of light and weather: Fuller’s main muse. Dedication is a fitting word in more than one sense: Fuller’s lifetime of painting has been devoted to capturing light’s beauty and vagaries; how a slight shift changes the landscape’s colour, form, and mood. He does this with near-unprecedented skill. In Divine Light, the sunlight parting the grey sky, could, in the wrong hands, be trite with sympathy-card connotations of hope. Instead, what Fuller gifts us is a breathtaking, anything-but-trite celebration of life with a simplicity of paint that could only come from many decades of commitment to craft, matched with a lifetime of human experience.

The Arms of Dawn, Mount Panorama, a smaller study painted outdoors, is as concise as a six-word story. It captures the precious seconds of sunrise in confident brushstrokes. Never overdone, Fuller is a master at allowing the paint to speak to us: hymns to the light, but in English not Church Latin. And despite their realism, Fuller’s paintings are symbolic: an internal as well as external landscape, into which each viewer can individually enter and find respite.

Red Gums tracing the Namoi River, Walgett is less assuming than the works previously mentioned, but its quiet strength should not be overlooked. A patch of red trunk – light or moss or bark? – draws the gaze to the left, from where it can circle endlessly, entranced and at peace, guided skillfully by colour and composition.

As a whole, Divine Light, Fuller’s nineteenth exhibition at Lost Bear Gallery, in his 77th year of life, is, like the artist himself, full of vitality. In these times of multiple wars and economic distress, these paintings are a much-needed reminder of how beautiful the world is, and humans can be.

Caterina Leone
Arts Writer