Little Blue Lake

My work is about the enduring horizon line and the visual environment.
When you are in nature you are looking, absorbing, seeing and experiencing the vast complex surrounds. Within the landscape, you always have a point of focus and direction, yet everything else that is not part of your focus forms part of the visual environment – these paintings are about rolling up the experience of the whole visual environment, beyond your focus, and looking to the horizon line beyond the immediate. The energy of nature, great beauty and the sublime are found at the horizon line; it is limitless and ongoing, and linked to the future and to destiny.
Nature is powerful, violent, brutal, cruel and chaotic, yet abundant, giving and eternal. It is a work in flux, where the definition of nature keeps changing, and our relationship with it shifts.
I painted Little Blue Lake in Tasmania as it is a vivid, bejeweling colour that lights up the landscape. It was once untouched nature, then it was turned into a mine, now turned back into nature through repatriation. The beauty is extraordinary, it is natural and unnatural, sublime in its beauty and alchemic in its colour.

Steven Alderton

2021

pigmented inks and acrylic on canvas