For ANNABEL BUTLER the impact of the pandemic, with lockdowns, online teaching and home schooling led her to rediscover my love of plein air painting. With her studio confined to the boot of her car ANNABEL BUTLER’s art practice finds itself on the road and unusually mobile. BUTLER travels around, stopping occasionally to capture her new surroundings. Painting en plein air she captures a variety of public places such as parks and beaches that she visits frequently within Sydney.

With confines of space BUTLER’s works adapts to a small – often 9 x 5 – size to accommodate the journey. Working to this small scale, she provides small windows in various settings, distilling them down to their essence of colour and light. This format references the plein air tradition of the Victorian Heidelberg School. Seeking to create a dialogue with the past by exploring continuity and change in the landscape BUTLER paints the same Sydney beachside locations depicted by Tom Roberts and Charles Conder in 1888.

Sydney’s green lung, Centennial Park, offered BUTLER visual respite from the urban environment. The park changed dramatically each season. She captures its beauty, particularly autumn, with its vibrant red and oranges contrasted against swathes of green, mirrored in the still waters of ponds.

These small paintings are energetic and gestural, with quick brushstrokes capturing the movement and tumble of waves on the shorelines or the breeze moving through leaves on a tree. BUTLER’s brush marks are textured and painterly and alive with an energy that quickly soaks up the discourse of colour and light and expels it out onto the painted surface. BUTLER’s mark making is full of energy. Her broad brushstrokes provide an impression of the surroundings, rendering a soft edge and focus to her works by obliterating the details of the scenes captured. There is a soft, scrumbled quality to BUTLER’s paint application that gives some works a soft, hazy, almost dreamy feel. Her textured mark making allows for underpainting to peer through each layer of colour. BUTLER’s palette is soft and paired down to a minimum in capturing the essence of each scene.