- This event has passed.
45 Letterbox Landscapes at 45
Edward Coleridge
45 Letterbox Landscapes at 45
13 May – 24 May 2025
hours:
Tuesday – Friday: 12pm – 7pm
Saturdays: 12pm – 4pm
admission: Free
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes – Marcel Proust
At harvest time great monuments of straw bales appear on the stubble in Wadawurrung country in the paddocks of Western Victoria.
At sunset or noon they seem mystically ancient but are entirely transient, soon fork-lifted away to haysheds, while others linger on.
The 1 to 4 horizontal format enhances the composition of the landscape, and, in the city, focuses the details of the towers competing for attention.
It was the free-thinking Dutch who were the first to paint landscape, a Dutch word in origin, when they had no landscape to speak of. They had to drain the sea to make a country to live in.
Hitherto landscapes had served as scenery for mythological and religious subjects. Jacob van Ruysdael established the oevre in the 17thcentury with a long career essentially painting the weather.
Edward Coleridge trained and practised as an architect in the UK until, on a trip to South America, he held an exhibition of Chilean landscapes in Santiago. On return he enlisted in the City and Guilds of London Art School whose Principal was the landscape painter, Roger de Grey, the then President of the Royal Academy.
On graduating in 1987 Edward joined the First Fleet Re-enactment Voyage in Mauritius for the leg across the Indian Ocean and was fortunate to crew on the brigantine, Soren Larsen, where he found that a sailing ship and its crew (and attendant albatrosses) a constant supply of subject matter.
When becalmed in the Doldrums he had the strange experience of re-enacting a scene from his ancestor’s epic poem The Ancient Mariner, was while able to sketch the replica of the motionless Bounty nearby, literally illustrating the line from his ancestor’s epic poem The Ancient Mariner.
The galleon lay motionless, literally: ‘as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean’.
The crew cheerfully him blamed for the delay. Next day a breeze bringing the first serene albatross.
Edward engaged in a Masters study of the landscape of western Victoria at a time when the long out-of-fashion works of Eugene von Guerard were being rediscovered. This happened just as every view the German artist painted in the Western District of Victoria was about to play host to a wind farm, the vast white turbines providing a perversely paintable subject matter.
A fascination with mapping, and missing the revealing style of the Ordnance Survey maps of the UK, led to a PhD Study of Major Thomas Mitchell’s maps and artwork at Federation University, titled Mapping Australia Felix. It centred on the Surveyor of General of NSW‘s Journal of his 1836 expedition when he ‘discovered’ Western Victoria and, enraptured by the “completely uninhabited region”, dubbed the region Australia Felix.
Edward’s paintings study the rural landscape on the eastern side of the so called Western District as where the Great Dividing Range officially ends at Mount Misery, as well as, in contrast, the contemporary cityscapes of Melbourne.
The concept of ‘Letterbox Landscapes’ was first exhibited at QDOS gallery in Lorne in January 2024.
Opening Night
Tuesday 13 May, 5-7pm