Please note: No bookings necessary to see the exhibition during regular gallery hours, Tuesday to Friday 11am – 5pm and Saturday 11am – 3pm. We’d love to see you in the gallery! Please click here for our COVIDsafe information.

Pochade painting has been the practice of many painters since the Impressionists. Once out of the studio they wandered around with small panels and a couple of brushes tucked into the pocket of their greatcoats. Pochade is from the French for pocket. They are quickly executed sketches in oil paint. A composition or fugitive passage of light could be recorded and the results, not too precious. Like practicing a scale as a musician might.

There around 400 pochades in this exhibition. Peta Cross has made it her practice to paint the image in one shot, with no reworking. Of the later works completed over the decade, this is completely true. Hanging the unedited collection of these works, may help the viewer see the progression of the “one shot” idea. The works will be hung chronologically.

Sitting in landscape, intensely observing, for the time it takes to complete a small painting has been a practice of crystallizing moments. There is so much drama in small shifts of light. In fact, the image is probably best recorded as a photograph for a more truthful representation. The painting is a distortion in a sense but the act of trying to somehow record the completely magnificent pulsing of things in paint is both exhilarating and fraught.

“Watching a black swan crossing the road in an industrial estate in Altona recently in the salvaged part of a wetland. I wondered as I always do how magnificent the wetland must have been.”

The seem-less ordering of nature is infinite. It is a big show, moment to moment so much is happening.