When I look at landscape, the objective contact is replaced with visual sensation, I see the landscape in terms of line, form, colour and space; my aim is to exploit that line, form, colour and space.
The Australian landscape is monumental, not only is its vastness, but also in its contrasts of form and colour. The landscape is also monumental in its diversity. Light, colour, form and texture are all subject to extremes of almost limitless variation.
The landscape of any locality, being the principal stimulus behind the work of any landscape artist, has the potential to exert an enormous influence upon those able to apprehend its full range of experience. Each of those artists within the Australian landscape genre whom posterity has deemed ‘great’ possess an innate affinity with the surroundings from which they draw their inspiration.
All of Holcombe’s work is imbued with a strong, often insistent sense of place, having its origin in the prolonged contact the artist boasts with the land. This contact consists not so much of rigid clinical observation, but rather, of communion with the land itself, providing Holcombe with both conscious and subconscious impressions from which to draw inspiration. The various elements of the land form the vocabulary of the landscape artist, serving simultaneously as both inspiration and language.
The following is an example of Robert’s work that are available for sale at Fastframe, click on the images to enlarge them.
