Adrian Barber Painter

An artist must first be moved if he is to move others.

The power of the natural world to exert a therapeutic effect – to arrest thought and to allow personal transcendence – is the highest aim of my work. Living in Tasmania allows me direct access to the primal landscape that is the source of my work.

My home is nestled in the forest on our mountain (kunanyi).  I walk its slopes daily, and I venture further into the state’s more remote and rugged places for days of solitary rambling.  Observing its light, forms, and detail, and experiencing its mystery, I am continually deepening my relationship with place.

I feel fortunate that I can combine my love of bushwalking with the act of creation to provide for my way of life.  I enrolled in the Adelaide Central School of Art in 2000 and found a new world opening up.  But three years later, back home in Tasmania, I found myself sketching the rocks on Mt Wellington and resolved to make this my life’s work.

Emotive passages of light, pathways to unknown places, structures of mountain and rock, the hypnotic patterning of lichen on stone; these are some of the subjects that undergo transformation back in the studio.