In the late 80s I settled in The Orara River Valley north west of Coffs Harbour where my wife’s family have farmed for several generations. The area’s now declining rural economy, modestly scaled landscape, friends and family supply most of the subject matter for my work.

I take inspiration from the Arcadian Classical tradition as created and extended by the likes of Longus (Daphnis and Chloe), Claude Lorraine, Watteau, Bonnard and Finlay that seems so appropriate to this corner of the world. I subject my essentially anecdotal material to careful formal organisation with the aim of producing well made pictures that translate a particular experience into a more universal mood or feeling.

In 2004 I won the Countryenergy Art Prize for Landscape Painting and later that year undertook an Artist in Residency at the New England Regional Art Museum in Armidale NSW. This is my first exhibition of new work since my retrospective Guy Gilmour: Painting in the Orara Valley 1990-2005, curated by Sandra Warner, at the Coffs Harbour City Art Gallery in 2005. In some of these paintings I am beginning to more explicitly draw out the Arcadian Classical themes that have informed my work while still retaining my domestic and local focus.

The title work in this exhibition My Orara Myriorama employs the 19th Century format of multiple panels that can be arranged in any order. It presents elements of the landscape I am most familiar with and allows the viewer to participate with me in what I find the great challenge and pleasure in painting pictures: finding new ways to see the familiar.

Guy Gilmour