John Wolseley dwells in small patches of landscape and precisely paints its flora and fauna, as individual things that capture the whole sense of a place. His paintings are often documents of how we connect to the environment, both as a culture and as individuals. His many pieces mosaic together to form an emotive sense of the whole; his precise scientific detail overlays the vaster space to form an abstract beauty that tells the story of his (and others’) inhabitations. John’s paintings are like waymarks, objects on the side of the human path that show us the way we travel amidst the landscape. His work shows how we build up and construct the landscapes around us.

Wolseley paintings are an invitation to the environmental creativity in us all. Just so, John’s workshop brought out the best in its participants, so that all enjoyed the process, the teaching, and the interaction. Around 20 established local artists braved the damp weather to learn how John approached his work. Through a number of serendipitous (wet) events, we were lucky enough to have the Noosa Regional Gallery workshop moved to the beauty of our Noosa hinterland property

John was a good teacher, friendly, encouraging, and humourous, whilst still managing to direct and critique the proceedings in very useful ways. John quoted the inspiration for much of his work, Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins:

Glory be to God for dappled things –

For skies of couple-colour as a brindled cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut falls, finches’ wings;

Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough,

And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him

Here’s a very quick overview of how to paint, Wolseley (workshop) style.

· Take 2 large pieces of paper (at least A3) and break down their white barriers to creativity by placing a few squiggles, a light wash over part of them (this might indicate your own emotional approach to the day), crumple and fold them a bit to show them who is in control.

· Find a small piece of land, no bigger than two by three metres (maybe even mark its boundaries with tape), and spend time looking and sensing its energy, shape, and life.

· On the first piece of paper, mark three or four separate boxes to draw this small landscape using differing artistic systems:

o The energy field – not what you see, but the energy you sense; include the song of birds, the rustle of small creatures, the direction of growth.

o The abstract minimalist – divide your rectangle into 3 (at most 5) blocks so as to reduce what you see into simple shapes.

o The microcosm – take a very small detail (a seed pod, a dead leaf, an old piece of rusted iron) and draw it exactly, like a 19^th century botanical print (use a magnifying glass if you have one).

o John also suggested topographical mapping, drawing the pathway of an ant, or tracking your own emotional response; treating the land as if you were a pecking heron, taking the half birds-eye view of this small patch. He directed that we must not move things away or onto our chosen patches, so that the patch’s own unstructured beauty would emerge.

· On the second piece of paper, we returned to the same patch and brought these styles and our sense of this small place altogether. Here was an opportunity to find the extraordinary in the very ordinary; to give the micro-place so many hours of focus that it became an object of love, its knowing seeps into the artist’s skin.

· Join the two pages (maybe with further sketches or pages) so they reflect each other, making the disparate whole. The story of the work’s making is exposed along with the evolving connection between individual artist and specific place.

In the final informal hanging, the workshop pieces all had coherence and an unexpected beauty. They were in John’s words, “rather good”, although he also pointed out we still all had to think more about the negative space, that we had to learn to draw the gaps as well as the objects.

By the time we finished, with hot pumpkin soup, red wine, triple creme brie and chocolate dipped strawberries, the rain plummeted down. It was time to go home, and to take on the extra day (or year) needed to develop the many ideas into finer works of art. Participant artists took away new techniques and ideas, encouraged in small ways to draw connection to place. John took home the fecund greenness of the place (so different from his famous desert depictions); maybe its fullness will emerge in future art pieces? And we were left with the wonderful artistic energies that sink into this place’s spirit, and keep us doing and celebrating environmentally creative art, contemporary (interspecies) music, and regional place-based design. Although, we were also forced to notice just how many weeds and chaos lies around our property – a common form of evidence waymarking human inhabitation! The damp day and the ever-present feral invasion invoke another Manley Hopkins’ poem (from Inversmaid):

What would the world be, once bereft

Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,

O let them be left, wildness and wet;

Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

What this workshop showed is that there are many different ways of seeing that create the layered landscape; it exposed the cultural and natural waymarks we use to describe our journeys in place. What the workshop proved is that we have good artists and stunningly beautiful places in this region - green art is growing strongly on Australia’s Sunshine Coast. There will be more!