Greg Jorgensen has travelled extensively overseas and throughout Australia and is inspired by the Australian landscape. He paints a range of natural features – escarpments, rivers, chasms, floodplains, deserts, saltpans, mountains, forests, waterfalls and gorges. These natural iconic shapes seem to embody landscape with deep meaning.

As a student of the Lance McNeill School of Realism, he learnt classical modes of painting. As a past member of the Australian Guild of Realist Artists, he became familiar with many ways of approaching subject matter and techniques. His way of looking at and perceiving landscape has slowly evolved and he now aims to extract from landscape basic feelings towards and reflections about being in the Australian landscape.

Greg focuses on design and colour, taking motifs from landscapes. Shapes are stylized, rearranged and modified. Sometimes they are reconstructed with different perspectives and spatial relations are at the service of harmony and design. The paintings aim to reveal a sense of place and rich, colourful statements of felt experience.

Some of the art uses elements of synthetic cubism. Landscape is built up from components. Dimension is accentuated through colour by the use of contradiction and juxtaposition. Meaning is gradually etched onto the canvas. From the paintings emerge contrasts of chaos and order, space and contraction, dynamism and stillness.

Gallery Comment by Terry Earle

This exhibition was booked to be held at the Malvern Artists’ Society Gallery but due to Covid19 restrictions we have reverted to an online format. I am always on the lookout for artists who are able to convey a different perspective and insight into this vast land Australia.

Greg Jorgensen’s achieves this in this captivating body or work. Harsh landscapes, warm colours, gnarled trees, rock escarpments and a sense of connection to the land are depicted with great sensitivity that our first nations people depict with unerring insight in their art.  Add to that the painting that depict early European settlement and abandoned man-made tools of trade.

My father’s family settled in the northern Flinders Ranges around 1885 before abandoning their pastoral property due to drought around 1896 and relocated to the mid north of South Australia where they farmed successfully for many years.

It came as a surprise to me when Greg featured landmarks from the Argadells near Quorn. I was not familiar with this particular property. If you haven’t been there put it on your bucket list. It is on mine now.