My obsession is with finding a way for human presence and landscape to be one.I wanted the two to merge somehow, the human presence and my experience of landscape, to become one through a process that I didn’t understand and that I still do not understand. One affects the other and what results is imagery that can be semi or completely abstract, imagery with a sense of presence without being subject to figurative interventions. It’s always magical and a mystery to me when something happens, as if out of the blue. I’ve perused this quest via many ways over the years, approaching this obsession from every point of view possible, for example; early on I began by drawing the figure in a space, painting friends in the landscape and even working in the studio from Memory or aided by drawings, amongst many others. Over the last ten or 15 years I was influenced by much time spent in deserts of the American South West and well as central Australia. The thinking of artists like Rover Thomas ,Emily kame kngwarreye and more more recently Sally Gabori it’s become more intuitive, using a wide variety materials and with more participation of the body in the process, more movement with many more points of view and Mai ly working from Memory.Over the past few years I’ve been thinking about “The Plains”, by Gerald Murnane, and the psychological landscape that exists as an inseparable conflation of mind, place and the tensions that time creates. These tensions evolve slowly, imperceptibly at times as they do in my paintings. In my paintings I watch as these tensions form, watching for the suggestive potentials of space, of narrative, of presence.The process I employ to do this doesn’t beat about the bush, it’s intentionally rough and direct. It reveals and exposes those things I notice, like light, and half-formed memories of places or tiny details of interactions I never knew I’d witnessed. I think about the edges and how they influence this psychological landscape where land and mind are one, and how this comes into existence in a space that’s flat and deep at the same time, a sort of elliptical space, like the lens in one’s eye.” Peter Bonner2023