Sophie Woodham, Columba College, Dunedin

Restricted
To just a few colours and forms
Stripped of extraneous surface details
Mud colour. Soft and smooth

Concrete greys and greens of smooth hills rolling, rolling
Ignorant of the cosmetic features
I paint only the bones of the landscape
Mud colour. Earth lifted, loose

The underlying form of the land
The heart, the whole, the entirety

Wallowing forms repeated
Deft strokes following the same linear fashion
Of brooding clouds as they float above the sea
Down we go; follow me now

To an estuary so free from clutter
Free from the Noise and the life
of the many who live amongst shadows of the hills
Rolling, rolling, rumbling, breathing hills
Triangularly faceted hills; pyramid structures that impose themselves on the landscape
Stop.

Subdued and quiet
Stillness broken by flashes of movement
Concave and convex
Dark and light / death and resurrection
Oxymorons alive in the hills
Magnified by the strokes of my brush
I capture the landscape on pale canvas before it escapes and moulds into something altogether
Different

A sudden yellow streak; a divergence from monochromatic safety of earlier works
From an abstraction of restricted greens and brown comes the darting yellow
Can you see it now, what I see?
A matrix of shifting patterns,
Compressing thousands of drops of rain,
Squally gusts of the howling wind, and restless teetering trees
Into a fraction of a second, a snapshot of the day

Shapes blending inseparably with the canvas
Who do they become for you?
The hills
Eroded by Mother Nature’s tears
The hills
So isolated from the wild bleeding colours
Of those who traverse them.
Silent and solemn, they wait.
The hills.