Painting has never been the simple application of color on surface in order to reproduce reality – objective or not. Any successful painter has rendered reality in a way that endures beyond its own time. And in that process lies the poetic struggle of vision and the talent to pull it off, the result of which is a signature, the hard fought engraved reason for living an aesthetic life in a world overrun with quite a few ugly things.

“Landscape is a vehicle to coax us into a transcendental state,” Sarah de Teliga tells me, implying that a transcendental state is a goal, and a temporary one at that. The expatriate Australian living in Paris expresses that goal that in pretty much every stroke of paint on her varied surfaces. As she prepares for an exhibition at Damien Minton Gallery in Sydney, finishing up some 20 small landscapes on board, 25 paintings on found crushed cans, and six small “pill” pieces on scraps of metal, I had the opportunity to meet with her and talk about what painting is, can be and the effort to get beyond reality to arrive at a nearer truth – in paint.

As your show readies to open and you prepare for the trip, what sorts of aesthetic thinking will you be bringing from Paris with you?
These past few years I saw and drank in an enormous amount of painting particularly Holbein, Memling, David Hockney, and Gauguin – and Gauguin through Peter Doig’s eyes. Gauguin, with the fabulous exhibition at the Tate in London, is an interesting point of departure. He was always trying to create a perfect world in his paintings – trying to remake even 19th and early 20th century Tahiti. When Gauguin arrived there he saw that it was so impure, so Westernized…he immediately set about creating an island dream.  Earlier he went to Brittany and sought out ancient folkloric imagery that no longer existed and tried to recast it through landscapes, nostalgia and paint.
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