Penumbra: "a space of partial illumination between the perfect shadow on all sides and the full light.

"My Penumbra Series started during a studio residency with the Bundanon Trust Residence Program at Shoalhaven in 2005 with its fluorescent green fields and dense bush land. Bundanon has a mysterious, melancholic, magnetic energy stranded in shadow between the rocky escarpment with its ancient cycads, lightning storms and the dark engulfing Shoalhaven River, steeped in the history and emotive paintings of Arthur Boyd While there, I used walking and drawing to physically and mentally project myself into the landscape, a process I continued later that year in Auckland NZ on its outer harbour island of Rangitoto, an evocative, primitive place where you walk on vitrified lava surrounded by fern glens to the crater of the volcano.My painting is the visual representation of these feelings and meditative states of mind. My response to the landscape is intense and often overwhelming, and the ‘Dark Water’ paintings of 2006 embody that experience. 

Returning to the sea, swimming at Lorne in Victoria and much loved local bays of Bronte and Clovelly my paintings sought to express the feeling of merging with the water and the emotion of space. The white ground of Swell, Red Tide and Undertow (all 2006) enable the central shafts and wells of color to splay against whiteness through light –filtered tonal edges. The emotional charge for me is one of entering a fourth dimension

Gabrielle Courtenay, September 06