Wandering through paint in the wet tropics

Painterly depictions of landscapes are redolent of an artist's vision and entwine topographical features with knowledge and experience of a place. Significant landscape paintings can become iconic images suggesting the national character of a region. In the genre of Australian landscape painting, images of southern states have dominated the field, while portrayals of the wet tropics are comparatively rare. In this article, artist Jacqueline Scotcher directs a northern lens to the field of Australian landscape painting. Her culturally significant paintings extend the field by depicting the far north region of the wet tropics. This case study reveals how Scotcher's practice–led doctoral research expanded her contextual and theoretical understanding of place, emplacement and phenomenology. In a reflexive process that oscillated between reading, thinking, writing and painting Scotcher has established new knowledge of art practice by developing an immersive walking-painting method. The walking-painting method has much to offer other artists seeking imaginative and aesthetic responses to their environments. Scotcher's work has resulted from considering one's bodily presence, the power of everyday movement and the beautiful import of attending to our unfolding presence in a tangled world of relationships in paint