In her tranquil Garden Suburbs studio, Belinda Street has been channelling the high-drama of altitude wildernesses.
An exhibition of her major oil on canvas works drawn from Tasmania's Mount Wellington, and a companion series of small acrylic abstract studies based on Kosciuszko landscapes, opens today at Straitjacket Gallery, in Hamilton.
On Wednesday, October 5, Street will be interviewed about her latest work by Maria Stoljar, whose Talking With Painters episodes have viral status in the Australian art scene.
The Q&A session is part of the Newcastle Art Gallery Society's Coffee with Art series, and is being held as a live-only event (which will not become accessible by podcast).
Stoljar is from Newcastle, raised in the Greek community of Hamilton South, and comes back regularly to visit family, as well as to engage with local arts.
"I also interviewed Newcastle artist Lottie Consalvo at the Newcastle Art Gallery," Stoljar says. "So I have a previous connection with the gallery and get a great deal of personal satisfaction promoting Novocastrian artists."
Stoljar first noted Street's "expressive work" when she was opening an exhibition of the Movers and Shapers women's landscape artist collective in 2018 at Sydney's Hazelhurst Arts Centre. The collective was designed to counter perceptions that Australian landscape painting is a male field.
In 2019, Street firmly established herself in that territory when she won the Paddington Art Prize - "a significant landscape painting prize in Sydney," Stoljar says.
Last year Street was invited to join prominent artist Elisabeth Cummings at The Kelton Plain Artist Residency, held at the Haslingden cattle property in the Monaro district.
"It's clear she's a serious artist," says Stoljar, whose intensive podcast and video series features visits to the studios of the nation's leading painters.
In the coming week, Stoljar will release an interview with portraitist Paul Newton - a 14-time Archibald finalist, who this year painted film-world couple Hugh Jackman and Deborra-Lee Furness. "He tells me how he became an artist, the stories behind some of his most well-known portraits and reveals some great colour mixing tips," she says.
In painting the realm of Kosciuszko, Street was aware she was stepping into quite hallowed turf of Australian art history, with Austrian-born artist Eugene von Guerard depicting the area's awe-inspiring scenery after joining a scientific expedition into the region in the 1860s.
"I look at his adventures, but I don't need to do that, it's already done," Street says.
"I have the luxury of being able to put myself into the landscape and bring my experience to it rather than just record what's there.
"I'm staying in some Airbnb or chalet, I'm certainly not risking my life for my art."
Still, high-altitude art trips can suddenly turn from sunny affairs to treacherous conditions.
"Things can shift in an instant," Street says. "They can be really calm and then it all turns, it's blowing a gale.
"You don't know what you're going to get up the top, I like that uncertainty. It's like life, you think everything is just swimming along, and then it turns, it shifts.
"As an expressive painter, I like to pick that up in my work, that drama and turbulence."
Street's show is titled Keep your feet on the ground and your thoughts at lofty heights, after a quote from Peace Pilgrim, written by Mildred Norman who was the first woman to walk the entire length of the Appalachian Trail. Norman devoted 28 years to walking across North America, devoid of possessions beyond a toothbrush, a map, and the clothes she was wearing.
"It really spoke to me," Street says. "You have no choice about keeping your feet on the ground, your thoughts are what you have in those moments."
Raised on Sydney's Northern Beaches, Street went on skiing holidays to Mount Kosciuszko as a child.
"When it's not crowded, you're by yourself, you're on the mountain, it's quiet and it's white - it's sort of like this nothingness, and it's very sensory as well," she says.
"You feel isolated, and while it's peaceful, it's also got this element of uneasiness."
