“Trust the madness” is written across my easel. It’s more than a mantra — it’s a method. A surrender to what cannot be planned, only felt.
I am an expressive, visceral painter working with the Australian landscape as a site of encounter rather than depiction. My paintings emerge from places that feel charged and alive — landscapes that hum beneath the surface, where something ancient presses close. These are terrains that feel deeply known and yet unknowable, held in tension between presence and mystery.
My process begins in stillness. I spend long periods in the landscape without making a single mark, allowing the place to wash over me fully. The paintings arrive later in the studio through a raw, intuitive process that resists control. Painting becomes a physically charged and emotionally unpredictable act, one that often requires sitting in the discomfort of not knowing what is trying to surface. In this way, the body remembers what the rational mind cannot hold.
Selected Works
Palimpsest (2026) Oil on Canvas 120cm x 100cm
The Long Listening (2026) Oil on Canvas 85cm x 76cm
I don’t paint what a landscape looks like. I paint what it does to me.
- Cameron Brooke