Kaye Johnston is a contemporary Shoalhaven artist who creates paintings and sculptures which relate to her home community, especially the people, landscape and rainforest. Being an environmentalist, she is concerned about the environment and the impact humans have on it, particularly through pollution, destruction of native forest and building homes on rural land(Kaye Johnston, contemporary south coast artist, 2008).





Locate it: Using Google Maps locate the town ‘Shoalhaven Heads’. https://maps.google.com.au/
 

What geographic features do you notice that could inform Kaye Johnston’s work?

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​Artist Statement

There is a stark contrast between the colours of the two paintings, the first of which uses red, black and grey, whilst the second uses shades and tints of green. 



​Shoalhaven Heads is an oil painting which uses an Abstract style to depict an urban landscape. Red and black are colours which are symbolic for blood and death, representing the death of the rainforest to support the growing city. With the addition of the contrasting colour of white, conflict is introduced to develop a high-contrast, chaotic image, evoking a sense of despair of the death of the rainforest. This is further highlighted through the use of the contrasting colour, green, to paint the ‘house shapes’ to symbolise that the wood of the forests is now being used for the houses. This also ensures these forms are emphasised(Kaye Johnston, contemporary south coast artist, 2008).

Shoalhaven Heads 2 portrays ghost buildings which are spreading over the natural landscape, in the same form as the first painting. Green evokes images of the natural landscape with its vast rainforests, which are being cleared to make way for new houses. Using different values of green creates a sense of balance and order as the city, represented in black and white, expands over the top of the greenery. Black and white creates a contrast to disrupt the fluidity of the green as new houses are built(Johnston, 2012).



Cubism is a key influence on the artist who draws on similar shapes in both paintings and uses the technique of deconstructing and rearranging the elements of an urban scene. Line has been used to create the shapes in the foreground, through the enclosure of space, whilst the background utilises strong blocks of colour, painted in geometric forms.  Lines with oblong shapes on the end surround the painting and symbolise street lights, which enclose the houses and contain the people inside, trapping them under their harsh light. Geometric shapes of squares and triangles have also been used to depict houses and provide a sense of over-population, further exemplified by the blocked background. The regular, angular forms provide a sense of order and monotony, being symbolic of a city, contrasting with the fluid shapes of the forests and natural scenes. Repetition of these shapes has been used to create an asymmetrical pattern, which creates a sense of balance throughout the painting, whilst still evoking images of the sparseness and regularity of urban sprawl(Johnston, 2012).

Johnston has used the dominant elements of shape and colour to portray the destruction of natural habitats to make way for houses, using contrast and repetition of these elements to create a pattern typical of urban sprawl. Both images evoke emotions of anger and despair towards the destruction occurring. Overall the simplicity of the artworks conveys a powerful image of the artist’s world and through using contrast and asymmetry she disrupts the balance typical of the disruption occurring to the ecosystems in her home.