Joanna Logue, Moth Pond II, 2024-25, acrylic on linen, 130 x 130cm

“One always talks of surrendering to nature. There is also such a thing as surrendering to the picture.”

—Pierre Bonnard

The landscape has always been Joanna Logue’s touchstone, from her earliest days growing up in the Hunter Valley in New South Wales to her decades-long connection to Essington Park, her homestead in the Central Tablelands west of Sydney, to her current residence in the U.S. on Mt. Desert Island in Downeast Maine.

In Logue’s paintings, the landscape is a point of departure for abstraction. The view is always intimate and perpendicular to the picture plane, in the manner of Japanese prints. The surfaces are richly textured and abraded with the trace of her active, searching mark-making. Trowel and brush are used intentionally. Color is excavated and layered as she discovers the internal structure that gives her compositions weight.

~ Excerpts from the catalogue essay: Suzette McAvoy, 2025, Independent curator, arts writer and art advisor, Maine, United States of America