Patrick Grieve - HOME

Next date: Friday, 30 January 2026 | 05:30 PM to 08:00 PM

Home has always been the Northwest Coast of Tasmania. 

My Work has always been concerned with describing a sense of place and producing paintings that have their own life and can exist outside the constraints of a label, such as landscape. They are not direct representations of places that I visit and see every day, nor are they abstract. The most successful of my paintings have an uneasy edge between that of the figurative scene and pure pattern or colour. 

I have always lived amongst farmland and have known the people that make a living from it, since I was a child. My paintings are worked and laboured over just as the soil and crops have been worked and plotted. They are scraped back or layered, constantly evolving and never really completed. The ones that work are kept and the others are pushed into shape or removed.

The surface of the work has the paint scraped on or scratched back to reveal or obscure the layers below. Just as the land has been worked time and time over so has the painting. What remains is the open expanse of a landscape with recognisable markers removed and the painting slowly making its own way towards an abstract ending.

Within a short distance from where I live there are many plotted and worked pieces of farmland. Each has its own almost individual personality that reflects the type of crop that is grown there and the people that work it. I take great pleasure in visiting each place in turn at various times of the year. These works represent elements of farmland and sky that have been a part of my visual experience since childhood.

The paintings are an artificial window onto the landscape that has surrounded me for 56 years. They are viewed through a lens which attempts to understand the passage of time and my place within this journey. The passing of time is marked by transitory colours, patterns, crops and textures of the changing seasons. As the months move and the seasons slip into the next, the reference points for the work move also. What I see around me is taken back to the studio and placed within my paintings. Within this space the works evolve at their own pace. It is a process as deeply ingrained in me as the rhythm of my own breathing.

Everything is silently moving and moving on. Places, people, events both joyous and sad visit us as the seasons slip again. We move, our home spins rhythmically and the passage of time washes over us as the light slowly fades from view.

Patrick Grieve is one of Tasmania’s most notable landscape painters, renowned for his richly coloured renditions of the North-West Coast. His textured and gestural works suggest his methodological toil—a ploughing, a planting, a flooding of seasonal change—a performative replication of the agricultural work that shapes and changes the earth around him. Fields of green rest over fields of ochre, scratched back or spread over, then cut across by the horizon, pressed down by the brilliant blue sky.

Grieve’s works have an illusory abstract, perhaps even minimalist quality, but only to those who have not seen the Tasmanian wilderness open out onto the sprawling plains of its unique North-West region. Acutely aware of the fragility of the fertile and productive fields that dominate his visionary works, he addresses a fine balance that is both ecological and painterly through the severing horizons that dominate the picture plane. There is an undeniable tension in these works as Grieve captures these not-so-natural wonders vividly and with intuitive precision.

His work is held in numerous private and public collections within Australia and overseas, including Parliament House in Canberra, The Macquarie Group, Artbank, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, University of Tasmania, Devonport Gallery, and the Burnie Regional Art Gallery. He lives and works in Burnie on the North-West coast of Tasmania and is represented by Bett Gallery, Hobart.

 

 

 

When

Location

Burnie Regional Gallery, Burnie Arts Centre, 77-79 Wilmot st, Burnie, 7320, View Map and directions