Abstract

Within this practice-led research, I apply a variation to the Australian landscape en plein air painting tradition (Amory, 2007) through my own interpretation of processes and concepts within contemporary landscape practice. My paintings explore landscape narratives instilled with personal artist experiences and memories of place that manifest, through tacit knowledge, a creative presence or affect in an artwork that represents my self-developed concept of the Spook as a central enquiry.

The ‘Spook’, is best described as a feeling, a creative state that is intuitively informed and honed overtime by the artist and viewer upon encountering the work. The Spook in no way manifests as a physical influence or entity upon creative process but rather as a creative awareness prompted by the work and the artmaking process. Investigating the Spook as part of the overall creative experience seeks to develop greater creative insights into the artist seeing beyond existing parameters and methods of practice to develop new strategies for intensifying the experience of creative outcomes.

Historical en plein air artists, Elisabeth Cummings and Ivon Hitchens and contemporary artists such as Joe Furlonger and Lucy Culliton whose practices utilise an informed understanding (Sullivan 2010) of personal experiences and memories of place as subject matter are addressed to inform the idea of manifesting a creative presence in an artwork. Deploying autoethnography and ethnography as subset methodologies, I unpack the personal narratives within the landscape context, including self and participant reflective journaling and participant surveys as methods.

My findings reveal that the Spook is an identifiable and adaptable creative principle of practice that can be applied across creative arts, yet the Spook is individually experienced at different times, and across diverse creative forms. Key research outcomes reside in the triangulation of the notions of the Spook revealed through the relationship developing between the artist, artwork, and the viewer, whereby the Spook can empower an experiential creative cognizance that is ever-evolving and ever-transforming.