The collective inheritance: the journey from crayons to canvas
On being an artist, finding one's voice, and the collective wisdom that guides us.
I was two years old when I first instinctively understood that the world needed more colour. My grandfather had just finished hanging fresh wallpaper in our home—a careful, methodical job that represented hours of precise work. But to my young eyes, something was missing. I took my mauve crayon and began to add what I felt the wall needed, convinced I was helping, genuinely confused when the adults seemed upset that my crayon didn’t quite match the existing pattern.
Looking back now, decades into my journey as a visual artist, I see that moment as my true beginning—not because I was naturally gifted, but because I was responding to an instinct that would define everything that followed: the compulsion to add something essential that others might not yet see.
Deep dialogue with the masters
My path through art has been a winding one, shaped by countless voices from across centuries and continents. Through the decades, I explored everything—glass decoration, linocuts, ceramics, watercolours, life drawing, experimental and performance art, even dance and learning to play the violin. Each medium was like learning a different language, each technique a new way of hearing what art could say.
During this period, I was in deep dialogue with the masters who came before me. Monet taught me about light’s fleeting nature, how it transforms everything it touches from moment to moment. The Australian impressionists—Arthur Streeton and his contemporaries—showed me how different light demands different approaches, how the harsh brilliance of the Australian landscape requires its own vocabulary. The American impressionists added their voice to this conversation about light and place, each school interpreting the world through their particular cultural lens.
But it wasn’t only the impressionists speaking to me. Botticelli whispered about ethereal beauty, about finding the divine in the everyday. Rembrandt showed me how shadows could be as important as light, how darkness itself could become luminous. Michelangelo demonstrated the sheer power of dedication and craft, the way mastery serves vision rather than replacing it.
Finding my own voice
But all of this learning, this rich dialogue with artistic history, was preparation for something I couldn’t have anticipated. Gradually, almost without noticing, my work began to shift from conversation with the past to communion with the present moment. Shifting into landscape painting became less about interpreting what others had shown me and more about direct experience—breathing, feeling, listening to a place, waiting for its voice to show me the way.
Not every place speaks to me. I’ve learned to be selective, seeking out peaceful, tranquil, ethereal locations that offer rest and refuge. I don’t respond well to loud conversations - instead I listen for the silence of being still and to hear the gentle whispering that guides my brush. The places that call to me are often discovered in the softness of morning, when birds and bugs are busy with their ancient work, when the day is new rather than weary.
In these moments, something profound happens. My brushstrokes, composition, and colour choices are no longer conscious decisions but responses to the moment itself. I become one with the land I’m painting, a conduit rather than a controller. The landscape begins to dictate the painting, teaching me how it wants to be seen, felt, remembered.
Collective inheritance
This journey from that two-year-old with her crayon to this present moment hasn’t been solitary. Every artist builds on the collective knowledge of those who came before—we inherit techniques, perspectives, and ways of seeing that belong to all of us. But inheritance isn’t passive reception; it’s active transformation. Each generation takes what they’ve received and adds their own voice to the ongoing conversation.
What I hope I’m adding is something about refuge and rest. In our increasingly frantic world, I want my paintings to arrest viewers, to stop them in their tracks and offer them a glimpse of what they wouldn’t normally pause to see or feel. This isn’t mere decoration or hobby—this is essential work. When someone stands before one of my landscapes and feels that moment of arrest, that intake of breath, that brief suspension of their daily anxieties, they’re experiencing what art has always been meant to provide: a doorway to presence, to the sacred dimension of ordinary experience.
A deeper purpose
Each time I set up my easel, or kneel down to take a quick sketch, I’m continuing a conversation that began long before me and will continue long after. But in that moment, brush in hand, heart open to whatever the landscape wants to teach me, I’m adding my small voice to the great chorus—one more note in the endless song that helps others remember what they already knew but had forgotten: that beauty is refuge, that attention is prayer, and that sometimes we need an artist to help us see what was there all along, waiting patiently for someone to stop long enough to notice.
Monet once said that his greatest desire was to paint the way the birds sing—naturally, unconsciously, as an expression of pure being. I understand now what he meant. When I’m painting in those gentle morning moments, responding to the whispered conversations of wind and light and shadow, I’m not trying to create pretty pictures. I’m trying to translate a feeling, to capture the essence of refuge itself and offer it to others.
Among the more contemporary voices, Albert Namatjira’s story resonated most deeply. Here was an artist who took Western watercolor technique and transformed it entirely through his profound spiritual connection to country. His tragedy—the recognition that came too late, the cultural displacement, the way his success became a burden—spoke to something fundamental about what it means to be an artist: we are always translating between worlds, always trying to make the invisible visible.
Margaret Olley taught me about the sacred nature of the artist’s daily practice, how she transformed her very studio into a living artwork. Her dedication to finding profound beauty in intimate, everyday subjects showed me that art isn’t about grand gestures—it’s about deep seeing, sustained attention, and the courage to keep looking when others have looked away.
In the end, being an artist means serving as a translator between the visible and invisible worlds, between the rush of daily life and the eternal presence that lives just beneath its surface. We inherit the wisdom of all who came before us, not to copy what they did, but to continue their essential work of helping humanity remember what it means to truly see, to genuinely feel, to be fully present to the miraculous ordinariness of being alive on this beautiful earth.
The child who added mauve crayon to fresh wallpaper was responding to the same impulse that moves me now: the recognition that something essential might be missing, that beauty and peace and connection are not luxuries but necessities, and that sometimes it takes an artist to help others see what they’re hungry for but don’t yet know how to find.
You can see my work and more about my story at my online gallery judithrose.art or in person on the Sunshine Coast Queensland
