Debbie Mackenzie came to painting by way of graphic design and a career in advertising, a background that sharpened her eye before she followed it somewhere more instinctive. She quickly established herself as one of the most exciting emerging artists of her generation, with sell-out solo shows and group exhibitions that have cemented her as a leading Australian landscape artist.
Her work is about reverie, a sense of place and a desire to be there. The source material is deeply personal: a childhood spent on the Peninsula, summers at a century-old family beach house at Peterborough on the Great Ocean Road. Those landscapes have never loosened their hold. The paintings they inspire depict scenes that feel just out of reach, as though one could almost step through the frame.
Mackenzie works in acrylics on canvas - vast, elemental, largely devoid of human presence, though never entirely. A cultivated field, a single distant house. Enough to place you there, not enough to crowd the view.