The practice of painting during travels has occupied artists from time immemorial.  It is the ideal way to record an individualized view of the landscape, perhaps contrasting the light and colour with that of the artist's regular stamping ground and focussing on the banal to give it a new an unique viewpoint.

Mary Jane Malet, in her exhibition at Stafford Studios, has presented a range of watercolours and oils, mainly from Italy, with a selection from Perth and Melbourne.  While her style verges on the illustrative, there were some gems in the show.  Her oils Provençal and Les Calanches from Vistal capture the ambience of a Mediterranean midsummer day with her choice of intense colour and simple shapes.  The small watercolour Sur la Route D'Arone, smouldering in subdued blues and greens, gives us a glimpse of a hillside scene which could be easily bypassed in the rush to get to a larger city.

In her small paintings, which seem to be the more successful work, the artist draws the viewer into her world and invites us to linger for a moment in the space of the imagination.  Here, technique and affectation are forgotten as the artist is lost in a reverie of light and shade, allowing the architecture to appear and recede from the landscape for a moment before moving on.