How does she do it?  How can Philippa Nikulinsky capture every hair on a marsupial, tendril on a weed sprout, insect footprint on a piece of dead wood and STILL make it appear like a fleeting glimpse of nature?  How can she laboriously illustrate an object from nature, which would demand a cold-eyed examination, and still retain a sense of spontaneity as well as reveal a personal warmth for the subject.  I guess the answer is in what I overheard one visitor saying to another while viewing this exhibition; "She must have such a lovely time out there in the landscape."

The centre gallery of FAC went all out to compliment this exceptional exhibition with beautiful displays of native flowers.  These gargantuan floral clusters distracted only a few from the imagery - one of them my companion, who experienced the awakening of a long dormant allergy and, with great disappointment, was forced to leave.  As the owner of iron clad sinus cavities I was able to revel in the art works and enjoy the intricacy, and intimacy, to be found of every drawing and painting.

I was greatly taken by Cymbopogon ambiguus (Scent Grass) not only for its excellence in depicting a clump of tangled shards of grass but because it reaffirmed the historical validity of taking a simple aspect of nature and celebrating the art of observation as well as replication.  For me, this work by Nikulinsky is a tribute to Albrecht Durer's 16th Century watercolour of a patch of weeds.

The ceiling to floor scrolls pay tribute to a very different form of art, the Oriental style of defining a specific while suggesting the general.  In Eucalyptus caesia (Silver Princess) Nikulinsky creates a rhythmic balance between areas of extreme detail and areas of flat contour lines with no filling, then she 'enhances' this ink and wash drawing by tinting only one blossom a delicate shade of pink.

The series of drawings Life on the Rocks, the Art of Survival in the hall are elegant studies in black and white.  Nothing like a graphite drawing to show up errors in seeing that a swipe of colour can hide - no visual or manual errors are evident.  But for all the big and beautiful, the colourful and the tonal, the informative and the illustrative attributes of all the exhibits I kept returning to one tiny little image Paracalaena triens (Duck Orchid) with its one red leaf, one red stem and one red bloom that adds up to one large dose of excellence.

Thank you Philippa for sharing your 'lovely time out there in the landscape' with us.