Volante means flying, and it is a very apt description of the paintings in this exhibition. Many of them give a feeling of flying above the landscape, or even into it. They are flights of imaginative energy which bring the landscape, the creative mind and the viewer into a dynamic synthesis.

The foundations of abstraction were laid back in the 1790's when Immanuel Kant published his Critique of Judgement.  In this work Kant declared that fine art must be free from the constraints of ‘arbitrary rules’, but at the same time it must maintain the ‘appearance of being nature’.  It must be ‘clothed with the aspect of nature’ but completely free of ‘laboured effect’.  Kant believed that art was not about the ‘property of an object’, but about subjectivity and the ‘expression of an aesthetic idea’. By focusing on subjective experience and aesthetic awareness, it could produce those pleasurable experiences which are ‘universally communicable’. This kind of art was based on a concept of beauty which was not dependent on the object but independent of it. Such independent beauty could be achieved by the use of such formal elements as light, colour and movement, which contained and transmitted their own aesthetic values.

Through these elements of light, movement and colour, Jane McKay has indeed achieved an aesthetic and subjective involvement with the world of nature while maintaining physical references to it at the same time. In Morning Light, for example, there is a sense of land, sea and sky coming together. This is achieved through the use of blues, greens and whites combined with dynamic brushwork. At the same time the work is composed roughly in three horizontal sections. The darker colours are concentrated in the centre panel so as to create an effect of earth with the sea below and the sky above. This concentration of darker tones towards the centre brings the forces of nature together so that they seem to both converge and diverge at the same point. The sea and the sky are brought into close relationship by a repetition of subtle colours and gentle brushstrokes. They both contrast with the surging collision of what appears to be waves and rocks. In other words, the physical world is transformed into something far beyond any surface reality.

This general compositional device of three horizontal sections coming together and producing something much larger than the sum of the parts forms the basis of several works. In Bluff an actual landscape is still recognisable, but the dynamic forces are stronger than the concrete reality. The central area again consists of a concentration of powerful, natural movements. This time the use of red introduces a reference to fire, and swirling brushwork lifts the earth and the fire towards the heavens. In Spinifex the three sections are generally suggested, but are then ‘overwritten’ by the swirling lines and marks of the spinefix. Again, the elements of the landscape are brought together in a way that combines and lifts them far above the physical.

Wind, water and fire are the dynamic elements within nature and these are all evoked to great effect. Red Valley is a large work (200x150cm) which again uses strong reds. Red earth, fire, and brilliant sunsets, even volcanic eruption or the fires of hell, all come to mind as an ‘ocean’ of red surges in great waves towards a grey sky. This is definitely a landscape of the creative mind. It is a landscape evoked or remembered, and then stripped of it its concrete existence. This powerful work is the most ‘visionary’ of the exhibition. It contains elements of the ‘sublime’, a term that refers to a transcendent quality which also inspires responses that are unsettling and disturbing.

A few of the works contain small marks or shapes which suggest human figures. Interaction is one of these. This work is also composed in three general panels. The lower panel is in dark tones and suggests the solidity of the earth. The sea surges above the earth and above that is the sky. Somewhere between earth and sky are what could be small figures on a boat. Like the figures in a Turner or a Friedrich landscape, they are both at the mercy of the forces of nature and part of them. The directional forces within the composition seem to take the viewer, at great speed, towards a horizon line which will probably never be reached.

It is not often that paintings convey a sense of the transcendent as strongly as the works in this exhibition. They are firmly in the Romantic tradition, which was the first Art movement to celebrate Nature as a spiritual presence. They have been inspired by an awareness of a dynamic presence beneath and beyond the surface realities of life and nature.