In Notes from Home, itinerant painter Zac Moynihan returns from his travels to paint the dreamy suburbs of Brisbane. Built and natural worlds dissolve into one, streaked by humid, watery light as storms roll in and out and the sun blazes its familiar copper over the hills out west.
Small and carefully observed, these postcards from Meanjin/Brisbane burst with the feeling of the place you know from the inside out. Each picture is a fresh encounter, a new day, a new slant of light, a different density to the air. Painting is an ancient craft, but that is the mystery of it: through ancient gestures we grasp the world anew again and again, while rooted in the earth from which our pigments come, grounded in place by the very substance. Moynihan repeatedly greets the world and its changing rhythms with genuine surprise, concocting a new alchemy of paint and light in each picture.
After winning the Doyles Art Award on the Gold Coast in 2022, Moynihan packed his kit and crossed the country, painting his way through the Bunya Mountains, the Grampians, Ballarat, the Granite Belt, the Great Ocean Road, Wagga Wagga, the Snowy Mountains, the Blue Mountains, and the Scenic Rim, leaving a series of soulful landscapes in his wake. Sparkling with real curiosity about this continent, those paintings are as varied in treatment as the settings themselves. When you look at these works you see Moynihan’s genuine openness. You see how he meets the unfolding world without preconceptions, without the imposition of a national narrative. You see that, for him, painting is a mode of receiving: of bringing the outside in. He is listening.
Notes from Home is Moynihan’s debut solo exhibition with Lethbridge Gallery in Paddington. The artist turns his quick eye and every skill he sharpened on the road onto Brisbane’s northwest. There’s paintings done en plein air and paintings taken further in the studio. Each one is observed fresh, but with a familiar ring to it.
A summer’s day doesn’t blaze with hot hues, but rather sweats in a pastel haze—more subtley conveying how oppressive clouds trap the muggy heat. Storms rise up like hungry predators: not wrathful gods of a hostile environment but powerful beasts prowling the hills they call home – sublime living cathedrals formed from the very atmosphere. Moynihan’s reverence for these slow movers is palpable. He is at his strongest when fusing sun and storm – the quick moving rains and fresh, clear skies entwine like interlaced hands, eternally threading through one another. His quick brush is impressive: we Queenslanders know how fast the rain rolls in; how fast the moods of the sky turn.
Moynihan’s paintings carry the urgency of the field. Little flecks of grit nestle in the paint, planted by a relentless wind. Brushstrokes trace the movement of sizzling air over glittering rooftops. Quick, harsh scrapes from the back of the brush carve heat shimmers and curling bark. The surface – be it board or paper – is lively. Skies open out as full, inhabitable landscapes in themselves, as palpably deep as the earth they stretch over, populated by chunky clouds and not simply wisps of decorative colour.
Some landscape paintings narrow our view of our country and impose rigid limits on our national stories. Moynihan’s landscapes do the opposite. He’s open to finding holiness in all sites, especially the streets we walk on every day. He doesn’t start with the idea of Australia. He starts with his feet solidly planted in place. In doing so, he brings us, as we look on, firmly back to earth too. Moynihan goes straight to the source. In European painting traditions and in Western philosophy, we call this ‘nature’. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples – who don’t demarcate themselves from it the way that non-Indigenous peoples do – call it ‘Country’.
Australian painting, if there is such a thing, ought to start with the land — the only real thing that unites us. I grew up on narratives that call this land hostile, I grew up in fear of our dramatic weather patterns—cyclones, floods and fire. A European transplant, I grew up feeling rootless, I grew up amidst a thirst for proprietorship as a means of control, amidst unquenchable greed that took this land for a means of generating wealth. Moynihan’s paintings peel back all these neuroses, revealing a humble love for this land. Moynihan shows us that such love can start with the place we stand right now.
Painting has been our companion for millennia; it repeatedly brings us back into immediate and physical contact with the world. The painter pushes earth around in that humble, responsive way, trying to tune in to the quiet rhythms beneath everything we’ve piled atop this ancient earth. Moynihan’s painting has a mesmerising pull because of the way he receives rather than imposes. He invites us to think in reverse: artist as listener, rather than producer of cultural objects or commodities. He invites us to pause and share in a deeply felt experience of this pocket of earth.
Samantha Groenestyn grew up on Mamu Country, cyclone country, far north Queensland. She left rain-drenched cane fields flowing with home-distilled rum to train as a philosopher and painter in Brisbane, Edinburgh and Vienna. She has written about painting for 15 years, for galleries across Australia and Europe and for Chilean journal Arte al Limite, with her signature philosophical twist. She is a 2025 finalist in the Archibald Salon des Refusés (Sydney), winner of The Agency Still Life Prize 2025 (Bowral) and was highly commended in the current Clayton Utz Award (Brisbane). Her work is observational but tightly constructed, anchored in vital, rhythmic drawing.
