The word sensory describes that which connects us to the physical senses of touch, smell, taste, hearing, and sight. It’s the word that best describes the work of Rick Eckersley as a designer and artist.
Rick has been an influential and innovative creative force in Australia for over four decades. Recognised as one of Australia’s foremost garden designers, he challenged the traditional ideals of the Australian garden. As a teacher, author and thought-leader, Rick has inspired a generation of landscape designers and gardeners. He celebrated the forms, textures, colours, sounds and smells of trees, flowers and grasses. He taught us to see beauty in the changing shapes and tones of a plant’s natural lifecycle. Even ‘weeds’ had a place in an Eckersley garden.
The way humans interact with their landscape has been at the heart of Rick Eckersely’s work, and he continues to explore this theme in his art. Using a combination of photography, collage and digital media, Rick’s abstract pieces reveal his fascination with organic shape, pattern, texture and colour.
Like his physical landscapes, Rick’s compositions demonstrate his love of risk-taking, experimentation – going rogue. Images and forms are layered, contrasted and juxtaposed. Colours are exalted or inverted, or both. The stunning, often kaleidoscopic works draw us in and invite us to look beyond. Sometimes recognisable botanical and figurative forms emerge and recess into the abstract. In this way, the pieces simultaneously appear familiar and otherworldly. And you, as the viewer, are left to contemplate your place in the landscape and the visceral response it evokes.
“Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one’s sensations.”
Paul Cezanne