Patrick Mavety - Chasing mountains

Patrick Mavety brings his latest exhibition, Chasing mountains, to Straitjacket in Broadmeadow from 1 to 23 August. Mavety is a Newcastle-based painter, and the show runs for three weeks, so there's plenty of time to get in and see it. There's also a meet the artist session during the run, which is a good chance to chat with him about the work.

His practice is a meditation on familiar places and a visual discussion of how humans have altered those environments. The paintings start with plein air drawings, and from there, memory and colour take over to explore the landscape and the relationship between drawing and painting. He draws inspiration from the mountains that sit behind Maitland, which he treats as a metaphor for an ancient land that cannot be flattened or erased. It's a local landscape, but he's looking at it as something much older than the changes we've made to it.

His process is quite specific: crayons or pastels for the drawings, and oil for the painting, using a minimal palette. He makes his own mediums from refined linseed oil, egg whites and chalk. He names local artist Peter Lankas as one of his first and enduring influences, alongside Australian painters Idris Murphy, Elisabeth Cummings, James Drinkwater and Luke Sciberras, and international figures like Wassily Kandinsky, Philip Guston and David Hockney. That's a wide range to pull from, and you can see it in how he moves from the outdoors into the studio.

Straitjacket is an art partnership run by two artists, Dino Consalvo and Ahn Wells, who present curated solo, group and represented artist exhibitions. You'll find them at 222 Denison Street, Broadmeadow, in Newcastle. Chasing mountains runs from 1 to 23 August.