Creativity Quote by Arthur Boyd

A declaration of identity and method, the phrase collapses the gap between maker and milieu. It suggests that landscape is not merely a subject to be depicted but the very medium of action: air, light, water, soil, history, and culture saturate the hand, the eye, and the conscience. To say everything one does is the environment is to admit that every mark is a weather pattern, every choice a tide, and every canvas a habitat where human gesture and nonhuman forces interpenetrate.

For an artist steeped in Australian terrains, from drought-scorched plains to the Shoalhaven’s mercurial river, the environment is not backdrop but co-author. The brush does not describe a gum tree; it participates in its presence, its shade, its seasonal stress. Pigment becomes sediment; washes behave like floods; the rhythm of strokes echoes wind across grass. Technique itself is ecological, responsive to the materials’ resistance, to daylight in the studio, to the smell of rain. The claim is ontological: what I do is not about the environment; it is the environment, as inseparable as breath from lungs.

There is also an ethical undertow. If every act is environmental, there is no neutral making. Choices of subject, scale, solvent, and story shape how others see and value a place. Images can erode or restore. They can turn land into scenery or return it to Country, alive with agency and memory. Such a stance acknowledges entanglement with older custodianship and the responsibilities of inhabiting a fragile continent.

The phrase widens beyond painting. Living, loving, eating, travelling, giving, these too are environmental acts. An artist’s donation of land, a community’s care for a river, a viewer’s attention to the nuances of light: each becomes part of the same ecology of regard. To act, to look, to feel, each is a way the environment moves through us, and how we, in turn, become part of its ongoing composition.