The landscapes created by Marc Blake in Together in a Sudden Strangeness are suggestions of place rather than definitive records. His delicately applied colour and subtle outlines have a dreamlike quality, and the other-world he has created already seems to be melting away.

Blake’s landscapes may be considered in light of 19th century Romanticism, suggesting as they do an ineffable beauty, the transitory nature of which evokes feelings of melancholy and nostalgia. The dappled light and falling blossoms of State of Origin reveal a single moment that has already passed, leaving the viewer yearning for something inexpressible. The soft tones that light up Blake’s forest glades and slices of life are the colours of reminiscence: the ‘golden summer’. Blake deliberately leaves his figures undefined and creates emptiness in the centre of his works, and these gestures act as invitations for the viewer to place themselves in the work and to experience for themselves the instant he has captured.

Working on his preferred medium of plywood, Blake does not hide the whorls of the grain; previously he has incorporated these lines into the topography of his landscapes, while here they float just underneath the translucent applications of colour. This visibility of the underlying medium reinforces the illusory nature of the painted scene, an illusion further enhanced by the physical indentations Blake uses as a means of transferring images. The outlines of trees, shadows and figures become part of the ply, dissolving any boundary between surface and image, and revealing the hand of the artist.