Scrub Burning, Northern Hawke's Bay 1965

Rita Angus made "Scrub Burning, Northern Hawke's Bay," with oil on canvas, and the way she's put this thing together it feels like an attempt to capture the energy of a fleeting moment, but also something really permanent, like a landscape. There’s something so solid about the forms she’s creating in the sky, almost like she's building up the clouds with clay or dough. Look at how the paint is applied in these swirling motions, thick in some areas, thin in others, giving the clouds a real sense of depth and volume. It’s not about making a perfect copy of a cloud, but about the process of building something out of paint. I'm reminded of Marsden Hartley, another painter who wasn't afraid to treat landscape like a kind of abstract construction. Ultimately, it's up to us to decide what we see in this painting. Is it about environmental change, a passing storm, or something else entirely? That's the beauty of art.