There is a particular quality of attention that still-life painting demands - a willingness to look, and the patience to truly see. James Roberts brings together a body of work that honours this patient act of seeing - gathering objects and studying landscapes - and turning observations into paintings that offer quietness, as both subject and method.

The still life paintings at the heart of this exhibition speak of a domestic world held in suspension. Rendered in oil on board with Roberts' characteristic warmth and restraint, these paintings find meaning in the accumulated and the familiar: bottles, vessels, fruit - things chosen, kept, and returned to. They are, in the deepest sense, collections; arrangements that reveal the intimate weight of ordinary objects.

Alongside them, a series of landscape paintings opens the exhibition outward. Journeys through the goldfields country around Creswick and Castlemaine, weekends away in the valleys of the Blue Mountains and urban discoveries around Sydney have yielded paintings that share the same contemplative spirit as the studio work. These are not grand panoramas but quiet encounters - a tree in blossom, a filtered light, a road through eucalypt - moments of belonging and departure held together in paint.

Painting, for Roberts, has always been a meditative practice. In this new work, that meditation deepens. The Patient Act of Seeing is an exhibition about memory and presence - the objects we gather around us, the places we carry within us, and the act of returning, again and again, to what endures.

​​

You can read more about the artist here: