Ric Burkitt, Brand New Day (detail), 2026, acrylic on canvas. Image courtesy of the artist.
RIC BURKITT
During this residency, Ric Burkitt invites visitors into the creative process, offering insight into his contemporary painting practice through studio work, conversation, experimentation, and the evolving relationship between landscape, abstraction, colour and place.
During my residency, I will explore abstract landscape painting through a range of tools, materials, techniques and approaches. Working intuitively, I will investigate how colour, texture, gesture and mark-making can communicate something beyond the physical appearance of a landscape.
My focus will be on the relationship between landscape, memory and felt experience: how a place can be remembered not simply as an image, but through atmosphere, sensation, emotion and fragments of visual memory. I am interested in how these impressions shift and change over time, and how painting might capture something of that fluidity.
Rather than depicting a particular view, I aim to create works that suggest a sense of place through abstraction, inviting multiple interpretations and encouraging viewers to connect with their own memories and experiences of landscape.
ARTIST BIO
Ric Burkitt is a professional artist and painting educator based in Stoneville, in the Perth Hills. A former graphic designer, he now works full-time from his studio, developing a practice that encompasses a diverse range of styles and mediums.
Burkitt’s current practice centres on semi-abstract landscape paintings that draw on the mood, atmosphere, and rhythms of the surrounding countryside, and on memory-based landscapes. Working intuitively, Burkitt explores the fluid relationship between landscape, memory, and perception, creating paintings that move beyond representation to evoke a lived sense of place. Rather than depicting a singular view, his works invite multiple readings, encouraging viewers to engage with landscape as an emotional and sensory experience.
In 2025, Burkitt was awarded the Ellenbrook Arts Prize and named a finalist in the Perth Royal Art Prize for Landscape. His solo exhibition, Far Horizons, was presented at the Mundaring Arts Centre from June to August 2025.
