Art review: Transit by Judith White

After its usual period of summer hibernation, Canberra's commercial art scene has whirled into action with Judith White's solo exhibition one of the first cabs off the rank.

Judith White is a Sydney-based artist who has been exhibiting professionally for about 30 years and has been showing regularly with the Beaver Galleries over the past couple of decades.

She is predominantly a landscape artist who has devised an idiosyncratic technique of layering her images with a strategy of combining finely worked acrylic painting and collage. This gives her work an immediate recognisability factor, so that you pick her paintings at a dozen paces. As she works in tightly defined series, sometimes the sequences start to appear a little formulaic, so frequently her paintings work best when viewed by themselves, rather than as part of a series.

In her exhibition, in 2012, she introduced a strong figurative element through which to anchor her compositions with large silhouetted human forms, like figures in a landscape. In this show she has moved away from the lyrical rural landscape of her earlier work to the urban landscape. The human form may not be clearly articulated, but its presence is implied with fragmented forms and frenetic movement. Many of her compositions in this exhibition are very busy, closely worked, and quite dynamic in their resolution. Urban lakes, parks and fountains are all key aspects of her urban imagery and appear as the lungs of the city environment, while other areas are given over to zones of transit, commuter zones, plazas and railway stations.

One of the key paintings in the series, Urban Lake I, is an arrangement in blue, where bold compositional superimposed blocks of colour and texture hint at a grid-like structure in which collaged elements appear like suspended islands. There is a considerable skill in the manner in which she manages to combine the sweeping gestural marks, fine filigree-like lines and patterns and surfaces. She controls a surface tension, where much is implied and we are provided with certain visual clues, but it is ultimately up to the viewer to enter the work and to develop and own a meaning for it.

The more time I spend with her paintings, the more I tend to see them as meditations on the urban environment. These are meditations which have a spiritual dimension as well as a strongly implied environmental agenda. This is particularly evident in her small and very moving triptych, Urban Lake: Reflections I.

Judith White is a very consistent artist, who over a considerable period of time has developed her own and distinctive artistic commentary on Australia's fragile environment.