For over two decades Jeff Makin and his family lived at the historical property, The Gables of Glen Harrow. During these years the Glen Harrow Gardens, planted some 100 years before their residence, were significant to the artist’s practice and to his family. Situated over nearly four acres and nestled amongst the misty foothills of the Dandenong Ranges, these gardens meant something more to the artist than simply a “landscape setting” to put to canvas. For an artist whose career has unwaveringly pursued the genii loci – spirit of place – of the Australian landscape, what is captured in The Glen Harrow Paintings is perhaps Makin’s most significant embodiment of this vocation. Captured in this body of work is not just the physicality of the landscape, but the essence of a life lived alongside his family, its changing seasons and intimate vistas.

As always with Jeff Makin, this was not a merely sentimental pursuit, but a critical, technical investigation of “applying the rule of what you know to what you feel” – a phrase repeated often by the artist and across each of The Glen Harrow Paintings. An intersection of romantic abstraction and the pictorial, these works, assembled here for the first time, record the heartbeat of Makin’s celebrated practice.