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From my Window
Wagga Wagga Art Gallery

27 November 2025 – 18 January 2026​​

 

The first signs of spring evoke some of the most deeply exhilarating and poetic feelings of the human experience. For millennia, artists, poets and musicians have endeavoured to describe the emergence of spring with brushes, words and song.

 

On a trip to Fowlers Gap in early 2024, Jo Davenport observed signs of tiny new trees that were sprouting where recent rain had pooled in depressions amidst the arid, red sands. The tiny trees seemed to jump up from the red earth with a purposeful sense of survival, filling Jo with a deep sense of optimism.

After returning to her Riverina home near Albury, the artist responded to her immediate bucolic surrounds. The dynamic spring landscape, framed by the windows of her painting studio, became her muse for this new body of experimental works, From My Window.

 

With brushes and paint, Jo imbued in her canvases the emergence of new life in spring- elation, wild winds, bursts of fertility, fireworks of colour, blossoms, birds and pollen, all swirling with great excitement. She invoked the honesty and innocence of childhood and worked with joyous spontaneity but also with thoughtfulness. Always contemplative, the artist spent time with each brushstroke before making the next mark. Her artistic process is synchronously passionate and deliberate.

 

A lover of poetry from many cultures, Jo notes that the synergy between the creation of poetry and painting is not dissimilar. In the creation of these new works the artist particularly references William Blake’s 1789 poem Spring.

 

Sound the flute!

 

Astrid Reed,

Wagga Wagga Regional Art Gallery

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