Here is Everywhere is an oil painting on linen made in 2012 by Melbourne artist TONY LLOYD, whose works play with the idea of mountains becoming portraits of self-reflection and horizon lines becoming pivot points in captivating images in paint.

Hovering on the edge of natural realism with a mastery of paint and filtering it through the lens’ of cinema and digital technologies, Tony Lloyd asks the viewer to create their own narrative upon these fantastical landscapes and objects.

Here is Everywhere is 92 cms high by 72 cms wide, painted in monochrome colour composed of black and white and shades of grey, featuring on the upper third of the canvas two single dwellings, a barn house on the left and a farm house on the right.

Below the horizon line, in the lower two thirds of the painting is an upside-down reflection of a single snow-covered mountain with steep sloping sides, rounded ridges with a wide, not peaked, summit. 

The sky in background in the upper third is lighter and greyish and provides great contrast to the dark and darkened dwellings in front that appear to be boding and shadowed silhouettes at twilight. The barn house on left looms larger, painted with more 3 dimensionality as if dimly lit by a nocturnal light source, it has a high-pitched gabled roof, and a single door and frame on its facing façade, which most subtly and almost imperceptibly has been left slightly ajar.

The farmhouse on right, less tall, but as wide, with steeper narrower gables, is all black, therefore only has 2D dimensionality.

With no façade detail visible, except for the defined outline of a small jutting porch, its post and five railings, the roof has a chimney at front and one at the other end.

Along the ridge of the roof, between and connecting these chimneys, is cresting, an ornamentation of repeating curves.

The home has one window, on porch side, a square white space that shows the blank sky through and beyond.

The foreground to these abodes has a thin strip of grassy ground that meets to the edge of an almost pitch-black lake, that has on the right, in front of the farmhouse, a single white rowboat that sits still on the flat water’s surface.

But below this is where the isolated mountain landscape is reflecting back to the houses upside down, its shades of snow, which cover more than half its topography, is whiter than elsewhere in the image, where the light of a crisp cool sun touches a brightness and glare on different snow-covered aspects and surfaces, leaving the horizontal strata of rock, painted in dark to black monochromes, exposed, and overall there is a large casting shadow across this reversed range that is ambiguously produced under the presence of the barn house above, brooding in twilight.

The Audio Description of Here is Everywhere has been written, voiced and produced by Nilgun Guven from Vitae Veritas 2023 for Boroondara Arts for their exhibition ‘Our Place: Celebrating 20 Years of the Town Gallery.’ This work is part of the Town Hall Gallery Collection.