soho galleries logo
SALE
Selected works reduced — view now

Australian Landscape Paintings & Artists

A landscape painting does something a photograph rarely manages — it slows a place down. The artist has already decided what matters: which ridge line, which quality of light, which stretch of coast is worth holding onto. That’s a big part of why landscape has stayed the most enduringly popular genre in Australian art — it brings a real, specific place into a room, and it never quite looks the same twice as the light in your own space shifts through the day.

Read more

Showing 1–65 of 72 resultsSorted by price: low to high

A short history of Australian landscape painting

No genre is more bound up with how Australians see their own country. The story runs through four broad chapters, and most contemporary landscape work is still in conversation with them.

Aboriginal painting — the oldest continuous tradition. Indigenous Australians have been depicting Country for tens of thousands of years, though rarely as "landscape" in the European sense of a view seen from outside it. Albert Namatjira (1902–1959) became the best-known Aboriginal painter of the twentieth century by working in Western-style watercolour while carrying an unmistakable relationship to the land into it, founding the Hermannsburg School and painting the MacDonnell Ranges with a familiarity no visiting artist could match.

The Heidelberg School — inventing an Australian way of seeing. European painters arriving in the late eighteenth century found their inherited visual language simply didn't fit: the light was harder, the palette drier, the bush less orderly than anything in a British or French tradition. By the 1880s the mainly Melbourne-based Heidelberg School had stopped trying to force it. Tom Roberts painted the working bush and the pastoral industry — Shearing the Rams, A Break Away! — while Frederick McCubbin, the first Australian-born painter to build a major reputation, took the melancholy side of the same subject, the settler dwarfed and sometimes beaten by the country. Arthur Streeton, later knighted, pushed furthest into the dazzling high-key light that still reads as instantly Australian.

Between the wars — light, gum trees and the interior. Hans Heysen made the Australian gum tree a serious subject in its own right and painted the arid Flinders Ranges with real conviction, while Elioth Gruner, a seven-time Wynne Prize winner, treated landscape as a sustained study of light itself.

Post-war modernism — landscape as myth. After 1945 Sidney Nolan and his contemporaries stopped describing the country and started using it, turning the outback into a stage for Australian myth — Ned Kelly, Burke and Wills, the drought — and opening the door to the abstracted, interpretive landscape painting that dominates the genre today.

Contemporary Australian landscape painting

Which is where this collection sits. Very little of it is a literal view. Most of it takes a real place — a river the painter grew up on, a pool, a headland, a stretch of the Kimberley — and abstracts it until what survives is the feeling of being there rather than the topography.

Featured landscape painters
Phil Stallard — by some distance the anchor of this collection. He builds abstracted Sydney waterways from memory, returning repeatedly to the Hawkesbury River he explored as a child, layering colour fields with gestural marks borrowed from the city's graffitied walls and construction sites.
Geoff Coleman — a Melbourne painter working for over four decades on the meeting point of the built environment and the natural one: swimming pools, homesteads and clean architectural geometry set against trees, water and shifting light.

Gino Campagnaro — architectural landscapes and interiors, soft-palette and unhurried, drawing on Bondi where he lived for years and on the mid-century light of Palm Springs and the Amalfi Coast. He paints in light rather than literal colour, aiming for atmosphere over accuracy.
James Willebrant — five decades of the Australian eastern seaboard and its Art Deco surf pavilions and ocean baths, in a sharply defined style built to capture "how our intense antipodean light illuminates and dominates that whole experience." His prints are held in the NGV and AGNSW.

Peter Griffen — the most abstracted landscape painter here, and squarely in the post-Nolan tradition of using the country rather than describing it. Works like Living in the Kimberley, Above the Coast and The Winding White Road reduce Australian country to colour, mass and movement. His method is deliberate risk: "to make discoveries risks must be taken, the traveller must get lost. A well planned journey can only lead to an already known destination."
Julie Simmons — a plein-air painter in the most traditional sense of the genre, working outdoors to capture shape and tone directly. A former commercial artist, draughtsperson and studio potter who returned to painting in 2004, she works in watercolour and increasingly in expressive multi-media on canvas, and is an associate member of the Royal Art Society. Her work is award-winning and held in collections across Australia.

Also represented in this collection: Linda Dry Parker, Marshall Williams and Mike Barr.

Prices range from around $2,640 for smaller studies to just under $23,000 for large statement pieces, with the typical work around $7,000, across oil, acrylic, watercolour and mixed media.

SOHO Galleries has been Sydney's home for original Australian art for over 35 years, with delivery and installation available nationwide.

If you're interested in any landscape painting, contact us today.

Australian landscape painting FAQ

Who are the most famous Australian landscape painters? Historically: Albert Namatjira, Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin and Arthur Streeton of the Heidelberg School, Hans Heysen, Elioth Gruner, and Sidney Nolan. Their work sits in public collections rather than the commercial market — but the tradition they built is the one contemporary Australian landscape painters are still working within.

Who are Australia's leading landscape artists working today? SOHO represents a curated group of established and emerging landscape painters across oil, acrylic, watercolour and mixed media — Phil Stallard, Geoff Coleman, Gino Campagnaro, James Willebrant, Peter Griffen and Julie Simmons — ranging from plein-air and architectural work to fully abstracted interpretations of the bush and coast.

What styles of Australian landscape painting are available? Traditional realist and plein-air bush and outback scenes, coastal and harbour landscapes, architectural landscapes, and contemporary abstracted interpretations — in sizes suited to homes, offices and larger commercial spaces.

Why is landscape such a popular choice for a home or office? A landscape painting brings a specific, real place into a room without dominating it the way a large figurative or abstract piece can — it reads as calm and grounding rather than as a statement.

Can I buy Australian landscape paintings online? Yes — every work in this collection can be purchased online with Australia-wide delivery, or viewed in person at our Woollahra, Sydney gallery. Each painting comes with full provenance and artist information.