2026 Cobalt Garden by Kylie Castan
Artist statement
This small exhibition showcases an array of ink, soft pastel, watercolour drawings and paintings representing my favourite subject matters from cherubs inspired by rococo and old master artists to observed floral tributes of roses and other types with watercolours, pastels, inks. I also enjoy creating imagined landscapes of skies, water lilly ponds, and garden locales. I admire the impressionist plein air subjects and styles and colours within the Australian context of cobalt blue, as opposed to ultramarine blue in the northern hemisphere. Cats are interesting subjects too. I have a bachelor with honours in fine art from RMIT 1994 and belong and exhibit with numerous art societies including the Planetary Healing Artists. I have tutored and now too, art also to different classes from pastel, watercolour and drawing with graphite pencils.
Curator Statement
Cobalt Garden brings together a body of works in ink, watercolour, and soft pastel that move between observation and imagination, intimacy and art historical memory. Across this exhibition, cherubs, cats, flowers, and atmospheric landscapes are not presented as separate genres, but as interconnected visual states—each one varies on tenderness, attention, and transformation.
At the centre of the exhibition is colour: cobalt blue. More than a palette choice, cobalt blue functions here as a conceptual thread. It carries light, air, and emotional temperature across the works, linking floral still lifes to imagined gardens, and figure studies to dreamlike skies and waterlily ponds. In this sense, Cobalt Garden is less a depiction of a single place than an ecology of perception—where memory, sensation, and painterly gesture coexist.
The artist’s practice draws from Rococo and Old Master references while remaining grounded in contemporary immediacy. Cherubic motifs are reanimated through fluid lines and translucent washes; floral studies shift from direct observation to lyrical abstraction; cat portraits and intimate figures capture fleeting character through economical yet expressive mark-making. Throughout, the works sustain a productive tension between structure and looseness, control and accident, delicacy and vitality.
Influenced by Impressionist plein air sensibilities and the specific luminosity of Australian light, these paintings and drawings invite viewers to experience vision as a living process. Forms emerge, dissolve, and re-form through layered strokes, stains, and pauses of white space. What appears gentle is, on closer attention, highly intentional: each composition negotiates rhythm, breath, and spatial movement with remarkable sensitivity.
Ultimately, Cobalt Garden proposes a poetics of looking. It asks us to slow down and dwell in subtle transitions—between line and wash, object and atmosphere, memory and presence. In doing so, the exhibition offers a contemplative yet vibrant field in which the everyday and the imagined become inseparable.
You can find photos of the event on its page in the Gallery