"Where the Moonlight Finds Us" is a large acrylic abstract painting honouring the vast Australian bush nightscape by Sydney Artist, Belinda Baynes.
It is 1m x 1m in size and stretched over a timber frame ready for hanging or for you to add a floating frame to suit your interior.
There is a particular kind of magic that belongs to the Australian landscape after dark.
As the last light disappears and the familiar shapes of the bush dissolve into shadow, another world begins to emerge. Ancient gums become pale, twisting silhouettes. Leaves catch fleeting fragments of moonlight. The deep blue of the night stretches seemingly without end, scattered with stars, while colours that were hidden during the day begin to glow from within.
Where the Moonlight Finds Us is my homage to that quiet, enchanted world, and one that I am lucky enough to be a part of often.
At the heart of the painting stands an old incredible Australian gum, its weathered branches reaching into an immense night sky. Around it, layers of emerald, turquoise, midnight blue and luminous aqua move between abstraction and landscape, suggesting foliage illuminated for only a moment before disappearing again into darkness. The earth below is softer and warmer, touched with blush, ochre and faded coral, as though traces of the day are still lingering beneath the moonlight.
And then, almost hidden within the vastness of it all, is a wombat and its tiny baby wandering through the landscape.
Its scale is deliberate. The animal is not intended to dominate the painting, but to remind us that while the bush may appear silent at night, it is never truly still. Beyond our houses and our lights, small lives continue beneath the stars, following pathways we rarely see. There is something deeply moving to me about that contrast: the enormity of the Australian sky and the intimacy of one small creature moving quietly beneath it.
This work is not intended to represent a single moment exactly as it appeared. Instead, it brings together my past memories from a magical place and imagination: the extraordinary old gums, the depth of the night sky, the unexpected colours of the Australian bush and that almost childlike feeling that something magical might be happening just beyond where we can see.
It is a celebration of the landscape I continually return to in my work: wild, ancient, beautiful and a little mysterious.
A reminder that sometimes the most extraordinary moments are the quiet ones, happening beneath a million stars, when no one is looking.
