Amelda Read Forsythe is an Australian artist from Melbourne.

…referring to Pieter Casteels III early 18th century series itself titled  Twelve Months of Flowers. The oil on board artworks reveal a dramatic change in direction for the artist in terms of palette. Hints of lolly bright pastels highlights in her predominantly monochromatic, or subdued greens and browns of perennial autumn, are now in full display. 

They are bright and brilliant, incongruous even, a display of native flora, of exotic mysterious flora, presented for official observation of formal still life. Her deft application techniques are lost in digital, flattened. 

You must be physically present to perceive the illusory qualities via juxtapositions of brushwork, creating a depth to the image rendering it both solidly an object and a feather-light image. 

Marielle Soni
2021

Read Forsythe’s enquiry into the uneasy, unsettled space between propositional ideas and embedded belief cleverly references the historic roles of drawing and printmaking. 

She invents a painting process employing brush and rag accrual and removal of paint that asserts her painted mark as neither quite painted, nor drawn or printed, but somehow, of all three modalities concurrently.

Her recent series Twelve Months of Flowers references European floral painting and printmaking, motifs of Australian indigenous plants, and newly discovered species from all over the world. In this series Read-Forsythe navigates through and repurposes our visual history as derived from enlightenment thinking. 

Her new paintings are propositional moments of congregation, new and old, here and there, arriving in one painted place and all-together making something worthwhile in a newly imagined current form. 

Andrew Keall
2021

Amelda Read Forsythe’s luminous paintings shimmer and shift, drawing you in to the mercurial landscapes they describe. Whimsical and playful at first glance, they slowly reveal the layers that stir below their surface. Seeming certainty gives way to something more unsettling; nothing is still, little is sure.  

Filled with energy and movement, the works articulate the uncertain times we are living in. Trees bend portentously, clouds roll and glide and small birds seek shelter. Careful detail gives way to hazier, abstracted elements. Established orders are being challenged, solid structures seem to buckle and sway.

This state of flux is not without it’s beauty, or hope. There is a rhythm in the movement and drift of the landscape. Dark and moody elements are offset by translucent light. The fertile greens and intense blues prevalent in the paintings are beautiful and also hopeful; hinting at the promise of more settled times. 

Read Forsythe is a stunning painter. With her luminous colours, diffuse surfaces and feather-light touch she captures the landscape in a way that is alluring, original and wholly her own. 

Nicola Stein 
2011