When the bushfires burned parts of the Gold Coast Hinterland last year, Beechmont landscape artist Dave Groom wasn't sure whether his home and art studio would survive.
After evacuating from his property for five days, there was a sense of relief when he returned to find it had been spared.
Before the fires, he had been working on some drawings of heath forest. But picking up where he left off was not possible.
Groom channelled this experience into his art and captured snapshots of the bushfire he had seen firsthand into his paintings and drawings of the rainforest surrounding his home.
"I looked at the paper and I couldn't actually go back to that drawing because my head was full of all the images of the fire and the experience that we'd all been through," he said.
"So I just had to start purging some fire drawings, so I did about three charcoal drawings which were based around feelings that I had about the fire and imagined views of the fire as it came through.
"I'd never really done any fire work before, so it certainly affected me."
That fire claimed around 10 properties in Beechmont and much of the rainforest in nearby Binna Burra.
For Groom, getting back to art was cathartic and helped him to process the whole thing.
"It was a fairly emotional period to go through," he said.
But something had changed, and when he first got back in the studio the usual blues and greens had been replaced with a darkness.
"Some of the pieces do feature fire-damaged ground — so my palette changed from those distant blues and greens that you get looking at the rainforest … to browns and blacks and those fire-related colours," he said.
"A lot of the work has hints of fire in it … but there's also that sense that, you know, the landscape is here and it will recover."
Surreal Nature
Surreal Nature is Groom's first exhibition since the fires.
It includes a mix of landscapes both fire damaged and undamaged.
"Being a landscape artist, I tend to just work with what I observe on a day-to-day basis and having the fires come through was a whole new look of the landscape and feel for the landscape," he said.
"There's a lot of smoke and dead trees.
"But, it's a really interesting mix of that journey of going through the fires and then seeing how the landscapes recovered."
Dave Groom's Surreal Nature Exhibition runs until September 13 at the Tweed Regional Art Gallery and Margaret Olley Art Centre, The Boyd Gallery Space.
