CEDAR CREEK, Australia - The road to Hobie Porter’s studio winds through dense green, the kind of layered rainforest that seems to breathe. It is quiet in a way that feels deliberate, as if the landscape is holding something back. Porter has built a career on that exact tension.
I had known of Hobie Porter long before I knew him personally. His sweeping landscapes hanging at Tweed Regional Gallery had stopped me in my tracks. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realise he was the same person I saw regularly at my daily café, Bastion Lane in Uki.
For more than two decades, Porter has painted the Tweed Valley - its escarpments, shifting light and familiar outlines - but rarely in ways that feel settled. His works resist the easy beauty often associated with landscape painting. Instead, they hover somewhere between recognition and unease, inviting viewers to look again at places they thought they understood.
“I’m trying to present a fresh perspective of something people are familiar with, but haven’t really seen,” Porter said.
That idea - familiarity unsettled - sits at the centre of his practice.
Born in Sydney and raised in northern New South Wales, Porter remembers sensing early on that this region was different.
“I remember as a kid thinking this area is so special, you’d be mad to move away,” he said.
The sentiment stayed with him, not as nostalgia but as a framework. While many artists leave regional areas in pursuit of opportunity, Porter made a deliberate choice to stay.
That decision was tested during his time in New York, where he studied and absorbed the pace and scale of the global art world. The experience, he said, was valuable - but clarifying.
“It was a concrete jungle,” he said. “There was magic there, but it was of a different kind - more about people. Here, it’s quieter. You have the time and space to think through your own ideas.”
That distance from the centre has shaped not only his lifestyle but his work. In metropolitan art scenes, artists are often in constant dialogue with one another - a feedback loop that can sharpen ideas but also flatten them. Porter, by contrast, works in relative isolation.
“If everyone is talking to each other about what they should be doing, they end up with the same product,” he said.
“You have to find a way to turn down the volume of those other voices to find your own.”
His paintings reflect that independence. They are technically precise, often built from multiple perspectives layered into a single frame. Viewpoints shift subtly - a cliff face might feel both distant and immediate, a tree both grounded and suspended. The effect is disorienting, almost dreamlike.
Standing in front of one of his works, I don’t feel like I am positioned within the landscape but somewhere above or within it, as if drifting.
“I want people to rethink the landscape,” Porter said. “To break away from standard ways of reading it.”
That rethinking is not purely aesthetic. Porter’s work engages with deeper questions about how landscapes are seen, interpreted and historically framed. Traditional Australian landscape painting often carries the weight of colonial narratives - the land as something to be surveyed, owned or romanticised. Porter’s approach disrupts that lineage without directly confronting it.
Instead, he alters perspective.
By shifting scale, compressing space or introducing small, almost imperceptible human traces, he creates a sense of dislocation. I, as the viewer, am no longer looking at a passive scene but participating in an experience that feels slightly out of reach.
“There’s a kind of transcendence in it,” he said. “You’re not just looking at a place; you’re rethinking how you relate to it.”
For local audiences, that experience carries particular resonance. We recognise the forms in Porter’s paintings immediately - a ridgeline, a valley, a familiar silhouette. But the way those elements are presented feels unfamiliar.
“Locals see something they know, but refreshed,” Porter said.
Further afield, the response shifts. Viewers without a direct connection to the region tend to read the work more broadly - through environmental themes, or as part of a wider conversation about landscape in contemporary art.
“I was always curious how that would translate,” Porter said. “But people seem to respond to the beauty of the environment, even if they don’t know it personally.”
Though I had known Hobie for years, this was my first time visiting the home and studio he had spoken about so often. The house itself felt like an extension of the landscape and, in many ways, of the paintings. Built by his father, the home curves around a grand central stone fireplace, its organic forms softening the weight of the rock. Art and tribal artefacts fill the walls, and a low library divides the stone kitchen from the sprawling lounge room. Even the bathroom opens itself to nature through glass, blurring the line between inside and outside.
Seeing the landscape in person - the lush green, the isolation, the mountains sweeping upward all around - made the work click into place in a completely different way.
Down at the neighbouring studio, Porter’s mother Jenny, an accomplished artist in her own right, sat quietly in front of a large canvas, layering light into one of her sweeping local beach scenes. Creativity here did not feel performative or commercial. It felt inherited. Embedded into the environment itself.
That duality - local specificity and broader relevance - has helped his work gain national recognition. Exhibitions in major galleries and inclusion in public collections have expanded his audience, but Porter remains wary of the idea of success as something external.
“When you’re living your life, you forget that people even know you exist,” he said.
What he does not forget is the role of the community around him.
“The local community has played a key role,” he said. “That support gave me the confidence to take the work further.”
One of the pivotal moments in his career came with a body of work titled Dry Rain, developed during the drought years of the late 2000s. The series introduced elements that would become central to his practice: altered perspectives, environmental tension and subtle disruptions of natural order.
“It set up my way of thinking,” he said.
In those paintings, leaves fall through empty space, suspended between sky and ground. The imagery is simple, but the effect is unsettling - an inversion of expectation that mirrors the instability of the landscape itself.
The idea of painting as a form of communication runs through Porter’s work, though not in a literal sense. He is less interested in conveying a fixed message than in creating conditions for perception.
“We want the feeling to be evident in the painting,” he said. “If people can feel it without it being explained, that’s the goal.”
Back in his studio, surrounded by canvases at various stages of completion, the process feels both methodical and uncertain. Each painting, he said, presents its own set of problems.
“You finish one, and then you have to start again,” he said. “You face all those problems again.”
It is a cycle that resists resolution - much like the landscapes he paints.
Outside, the light shifted almost imperceptibly across the valley. It was the kind of change that might go unnoticed in passing, but under Porter’s gaze, it becomes something else entirely: a moment worth holding, reworking and offering back.
Not as it is - but as it might be seen.
Perhaps that is why Porter’s work resonates so strongly here. Locals are not just seeing a landscape. They are seeing their own home reflected back at them through the eyes of someone who has spent a lifetime paying closer attention than most of us ever do.
Hobie Porter’s work continues to resonate both locally and nationally, with upcoming exhibitions including Sydney Contemporary Art Fair in September and Tweed Regional Gallery in March 27’.
www.hobieporter.com.au
By Rada Campbell
Extended version of the feature originally published in Tweed Weekly.