For Jenny McIntosh, the Australian bush isn’t just a subject; it’s a lifelong companion. Carried into the Blue Mountains in a rucksack at six weeks old, Jenny has spent decades translating the grit and glory of the landscape onto canvas. Today, as an artist on the Jervis Bay Arts Trail, she opens her working studio to the public, stripping back the mystery of fine art to reveal the joy of “better muddling” and the technical mastery behind her vibrant oil landscapes.
Jenny McIntosh has a deep and abiding love for the Australian bush, developed over a lifetime spent immersed within the landscape – since she was stuffed into a rucksack merely weeks old and taken with her family out into the Blue Mountains. Visitors to her studio in Sanctuary Point can experience not only her incredible oil paintings of landscapes from the coast to the mountains, they will also learn about Jenny’s process and her deep technical knowledge of painting.
A Studio Without Secrets
“I really love it when people come, I want them to experience a working studio,” she says. As a full-time artist and art teacher, Jenny’s studio – a standalone building in her garden – is packed with a dizzying array of materials along with paintings at various stages of development.
“Because I’ve got a big working studio and I’m working full-time as an artist, I’ve always got work on the go. It’s not like a polished gallery with every work finished and framed and ready to be sold. There will be some of that but there will also be something on the easel,” she describes.
“The chats [with visitors] have been really good. A lot of people have come along who paint as a hobby and conversation always gets around to how to paint, what do you use, and I really like to tell them all of that stuff.”
She says that sharing her work in progress has helped her to become a better teacher, and to connect with people’s nervousness about trying to paint.
“All paintings have the ugly stage or you’re trying to work things out,” Jenny says, adding that when people discover that, it can help them to overcome the fear of trying, getting started.
“I’m quite happy to show you warts and all. I think that’s really important anyway, in my teaching journey and in my own learning journey, you realise that you can’t get to where you’re going if you don’t make the mistakes. I don’t even want to call them mistakes, but if it didn’t quite go the way you planned, that’s the springboard for the next idea and that’s how you grow. That’s how you learn.”
As one of the open studios on the Jervis Bay Arts Trail, Jenny loves to opportunity to show more people the under-story of oil painting.
“ Most people are like, whoa, this is exciting. Because they don’t know what goes on in an artist’s studio. Especially if you’re showing them process and then they understand that they don’t have to be, oh it just comes out in one hit of inspiration and it’s a perfect finished item. That’s not how it how it works. I think they feel a little more comfortable about allowing themselves to have a go.”
Jenny is incredible generous with her knowledge, with her visitors and with her students, including all the research and experimenting she has done herself about how to make archival quality work.
“I’ve spent a lifetime learning. I’m a sticky beak, I need to know. I go down rabbit holes and I want to know all the underneath stuff. I want to know how to do it so that it’s going to last and it’s not going to crack, it’s not going to fall off, or have some weird, unexpected thing happen.”
Jenny has been a full-time artist since 2022, giving up other work including a massage business to take the leap and focus on her art practice and teaching. She offers a range of classes, from regular studio sessions for a small number of emerging artists where she supports their individual practices with advice on technique, to helping beginners to get started and in a range of mediums from drawing to oil paint and pen and wash.
“I think you learn by teaching. You hear that, but I didn’t really know it until I started teaching. I learn from students all the time,” Jenny says. “You learn because something comes up, you want to teach them. Or simply, the biggest way is, you might have just been doing things because you know how to do things. But now you’ve got to teach it to someone, so you have to really look at, well, what am I doing? It just strips it right back. And sometimes too, it is a benefit to revisit the basics from time to time, the foundation. You can’t have a strong practice without a good, strong, solid foundation. It’s as simple as that.”
Always a Maker
Jenny says her love of making and her love of teaching others have both co-existed in her since she was a child.
“I’ve always been handy, I’d learn to knit, I’d learn to sew, I’d learn to make something out of cardboard, there was photography I was always making things. If the other kids said, I’m bored, I’d say, we can make this! If I can do something and someone says, I wish I knew how to do that, I’ll teach how to do it, because it’s the joy of sharing and passing it on.”
Of teaching, she says, “I get so much out of it. I want to share that joy with other people. I want them to experience that, too.”
One of the ways she shares this joy is through her Art Café events, which are casual mornings with coffee and cake, and simple pen and wash creations.
“The Art Café came about because a lot of the workshops I teach are very serious. They’re fine art, learn how to oil paint, learn how to create great sky or learn about color and tone. And they’re more expensive.
“Because I also know how valuable art is to our well-being I wanted something that was low-cost, had a social element, that was the really big part, and indulging in art, whether that was a fun thing to do with girlfriends or whether that’s dipping my toe in to see if I’m even game to do it. There’s such low stakes, everyone is pretty free. I try to make them really comfortable, make it really clear, we are all just muddling through, but I’ll give you some direction for better muddling. Art Cafe is about socialising, using art for wellness, it’s light teaching.”
The Art Café mornings are incredibly popular, and Jenny credits Fiona, who owns Peckish on the Park in Nowra as being very supportive. She is now starting some mornings at Sussex Inlet, which will be in the community centre with simple tea and cake provided, but the same approach to art making.
A Gift from the Grandparents
Jenny says her grandparents spotted her talent and were instrumental in providing her with good quality materials to really kick start her journey.
“All kids start out drawing and some of us stop, some don’t. I didn’t, I was always obsessed with it, if I wasn’t drawing with something, I was drawing in the dirt,” Jenny laughs. “I always wanted to paint, I wanted to paint big pictures, I remember that even before I went to school.”
She has vivid memories of key moments along the way.
“One of those pivot moments was, I was quite young, I had my blackboard set up out the back. Somehow I must have seen Sunflowers by Van Gogh and I thought, I can do that. And of course I was so frustrated I couldn’t because those [kids] paints were never going to let me do what I had in my head!”
Her grandmother stepped in, introducing young Jenny to a friend who showed her how to use oil paints, and that transformed that frustration into joy.
“She wrote out a list and it was a full palette, I think it might have been 12 or more colours plus you need this and this, and gave it to my grandmother who then took me to Grace Bros in Roselands and bought everything. Then my grandfather spent the next week chopping up bits of ply and priming them in all sorts of shapes and sizes. I was about 11.
“I was grateful then but as I look back, I wonder, if they hadn’t have done that I doubt I would have got much of a start.”
Jenny says her family were all very creative and musical, with many serious amateur photographers among them and even a darkroom at home, but they were also working incredibly hard and looking after a disabled sibling. Her father was one of the major orchid growers for export and wrote horticulture books for which she did the drawings.
Dad had set up a darkroom in the kitchen, but when I started painting in my bedroom with oils and my mother was freaking out, and actually rightly so, I realise, they extended off the back of the garage to make a studio and a dark room.”
Love of the Bush
Jenny’s dad was instrumental in giving her the love of the bush and powers of observation.
“I love drawing and I never wanted to be pigeonholed into one genre. But landscape has always been probably the main one. And I think that’s because from the day I was born, virtually, at six weeks old, I was in the bush. As each of us came along, we were thrown into a rucksack and carried into the bush.”
Her dad was a master bush craftsman, member of the Kameruka Bushwalking Club, heavily involved with the Scouts, and ran in circles with the likes of Paddy Pallin and Richard Graves, explains Jenny.
“I’ve got a backpack at home that was made by Paddy for me when I was three,” she says. “Dad was bushwalking, rock climbing, canyoning, caving, all of that sort of stuff. That slowed down as children came along, but he was still out in the bush.
“Dad always shared with kids, any child nearby at a bbq he would be showing them the constellations. Or on a bushwalk, he’d be pointing things out. Which he did till the day he died. I took him for a little walk two weeks before he died down Glenbrook Lagoon, and he was still pointing things out.”
She says her dad definitely gave her powers of observation, also through his love of photography, that have served her art practice.
“I had a camera in my hand from the time I could hold a camera, and I can hear him saying, when we’re kids, ‘open your big peepers’.”
Lifelong Learning
Jenny has undertaken study in art at school, TAFE and various small art groups as well as a lot of self-directed learning. At 26, she attended Penrith TAFE as a mature age student, and describes the style of art teaching in the 1980s with humour, “it’s the 80s. Splash a bit of black a round. Throw a bit of red on it. Give it a good concept and that’s it. And in the 80s if anything actually looked like a tree, well, you’re tight! Come on, loosen up!”
She says there were a couple of brilliant teachers there, and the biggest influence was the people she met along the way, “that’s what gave me connections and put me in contact with a group of older women who were under the Graeme Inson School, they were teaching, they were doing scholarships and things overseas, and they lived out in Windsor, we would go and paint and draw somewhere every Tuesday, so it’d either be in the Mountains, in Sydney, The Rocks, or somewhere like that, or someone’s studio.
“We used to go to life drawing in Erskineville which was amazing because artists of all sorts would be there. It was run by this older woman and she was eccentric. She had a cowbell she would ring for the change of pose.”
Jenny says that peer critique was one of the most important elements of her growth as an artist. “Everybody from TAFE right through to these people, we all did critique at the end, show and tell. We would discuss what had worked, what hadn’t, how we felt, and I do that in my classes now with my students and it’s one of the most valuable things. They all have learned how to speak or are learning how to speak about their art and figure out their problems that way as well.”
Streetscapes as History
Beyond her stunning landscape paintings, Jenny has also loved creating bodies of work such as streetscapes and charcoal nudes, both of which she hopes to find time for again in the near future.
Of her streetscapes from the Blue Mountains, she describes several works in and around Katoomba Street, which offered a lot of inspiration.
“Katoomba is such a quirky place. Katoomba Street on early Saturday morning in the middle of June,” she recalls, with the inspiration, “usually someone going about their business. It’s a streak of light. It’s an alleyway. It’s a drainpipe. It’s garbage bins … these things are great to paint because they’re history as well.
“There was a green house that was at the back of Coles, and it was next to one of the alleyways, an old house and a lot of people have had a history of living in that house. There was a little red moped parked outside and there were quirky things hanging off the fence and I painted that.
“So many people gave me stories of how they lived there, one woman was pregnant when it snowed, she fell down the stairs, and someone else said, that’s my moped! Then six months after that exhibition the house was bulldozed and it is now just some modern brick building.”
She recalls another streetscape painting of Huskisson from down by the wharf that she painted about 15 years ago, “it doesn’t look like that down there now.”
Here and There
“The first couple of exhibitions I had down here [in the Shoalhaven] were called things like, ‘From Here to There’ and they revolved around the Blue Mountains and here because there was work that still had to be done,” Jenny says of her big move from the mountains to the coast.
“Up there was like painting an old friend. I knew it intimately. I’d been painting it and drawing it a long time and today that is still the same case. I’ll never give up painting and drawing up there because I love it.
“Down here was discovering a new friend and it was more curiosity. I’m still on that journey and if I had my way I’d be doing it 24-7. It’s a process of discovery and learning more about where I am now and what’s my role here. For a while I felt very between the two. By painting and discovering that grounds you as well.”
Jenny says that while the coastline is the most obviously different feature, she is still attracted to the bush, a more inland view of the environment.
“I love walking a lot in the National Park and around our beaches obviously. I do still like going a little inland and I’ve got a lot more to discover here but I’ve been lucky e I’ve had a couple of offers to go to people’s properties that are out the back of Kangaroo Valley and Berry.”
Of the contrast between the Mountains and the Coast, she says, “the most obvious is composition. You’re on a beach and yes, it’s very beautiful but how are you going to make that interesting? You need something to lead you in.”
The atmosphere is another difference that Jenny describes.
When you’re in the Mountains and you live in the Mountains, when you stand on a lookout, you’re up in the clouds and everything is closer around you. You’re more in it, in a sense. I also spent a lot of time in the valleys. I would hop off over the ridge, get down, get in. Everything is close and it’s around you. Peeking around something, looking in the creeks, in the crevices, in the cracks, really close looking.
“On our coast, it’s a bit sparser, you’ve got more scrubby stuff and the trees are bent in a different way than they are up there.”
She says her palette has changed a lot too, with the coast offering up a spicier range.
“The colours are different here. I don’t think I had phthalo blue on my palette way back then. As soon as I came here, it made its way onto the palette and so has cobalt teal and so has phthalo green. Look at our bays, look at the colour of the water. You just can’t get that just with cobalt blue and ultramarine blue. You need some spice. Those kicker colours.”
The Jervis Bay Arts Trail is on the last Saturday of the month, with studios open from 10am till 3pm. See their website for which studios are open on the day, and a map of where to find them.
