John Eden is a prolific artist who paints and draws the everyday as well as the surrounding bushlands where he lives and works in the hills near Perth. Eden graduated from Leeds Polytechnic, BA(hons) Fine Art in 1990 and then finished his post-grad in teaching at Middlesex University. After relocating to Perth, Eden has primarily taught art and only recently moved his attention more towards his own practice.

Eden paints entirely devoid of the romantic sentimentality, demonisation or attempts at enforced naturalism that often accompany works of landscape. The act of smudging, of erasing with water, of spraying aerosols add a slurring uncertainty to the edges of Eden’s shapes and lines and evince an affinity for surface. Compositions elongate and disappear, rivulets swerve, abseil and rumple across the canvas. The marks here have valency; they are visual chords rather than notes, beset with a vividness and interiority that is entirely genuine. (Aimee Dodds, 2023)