We, in eastern Australia, wake each morning to some of the most extraordinary birdsong on the planet: the eponymous cackle of the laughing kookaburra; the cooee of the eastern whipbird; the pitch-perfect mimicry of the superb lyrebird. There is a reason why we say that to come across someone exceptional in our life is to find a “rare bird.” These small creatures enrich our lives.

Peter Stevens says that his new paintings are about “the birds and the trees, and the things we take for granted.” From a life spent in nature—observing, documenting, painting—Stevens brings us an exhibition that celebrates the beauty he finds in the Australian bush, while drawing attention to the threats that industry and indifference pose to the environment.

For several years, Stevens has worked between studios in Sydney and Wooli—“an hour off the freeway before Grafton.” Few artists have spent dedicated time in this area—the notable exception being the late Nicholas Harding. Along the pristine coastline of Yuraygir National Park, Stevens experiences “the cycles of nature and the seasons.”

On one day, he might be “walking the dog with a huge southerly blowing, the sky dark and the sea wild.” On another, he might be fishing from the beach, with a Brahminy kite circling overhead, waiting for Stevens to fling up a pilchard from the bait bucket. He does not carry a sketchbook, preferring his direct experience of nature that he will later recall in his studio.

Stevens describes each of his paintings as “an abstract inquiry, but with some sort of reality.” In many of these paintings, that reality is provided by a bird—each an instantly recognisable Australian native. There are vertical boards in this exhibition with birds enclosed in forms that resemble a leaf, but that may also be read as an “estuary, coming off the sea” from a high horizon line at the painting’s upper edge.

The trees, meanwhile, play more of an abstract and (quite literally) a supporting role. Some paintings have the trunk of a tree—a paperbark, a eucalypt—positioned as “a structural element down the middle” that echoes the composition of waterfall paintings that Stevens has made in the past. In others, the abstracted bush is viewed through several trunks or branches—reminiscent of a work like Cézanne’s The Chestnut Trees of Jas de Bouffan in Winter, in which passages of the Provençal landscape and his beloved Mont Sainte-Victoire are viewed through an avenue of chestnuts.

The subject matter in Stevens’ paintings is drawn from a mix of recent observation, distant memory, and a scientific eye to nature. He recalls a childhood that was all about “the idea of being out.” Raised “in the back blocks of Wahroonga, hunting yabbies in the creek, covered in leeches,” he only came inside when his mother called. He experienced both the coast and the interior of New South Wales, with his father’s family by the sea and his mother’s family in Bathurst.

From his maternal grandfather—a devoted birdwatcher—Stevens has inherited detailed field journals. He continues to review his grandfather’s notations, drawing inspiration from these decades-old sightings, as well as his own, as he selects different bird species to paint.

His grandfather’s scientific rigour has also been inherited by Stevens, who first studied science at university before his career as a painter and a master printmaker. He finds himself drawn to others who attend to nature in this way—like the Danish artist Per Kirkeby, who studied natural history and arctic geology, translating that understanding of the strata beneath our feet into experimental works about deep time. Another artist where Stevens has found “people draw a connection” is Colin McCahon. “He painted a singular vision,” says Stevens, such as in “his early paintings of Kauri forest and the coast” of Aotearoa’s North Island.

Environmental conservation—especially in the face of native forest logging—is something that Stevens often finds occupying his thoughts. “The small things in life give it meaning,” says Stevens. “We’re surrounded by this organism and should be doing more to protect it.” It is more than a casual interest. He admires Bob Brown (a fellow “ratbag greenie”) for his decades-long “dedication and tenacity to change” for the benefit of the Tasmanian environment, and the environment in general. He keeps current on native logging sites and reads forestry documents relating to specific coupes across Australia. Through a friend of his son, Stevens has learned the “language of forestry”—the simple markings used by loggers on the trees that they turn to lumber and woodchips.

As Stevens speaks about his life in nature, he mentions reading about the regent honeyeater “losing its song”. Researchers from the Australian National University have found that the call of the adult male is heavily simplified, in part due to there being fewer adults to teach younger birds how to sing. From a Blue Mountains population of 1,500 in the 1990s, there are fewer than 300 regent honeyeaters in the wild. The destruction of woodland habitat—especially Box-ironbark forest—is a key reason for the species’ declining population. As the H5 bird flu reaches Australian shores, Stevens further reflects on this latest threat to our rare, native birds and the fragility of the ecosystems that hold our environment together.

There is a poignancy, then, within Stevens’ work, which both celebrates the uniqueness of our native species, but also mourns the speed of their loss. This exhibition is an invitation to reflect on the Australian landscape, and to listen closely to what Stevens calls “the quiet poetry that is between the trees and the birds.”

Jack Howard, August 2026