Bushfires struck terror into the hearts of colonials and contemporaries alike. They also inspired artists. The late colonial painter William Strutt's Black Thursday 1861-64 recorded the dramatic flight of people, cattle, birds and native animals from the fires that ravaged Victoria in the summer of 1851. A few years later, Eugène von Guérard depicted an awesome night scene created by the raging wall of flame in Bush Fire Between Mount Elephant and Timboon 1857. In more recent times the fires that came close to burning down Fred William's home at Upwey moved him to paint his Dandenong bush fire series - the fire's approach, the burnt aftermath, and the bush's final regeneration.

Mark Schaller drew inspiration for his new series of paintings from the fires that attacked the Grampians in the summer of 2006. He visited the area while they were still burning, and described the scene as like a bombsite. Walking through the burnt forests at night, trunks glowed with an incandescent light, the stillness broken by the sudden crack and thud of falling trees and branches. The drama appealed to him, as seen in the striking colours and powerful dark forms in the paintings in this exhibition. The colour range is intentionally limited to hot reds, oranges and yellows, contrasted against blacks and greys to give greater impact, the cool greens and blues in the regrowth paintings providing a sense of visual and actual relief, a change of colour temperature and mood in the sight of regeneration after devastation.

Schaller approached the scene by 'walking around a bit before sitting down to paint' - smaller works on the spot, and larger paintings on return to his Melbourne studio. He also completed a group of small etchings on the theme. The smaller oil version of Mt William, painted from the motif, presents an orange and yellow patterned sky over a black and grey checkerboard of denuded landscape, both linked by the skeletal lines of trees, the burnt foliage of some presented as ovals of red - immediate and engaging, the geometric forms, curves and zigzags providing visual structure and involving movement. Schaller seeks feeling rather than literal presentation, the moment interpreted by the interchange of what is seen and felt as in Grampians on Fire. The background profile of the mountain fixes the locale, seen through black sentinels, like entrance posts to a gateway, ashes scattered across the ground. Classically composed in its balanced verticals and horizontals, it introduces a phantasy of blackened forms encountered throughout the exhibition, at their most inventive in the larger version of Mt William. In Halls Gap on Fire, however, the flames still rage, conveyed through the flickering action and agitation of ascending angles, forms reaching out of the inferno. Only in After the Fire does Schaller allow colour variation in the introduction of vivid purple trunks, still glowing from the conflagration.

The miracle of the greening of the Grampians following rain, what Schaller calls 'the affirmation of nature', comes in two paintings titled Regrowth.  One is in vertical format visually engaging through its jungle of greening across the picture plane, and the large, horizontal, panoramic, composition, near Silverband Falls where the fires uncovered a previously lost site of Aboriginal rock carvings. The Phoenix rising from the ashes carried a double benefit - nature restored and a masterpiece uncovered, a time rightly claimed by Schaller as a 'renaissance'.

David Thomas