About the Artist

 At the Forest by the Sea

Yudha studied Visual Arts at the University of Melbourne and held his first solo exhibition at the George Paton Gallery in 1992. He has exhibited his artworks in group and solo shows since then.

In early 2022, Yudha retreated from city life to enter an artist residence in a small shack by the sea. There he encountered a mystical entanglement between the words and imagery of Romantic poets, such as Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Lord Byron and William Blake and the intensity of the natural environment. 

The result is At the Forest by the Sea – a collection of paintings inspired by the unique nature of the Ramsar wetlands, internationally significant ecosystems which surround his studio in Western Gippsland. 

Rather than merely reproducing the shapes and colours of the scenes, Yudha aimed to breathe life into these artworks, much like the 19thCentury Romantic artists and poets who inspired him.  Through heightened colours and intense contrasts he worked to represent and emphasise the emotional, spiritual, and unattainable ideal of forms using the natural features of the environment as starting points in each of these inner journeys.

Paying tribute to his favourite poets, Yudha embeds lines of their poems in the titles of his artworks. He hopes you might be inspired to read the poems while looking at the artworks, discovering, as he did, the beauty of the Romantic’s reverence for intuition and the power of human feeling.

The Laws of Nature.

Unable to run

When the weather turns 

The trees are patient,

They won’t blame god,

human

Or the wind 

Rather, they parade, attentive

To the sun, to heaven, to the creator. 

Struck by lightning, 

Smashed by cyclone, 

Unfurled in a sun shower-

Never self-pitying

Only reaching upwards, with devotion

Even when Forsaken

They remain 

Loyal to the Laws of Nature

Yudha Scholes  2022

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