Jason Moad

Jason Moad is a contemporary realist painter, based in Melbourne. With a careful, labour intensive approach to painting scenes, Moad invites us to examine the presence and personality of plants.

With each brushstroke, Moad effortlessly captures the intricate details and vibrant essence of nature, transporting viewers to enchanting landscapes bursting with life. His mastery of light and shadow brings wonders to life on canvas. ‘Quiddity’ showcases Jason Moad’s profound connection to the natural world, inspiring a deep appreciation for the incredible beauty of our planet’s botanical life. This exhibition is a testament to his remarkable talent and unwavering passion for the wonders of the botanical realm.

“My initial title for this show was Negative Capability- until it was rightly pointed out what a downer that sounded like! None-the-less, Negative Capability, a theory expounded by the poet John Keats, is all about the ability to live with mystery, in the face of enlightenment values that insist everything has a neat, tidy, satisfactory and ultimately rational answer. Human beings, at least since the enlightenment, have tended to categorise and rank organisms in hierarchies, separating the natural world into higher and lower life-forms. Far from scientific, this is a system as much influenced by historical, cultural and religious values. Values perhaps more suited to the production of art.

I have tended to paint plants as subjects, rather than objects. In my work they represent the other-than-human, partly inspired by the work currently being done by a few brave scientists and philosophers exploring the remarkable likelihood that at least some plants, despite not possessing brains or nervous systems, are none-the-less capable of learning and memory. Plants and fungi, it turns out, can feel pain, be anaesthetised and probably, in some way, even see. There is increasing speculation that they possess some form of consciousness. We like to see ourselves as separate from nature and the inevitable pinnacle of evolution. One need only look around to see how that is working out. The truth is, we live in a world full of people and, as an animist, I’m keen to point out that only some of them are human.

I eventually settled on Quiddity as a title. Quiddity is about the inherent essence or nature of something- a quality that the rigid mission of the enlightenment, cartesian thought and scientism is incapable of pinning down.”

– Jason Moad, 2023