A Spell of Order: David Inshaw’s Karri Tree Walking Trail, Boranup

Inshaw has always had the capacity to transform landscape into theatre, and here he does it with eerie precision.

The trees, those towering karri giants of Western Australia’s south-west, have been rendered not with the loose, painterly sweep of plein-air spontaneity, but with an almost hallucinatory order.

Every trunk stands like a column in some arboreal nave. Every glade is lit like a stage.

And yet the painting breathes.

What could be static — decorative, even — becomes uncanny.

The topiary-like tufts of foliage, the velvet path curving deeper into the forest, the trance-like repetition of forms: it’s all too perfect.

And that’s the point. Inshaw isn’t painting what he saw. He’s painting what remains after memory has digested vision and spat it back as symbol.

This isn’t a landscape. It’s a spell.

If you’re after realism, take a photograph. If you want to feel the forest dreaming itself, look here.

This piece of writing is a fictional homage to the writer cited. It is not authored by the actual author or their estate. No affiliation is implied. Also, the Apollo magazine reference is also fictional. It is not associated with the publication’s rights holders, or any real publication. No endorsement or affiliation is intended or implied.

An ongoing counterfactual art history project imagining what might have emerged had British painter David Inshaw spent extended periods working in Western Australia from the late 1990s to the late 2000s. While Inshaw never undertook such a journey, all visual and critical material in this series is crafted with respect to his real artistic style, interests, and biography. These reviews are fictional pastiches written in the spirit of critical engagement and creative speculation—not hoax or parody.