In a relatively brief career, Luke Sciberras has found his subject, and his ideal environment. "I've always concentrated on the landscape," he says. "I was never really interested in anything else."

For the time being, this means one particular landscape: the dry fields and jagged gullies around the old gold mining town of Hill End, where he and his family have bought a cottage. The soft greys and muddy ochres of that tortured earth recur again and again in Sciberras's semi-abstract paintings.

One reason he is so attracted to Hill End is its status as a sacred site in modern Australian art. At the height of the gold rushes in the 1860s, Hill End was the third most populous centre in New South Wales. By the time Russell Drysdale and Donald Friend arrived in the late 1940s, it was almost deserted. Melancholy and dilapidated, it became the inspiration for some of Drysdale's most iconic pictures, such as The Cricketers (1948). In the years that followed, Friend bought a house in Hill End, and wrote a book about the town. Fellow artists, Paul Haefliger and Jean Bellette also acquired local real estate, and soon the old hamlet had become a branch station for Sydney's Bohemia.

The trend continues today, with a lively program of artist residencies, and a constant to-and-fro between the city and the bush. Sciberras has become a leading Hill End personality, and is usually in the thick of all the artistic gatherings - the parties and lunches, the soirées and sketching parties. He looks upon older artists such as Elisabeth Cummings, John Olsen, John Firth-Smith, Garry Shead and Tim Storrier, as mentors, and feels he has learned a lot from their examples and their encouragement.

On the other hand, Sciberras sees his residence in Hill End as a way of curbing his natural gregariousness. Most of the time he is able to pursue his own work, free from the social temptations. Once he gets started, he is completely immersed in the experience.

"For me, the act of painting is to me the ultimate intoxication and addiction," he says. "But being out in the landscape is also pretty special. I'm learning how nature behaves, and how to translate that into a painting. You form a relationship with the landscape, like you do with a person. It provides endless compositions, endless challenges with colour. Inspiration comes from a perpetual, unresolved, engagement with this environment."

Sciberras feels he is not trying to capture a likeness of landscape, but rather to express how he feels about it. "It's only ever a parody," he contends, "whether you're painting with a single hair brush or a broom. It's a very clumsy parody, but it's something you've got in your system. It's the challenge of never feeling you've got it right. You ask: 'What the hell is that colour made of?' You look at the grass - the blandest colour you can imagine. How do you make that? It never ends. How do you paint the light-sucking blackness of a tree trunk against the landscape?"

As Sciberras sits in his broken-down shed of a studio, surrounded by animal skulls and paint-spattered sticks of furniture, he tries to work as fluently and spontaneously as he can. He claims to never suffer from artist's block. "That's just wheel wobble of a frantic mind," he says. "I like to go into the studio with a fistful of drawings and fly into it - make my mistakes and learn from them. It's got to be a vital process, otherwise you're just projecting this very egocentric, cerebral thing. Good for some but not for me!"

John McDonald

View the full list of artists photographed by R. Ian Lloyd