Hein Poortenaar is an emerging part-time artist who lives and works from a property halfway up a mountain in the Huon Valley, painting in the gaps around a day job. His practice centres on the landscape, rendered from realism through to tonal abstraction. His work is built up through layered paint, scraping back and using diverse mark-making tools. Half artist, half engineer, always an explorer, Hein Poortenaar reads a landscape the way a bushwalker reads terrain — the folds of the hills, the light, the easiest route through. That same eye drives his painting: bold, heroic and unapologetically raw, with paint applied and scraped back until the image feels earned rather than pretty.

Also a sculptor of large, brutal pieces and builder of an imaginary medieval world at 1/10 scale, Hein’s guiding philosophy is simple: be prolific, be wild, be untameable and gather as much interesting material as possible along the way. He works purely for his own satisfaction, free of any pressure to be commercial, and when he isn’t at the easel, he’s usually deep in the bush or lost in some equally ambitious side project.