Every year or so I pass through Adelaide, on my way back from a painting trip to Middleback Station (west of Whyalla). The first thing I do when I get off at the bus station is pace the five or six blocks to the Art Gallery of South Australia to have a look at the Horace Trenerry paintings there. Tucked in a corner of the 1940s room, Trenerry's landscapes of Willunga and the Flinders Ranges invariably sing out to me from the walls. Their resonance, the way they make the worthy pictures around them look a bit lacklustre, is similar to seeing a Vermeer in a room of chocolatey Dutch genre paintings. Trenerry is an artist really at grace with the landscape he loved. The veracity of his i...