Tara Coey calls herself "a suburban girl" from Brisbane who "just found herself" in regional New South Wales. It's a modest way to describe a life that's taken in a corporate PR career, hopping around following a Navy husband’s postings, three young kids, and now — at what she calls "obsession level" — a fast-growing career as a landscape painter.

Tara and her family settled in Orange in the middle of winter in 2020, heavily pregnant with her second child and in the thick of COVID. It was meant to be a stepping stone back to Brisbane, where her family is, once her husband left the Navy. Instead, Orange became home.

"We just think it's such a great place to raise our little family," she says.

Tara's love of drawing goes back to childhood, sitting down with her mother — someone who would be able to copy a horse or a scene just by observing it — and, further back, a grandfather who was creative too. In grade 12, an art teacher encouraged her to build a portfolio, but her confidence wasn't there yet. She studied business and advertising at university instead, drawn to the idea of creative writing and design, until she realised that wasn't where her heart lay.

"I don't really wanna sell toothpaste, and I can't come up with a jingle," she says of the realisation that steered her towards public relations and communications instead. A career she'd stay in for 15 years.

Art didn't disappear entirely during that time — the odd painting a year, pastels and a sketchbook tucked into her bag on a European trip — but it stayed in the background. The real shift came about three years ago.

"It wasn't really until I had my third child, she was in the bouncer, and I just needed something else," Tara says. What started as something to fill a small pocket of time for herself has become a full-blown pursuit: "I'm looking at every landscape, thinking, how would I tackle that?”

Orange itself, she says, is a big part of why. "Within five minutes of where we live, we're just looking out to the most spectacular landscape." Apart from Mt Canobolas and the lake, a short drive delivers a winery, a hill, a sunset, the kind of everyday beauty Tara says she doubts she'd have noticed, let alone painted, if the family had stayed in a city.

That sense of quiet observation shapes everything about her work. Her landscapes are muted, tonal, and noticeably empty of people. Of the roughly 15 to 20 pieces heading into her upcoming solo exhibition, only one includes any human presence at all: even that a tiny, distant figure rather than faces.

"There's a quietness to my work," Tara says. "It's not loud. It's a subtle colour palette, regional landscape scenes… I'm not drawn to putting people in it." What she's after, she says, is simple: "Pause and look at it. There's that quiet beauty found within it.”

A sense of understatement reflected in the titles of her work, such as 'Gentle Days', 'Blue Skies Over Canobolas Public School', and 'A Good Vintage'.

That restraint also extends to colour itself. Burnt umber and other earthy, subtle tones dominate her palette, though she's been surprised, looking back over the current collection, by how much blue has crept in. Pale afternoon skies, autumn light, morning mist.

"Truth be told, maybe I am a bit scared of colour," she says. "It's a confidence thing."

Confidence is a thread that runs right through Tara's story. Taking a studio in Lords Place earlier this year — rather than working from the family home — was, she says, "a big decision" and one that's shifted how she sees herself. "I've gotta start calling myself an artist with confidence, and I think having a studio was definitely a turning point there."

It's helped her push past hobbyist status, exhibiting through the Corner Store Gallery (where she recently won a regional art prize), joining the Orange Art Trail, contributing to the regional gallery's upcoming ‘Here and Now’ exhibition, and picking up mentoring from Newbridge artist David Lake, who she credits, alongside landscape painter Warwick Fuller, as being a key influence on her work.

Fuller's influence shows up directly in where Tara wants to take her painting next: looser, more suggestive brushwork, and more time working en plein air rather than from photographs. "When I have done it, the painting is a bit more alive, a bit looser," she says, adding that toward the end of creating her current body of work, she can already see that shift beginning.

"I wanna keep pushing forward. I wanna keep improving,” she says, excited by what that future work might look like.

For now, that forward motion looks set to continue. With her first solo exhibition nearly ready, group shows and art prizes on the horizon for next year, and an invitation to next year's Affordable Art Fair already in hand, Tara Coey's "obsession" is starting to look like a win for the Central West.

"I'm just giving it a go," she says modestly. "I'm just putting it out there.”

Instagram: @TaraCoeyArt Www: taracoeyart.com

Tara Coey’s solo exhibition ‘Place’ runs from October 19 to November 28 at The Peisley St Gallery, 54 Peisley St, Orange, with an opening celebration on Thursday, October 22, at 6pm — all welcome.