Jonathan Bowden is Launceston's living impressionist painter

Not physically, though, only figuratively: the 80-year-old painter has dotted the blank spaces of his living room and studio with his own large-scale pastel works depicting the North Esk River.

The great muse of his life in Tasmania has been the water's course through Corra Linn, south of Launceston, which he paints with a painstaking technique called "broken colour".

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"It's pure colour painted in small strokes next to or on top of one another - they don't physically blend," Bowden said.

"Up close, the image is indiscernible - you can't tell what it is - but when you stand back from the canvas, your eyes bring the colours together.

"The mind does the work and the colours meld."

Few painters, if any, have Bowden's skill or maturity of the broken colour technique; especially in Australia.

Born in Melbourne in 1942, much of Bowden's late life has been spent in Tasmania but just under half of it was roaming continental Europe and London, where his great inspirations were found.

An almost direct lineage from the school of painters which changed modern art, the 19th century French Impressionists - most obviously Claude Monet - can be drawn to the Riverside artist.

Bowden has paid particular homage to this influence with a set of paintings he calls Water and Stone, which came about from his time studying Monet's 25-painting series, Haystacks.

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"I was bowled away by the power of his simple sets of raw colour which convey the time of day," he said.

"I wanted to take what Monet had done and to work by the water's edge at Corra Linn; not to copy but to be inspired by."

The Water and Stone works show Corra Linn in vivid hues and rushing movement - an effect helped by broken colour's illusory effect on the optic nerves - and aims at capturing "the wonder of such a wild and natural place".

Each piece was painted in open air at Corra Linn, or as the French impressionists called it en plein air.

Now in his 80's, Bowden still finds time to travel to Corra Linn in the summer, though he completed his major series in the early 2000s and has since sold off a number at exhibitions in places like Gallery Pejean.

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An appreciation for his oeuvre has been growing over the past decade, with pieces often fetching somewhere in the realm of $5 thousand dollars each.

But what's most notable about his work - and any artists - is not monetary, it is either a breaking of convention or return to a legacy of craftsmanship inspired by a response to our own time.

Bowden is capturing natural beauty in an increasingly industrialised world.

Bowden's is part of both the French and another movement, which started at the same time over 100 years ago: that of Australia's Heidelberg School of painters.

Known as the "Australian impressionists", they painted the unique light of our country as Bowden does now, and gave "voice or a shape to something so ordinary that is deeply missed when it's no longer there".

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"If they were somewhere else, most Tasmanians would miss it and wished they'd done more while they had it or more to save it," Bowden said.

"I know I can do nothing to preserve it, but at least I can record its presence, its moods, its seasons and times of day."

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