Atutumn Ghent (2010)

A traditional painter's digital techniques create serene landscapes that transcend reality. Mike Peters catches up with Catherine Nelson in Beijing.

The parts seem simple: Pollen gathered on a summer day. Autumn leaves floating in water. But take a painter with visions of broad vistas, give her a digital camera, a bathtub and a computer, and the whole becomes a panoramic dreamscape. "I didn't start out trying to do an ecology series," says Catherine Nelson of her just-opened Beijing show titled Future Memories. "Of course I am concerned about the planet, and in the end this collection captures what will only be memories if we don't treasure what we have.

"But I am really driven by landscape," says the Australian artist who spent a dozen years working as a compositor on films such as Moulin Rouge, Australia and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

"As a painter, when I look at a painting I am looking at not only the subject of what it is, but the painter and the painter's vision of that subject," she recently told the magazine Australia Unlimited. "That was my training and that never left me."

Since 2008 she's returned to making her own art, using photographs from nature - lotus blossoms, leaves, birds, a tree-lined horizon - digitally woven into a spherical collage that contains hundreds of images put together into a seamless, luminous landscape.

"I like to spend about three hours taking lots and lots of photographs in a setting I like, so the light will be fairly consistent," she says. She might spend another afternoon collecting leaves and pollen near her home in Belgium, where she lives now, and use them in ways inspired by impressionist artists and the Flemish renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel.

"I love his ability to put many stories into a single moment," she says, and the circular form she employs provides a wide-angle opportunity to do the same.

Nelson says she molds her images intuitively, without obsessing about meaning.

"I like the idea that everyone can form their own interpretation". The result is a scene that may be clearly identifiable as a botanical garden in Ghent or Sydney, and yet "really looks nothing like it" after Nelson's deconstruction, reconstruction and luminous digital painting.

Nelson's Beijing visit for the show's opening at Galerie Paris Beijing was her second trip to the capital, and the energy of the 798 Art Zone nearly overwhelms her.

"It's very exciting," she says. "I've never seen anything like it." That mirrors the enthusiasm she has for her own art.

"The industry has mushroomed," she says of the whole realm of visual effects.

"But in some ways it's yet to blossom. Every year I feel more possibility. They are developing cameras that can change the focus within an image after the photograph has been taken, for example. We just don't know what technology will bring next."