She farewells her husband – tourism entrepreneur Rob Pennicott – and their two adult children and their family home in South Hobart, and indulges in some quiet reflection.

Sometimes Boulter heads to the family’s second home on Bruny Island, or sometimes she’ll camp instead.

Sometimes it’s for three or four nights, sometimes it’s for a week or two.

But regardless of the location, or the time frame, Boulter says there’s “a lot of walking, and thinking, and looking” and also plenty of “reflection and contemplation’’.

Because as the much as the 54-year-old landscape painter loves spending time with her family, she says there is a special kind of artistic inspiration that comes from these short but mighty solo getaways in nature.

“I need to have this unfolding envelope of experiences,’’ Boulter explains.

“I do consciously make time out of the studio for all that, whether that’s going to Bruny – there are certainly places I often repeat visiting – but also other new places I go to. Sometimes it will be a little residence I do on my own, or camping somewhere. I often take a lot of images, and write a lot of notes … being on my own is useful for that.’’

Add those getaways to her more regular experiences among the elements – like a family boat trip on the waterways around Hobart with Rob and children Mia, 25, and Noah, 23 – combined with Boulter’s childhood memories growing up on the ocean when her family built a boat and sailed it from Australia to Canada and back again, over a seven-year period – and Boulter has no shortage of imagery to draw upon when she sets foot in her Salamanca Arts Centre studio to paint.

“In my studio, there is a large table with a pile of ill-printed photographs; they have been drawn on, ripped up, some photocopied into black and white and drawn on again,’’ Boulter says as she explains the origins of her latest exhibition, Atmospheres, which has recently finished showing at the Devonport Regional Art Gallery and will launch at Hobart’s Bett Gallery next month.

“There are plenty more in boxes; these are chosen. For a memory, I can’t quite place, nestled amid grasses along the foreshore, an intensity of light or a specific colour, soft duck egg blue, or rich purply greys,’’ she says.

“They aren’t in chronological or geographical order. They are of places I’ve spent time in and are embedded with recollection and reverie, but now, in my studio, these images reworked, re-felt, and reimagined into collages, become something else. A portal into an imagined realm. Holding these little worlds in my hand, they seem tantalisingly real. And yet, they are also a passage through reality, time, and emotion. They offer clarity and an enigma. And so, I paint to elucidate a certain feeling or atmosphere – describing the space between becoming and dissolving, intimacy and distance, presence and absence. Recomposing familiar landscapes into descriptions of the slow transition of time, one moment to the next, overlapping and turning back on itself. The strange mixed-up continuum of life, an everchanging, incomplete collection of atmospheres.’’

Painting the moody, mostly large-scale seascapes is not a quick or easy process – Boulter says experiences typically marinate in her mind for many months before she feels ready to paint them.

“I always have images floating in my mind for about a year, and then they come out,’’ she explains.

“It’s a longwinded, slowed-down version of time … a time of reflection and contemplation. It’s about bringing new layers of emotion or experience to life. The landscape then becomes imbued with that whole way in which I see and experience my life.’’

Boulter has long been using photographs as prompts in her work, but says her finished paintings typically look nothing like one particular photograph, as she brings together multiple images and emotions in one painting, as she aims to “create harmony, but also tension’’.

“I have a bit of a plan,’’ she says, of starting each painting.

“I’ve always had photographs in the studio and they are a starting point, and then the painting becomes its own entity.

“A photo might become a touchstone again if I get lost in the middle of the painting.’’

And of course Tasmania’s landscape – particularly our plentiful seascapes – form part of those recurrent memories for Boulter, who developed a strong connection to the sea from an early age. Her childhood was spent on the ocean, as her parents built a boat in Brisbane and sailed it from Australia to Canada and back again. Boulter was only a toddler when the journey began and spent her primary years being homeschooled while developing a love of the ocean.

And although the ocean always played an important role in her life, art was something that she didn’t really explore until later.

“It happened fairly by accident in a way, I think,’’ says Boulter, whose dad – a fisherman – moved the family to Tasmania when Boulter was 13.

“I don’t recall being one of those kids who drew a lot, although my sister was very talented in that way. Although my parents were adventurous, they were not involved in the arts. So (my interest in art) kind of came about when I first started high school in Woodbridge – I had an art teacher there and I used to go in to the art room, I enjoyed it, and it sort of became a lunch time thing as well.’’

Then she attended Hobart College for Years 11 and 12, where she was taught by respected Tasmanian artists Wayne Brookes and Sean Kelly.

“Those veterans of the arts were really inspiring,” Boulter says.

“And I found I wanted to spend all my lunch times in the art room.’’

Boulter says art was a good opportunity for her to “delve into those existential questions teenagers have rattling around in their heads and make work about that … and kind of just be free to do things that were outside of structured subjects, and that suited my upbringing’’.

“It reflected how I felt like I worked best,’’ Boulter says.

“To be myself and be free to really tap into those things.’’

Like a lot of teenagers, Boulter says she was interested in portraiture, and self-portraiture, and enjoyed experimenting with various styles and exploring the use of colour.

“I wasn’t interested in the landscape at that stage,’’ she says.

That came later, while studying fine arts at the University of Tasmania.

Boulter initially used her university studies to explore the world of portraiture, with an interest in figurative abstraction and life drawing.

But by her third year of art school Boulter says she “kind of got this notion about my experiences being what my art should be about” and that prompted a shift into the “emotive realm” of “big ocean seascapes” that the full-time painter has become known for.

“It definitely started me on this path of (seascapes) being my form of expression,’’ Boulter says.

“It was really in that final year that it all came together. I tried on lots of hats before I put my own back on.

“It was me coming to terms with the fact that you paint your own experience, and that experience is the most valuable to me. Stripping everything back and taking myself into a landscape gave me a freedom to express emotion … I found I could really express myself through landscape painting.’’

Boulter credits her unconventional upbringing for allowing her to confidently pursue a career as an artist.

“I remember in college there were always people who would say you needed a real career,’’ Boulter recalls.

“My parents never gave me that impression at all … I was grateful for the naivety, to not have to be worrying whether art was a legitimate way to spend your life.

“I think (growing up on a boat) gave me the ability to see outside of normal conventions of what a career might like look.’’

Atmospheres is Boulter’s 25th solo exhibition. Her work has also been part of numerous group exhibitions and Boulter has been a finalist in many prestigious art awards including the The Glover Prize, Hadley’s Art Prize and the Wynne Prize. Boulter says she is always looking for opportunities to push boundaries within her artistic practice, and she returned with fresh inspiration from a two-month residency in Paris, in January 2023, after being awarded the University of Tasmania’s Rosamond McCulloch Studio Residency.

“I found it very liberating,’’ Boulter says of her time in Paris, working from the Cite Internationale des Arts complex.

“I felt this renewed energy to feel ambitious about my work, and I don’t mean in a career way, I mean in taking on harder subject matter or harder ways of doing things or intangible things I’m trying to express.

“I always want to make sure I bring in new elements and challenge myself to kind of push things along. It’s always a tricky business between building on what you’ve got, but also creating new challenges.’’

Boulter is not the sort of artist who starts one painting and works on it solidly from start to finish before moving on to the next one. But rather, Boulter enjoys working on her entire body of work for a single exhibition all at once, flitting between paintings depending on her mood of the day, and alternating between smaller, “more intense” works, and her larger works which she says have “a more encompassing or immersive feel”.

“It’s slow … I work on a lot of them at once,’’ Boulter explains of her paintings and how she brings each exhibition together.

“There are lots of layers … new things are happening as I paint that I need to respond to.

“I come into the studio each morning, I sit and look, I take in things, and I respond to what I’ve already painted and what needs to be done in that time.

“Letting each painting sit to give you a different kind of perspective is a really important part of my process. It’s more about space and giving myself a really beautiful space to delve into the transition of one colour to the next, light moving into darkness, or low branches that might sit against the sky. It’s not just the actual painting, it’s looking and reflecting on the ways in which the works relate to each other. It’s all one work and it all comes together. So it’s great to have more than one work going (at once), all relating and bouncing off each other, with parts taken from one painting into the next.’’

Atmospheres represents about 14 or 15 months of work and Boulter admits it can be daunting to start working on a new exhibition, knowing that she has a lot of images to produce in the required time frame.

But she tries to push thoughts of deadlines out of her mind, and says stepping through the door of her studio is a bit like stepping across a threshold into a magical world where real life doesn’t exist.

“I literally put it out of my mind,’’ Boulter says of deadlines and other external pressures of daily life.

“I do just really leave all that outside the studio, because inside I want to be completely immersed in the excitement and intensity of the work and my process. And ideas of a deadline, they drag me out of my zone.

“Something happens when I step in and shut the door. It’s a new place, it’s a very clear thing for me. The studio is this real sense of open play and anything goes in your thoughts, and you’re allowed to kind of immerse yourself in this work mode. So I try and keep other stuff outside the studio.’’

Boulter says the thing she loves most about making art is still the same thing that drew her to making art as a teenager.

“It’s the slow contemplative nature of it, the unfolding of it,’’ she says.

“And the unpredictability of the discoveries you make along the way. I find it a very revealing process in a way I can’t express in words. But I find that I see things in my work that I can’t express any other way.’’

She admits that making art, and delving into various moods and emotions, can be a confronting and exhausting process but that’s also part of what makes painting such a delight.

“It’s the vulnerability that is very challenging but the joy, I suppose, is that there’s little moments of clarity that you were not expecting,’’ she says.

“It’s the intensity about it, the revealing of it – that you have this passion inside and this sense that you want to share something.’’

And she says being able to draw inspiration from the natural world around her, as she enjoys life in the beautiful place that is Tasmania, is also something to be celebrated.

“Going out into the landscape, and reflecting on that and taking that back into the studio – it’s a privilege to be able to spend time doing that,’’ Boulter says.•

Michaye Boulter’s Atmospheres exhibition runs at Hobart’s Bett Gallery from July 5-27. bettgallery.com.au