Like the first artists making cave paintings 40,000 years ago, he's attracted to the warm hues and tones of the earth.

"There's an authenticity in natural pigment that you just can't get from commercial paint," he said.

"For one, you source your own material and then you work with it to produce a work. That's the real joy I get from it."

One wall of his studio at Canberra's M16 art space is lined with hand-ground natural pigments in a stunning array of colours, the works of thousands of patient hours.

"The colour range is nowhere near as limited as you'd imagine," he says.

"The one problem with it is you don't know what you've got until the next day when it's dried. Just like the earth looks different when it's wet to when it's dry, the natural pigments look completely different. It changes dramatically."

Timo's one of three artists featuring in a new exhibition at The Q, along with contemporary Iranian painters Zoya Tavakoli and Golshan Ghorbanis. The gallery lists the exhibition, titled Shiraz Exchange, as a "cultural exchange between East and West, exploring both the similarities and the differences in contemporary painting."

And Timo's collection of unstretched canvas paintings are their own cross-cultural fusion, mixing the colours of the Australian bush with eastern mysticism.

Inspired by the poetry of Indian yogi Sri Aurobindo that he encountered during a recent trip to India, Timo said he'd riff off the density of the yogi's words, turning a line like "dawn built her aura of magnificent hues" into an artwork interpreting the reflections of a dazzling sunrise over the ocean.

But he says he's not trying to create an idea of any specific subjects in people's minds through his artworks, but rather to convey a feeling.

"I like to take a painting to the point where people can't tell what it's based on or its subject matter, but create a distinctive feeling that people notice but can't see.

"How people feel about a work is more important to me than what people see," he said.

- Catch the launch of 'Shiraz Exchange' at The Q exhibition space next Wednesday night from 6pm. The exhibition features works by contemporary Iranian painters Zoya Tavakoli and Golshan Ghorbanis as well as local painter Timo Nest, and runs until Saturday, November 1.