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This small selection of Australian landscape painting, beginning
with the period of European settlement, highlights different ways
of depicting land and organising pictorial space. Of course for
a long time before the arrival of Europeans, Aboriginal people
were interpreting aspects of their land through song, art, dance
and ceremony.
It is interesting to note changes in regards
to creating the illusion of depth in landscape painting. In the
past a horizon line was used to create a sense of vast space.
The resulting effect was that it positioned the viewer at a distance
from the landscape. Later, as indigenous and contemporary art
influenced artists and as we have come to know the landscape better,
the use of a horizon has diminished or totally disappeared.
Eugene von Guerard and Thomas Clark both arrived
in Australia in the early 1850s yet they depict land in quite
different ways. Von Guerard (1811-1901) painted 'Tower Hill' as
an idyllic landscape where the Aboriginal group, shown in the
foreground, appear to live in a latter-day paradise. Between the
contrast of the detailed foreground and the distant horizon one
senses the artist's desire to explore this unknown land.
'Muntham' by Thomas Clark (1814-1883), painted
approximately five years later than 'Tower Hill' shows measured
paddocks, denuded hills, grazing animals and farm-workers - no
sense of the unknown here! Our eyes tend to settle in the valleys
where the homestead nestles. Unlike von Guerard, Clark is not
interested in exploration or botanical correctness but rather
in belonging and ownership.
In von Guerard's later painting of 1884, 'Old
Ballarat as it was in the summer of 1853-54', the genesis of a
city is captured. By showing cleared land and a horizon of disappearing
wilderness, von Guerard may also be questioning the price of progress.
Fredrick McCubbin (1855-1917) painted 'A Bush
Burial' in 1890 when the colony was experiencing the worst drought
and depression in its history and this possibly influenced the
choice of subject. McCubbin creates an engulfing, claustrophobic
landscape by barely suggesting any horizon and compressing midground
and background. In contrast, the bush folk are portrayed as heroic
figures.
There is no sense of the heroic in Clarice Beckett's
work. Instead, Beckett (1887-1935) pays homage to the everyday
scenes and small events that we all experience. Misty suburban
landscapes are painted with a transient beauty that suggests the
impermanence of existence. Beckett often painted plein air
- completing her work outside rather than in the studio. Between
the heroics of McCubbin and the cherished everyday events seen
in Beckett's work, we could speculate on how World War 1 may have
had an effect on the choice of subject matter deemed worthy enough
to paint.
Albert Namatjira (1902-1959) grew up on the
Hermannsburg Lutheran Mission near Alice Springs and knew the
Central Australian desert intimately. A characteristic common
to most of Namatjira's landscapes is the sense of energy within
the land. Though his paintings conform to European traditions
of landscape painting in that they contain foreground, midground,
background and distant horizon, the forms pulsate through the
patterning of shadows across the painting, making the land itself
appear to breathe.
Sidney Nolan (1917-1992), like McCubbin, was
interested in depicting narratives in the landscape. In 'Kelly
at the Mines' the horizon appears disjointed and forms are not
anchored in space. Instead they seem to float and the landscape
becomes the locale for surreal dramas: a dreamed place. The Ned
Kelly series was painted during World War 11 when Nolan was himself
hiding out from army authorities after deserting.
In 'Yellow Landscape', Fred Williams (1927-82)
also disturbs the organisation of pictorial space by evaporating
the horizon line in what appears to be searing heat, allowing
the tree forms to float in heat and space. Through thoughtful
distillation of forms accompanied by gestural brush strokes, Williams
transforms half-cleared, unremarkable scrub into a kind of calligraphic
meditation on observation.
In 'Eagle Landscape' by William Robinson (b.
1936) the horizon line is totally abandoned and the viewer is
made to feel that they are surrounded by the landscape as one
simultaneously sees above, below, through and over. As the title
suggests, this painting may well be an imagined bird's view as
it swoops over hilltops. Robinson often depicts the land close
to his home and this gives his paintings a sense of familiarity
and sensitivity to the connections between land and living things.
'Leaving a Mountain' by Bea Maddock (b. 1934)
has very little sense of depth as one mountain dominates the horizon.
Instead we are made aware of how the landscape was observed: slowly,
bit by bit. The artist might be suggesting that intimate knowledge
of the land can only be gained through slow observation. Her work
often has a feeling of being wrought from earth as she uses ochres
from her native Tasmania mixed with encaustic (pigment
mixed with molten wax).
Kathleen Petyarre (b. circa 1940) was born on
Utopia Station, north-east of Alice Springs. Common themes in
Petyarre's paintings are the Dreaming stories she inherited from
her mother and father. There is a feeling of immense space in
Petyarre's paintings though there is no hint of a horizon line
and the subject matter may be as minute as the trail a lizard
leaves across sand. The viewer is made to feel that they are surrounded
by and submerged in the landscape.
Deborah Vaughan
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