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Posted 17 May 2018

Abstraction 2018 and The Field Revisited

 

Titles given to artworks can be revealing of how artists view their work. At Robert Hunter’s current retrospective of abstract paintings at NGV Australia, Untitled makes a frequent appearance. The artist’s career began in the 1960s and for his generation of Modernists Untitled was ubiquitous. The idea was to avoid the “literary” and instead “let the work do the talking”.

 

Hunter’s work is also included in NGV Australia’s new show The Field Revisited, a fiftieth anniversary re-creation of the 1968 exhibition of hard-edged abstraction that opened the NGV building in St Kilda Road. Interest in the exhibition has been building with a growing presence of abstract painting in the contemporary art scene. Melbourne and regional galleries have been staging shows which mix old and recent abstract painting. Bendigo Art Gallery recently featured abstract paintings drawn from its own collection.

 

The renewed interest in abstract painting began around a decade ago. In 2007/08, the NGV exhibited the painting of Yvonne Audette from the 1950s and 60s. Over her career Audette has been a practitioner in the tradition of the New York school of Abstract Expressionism. In the past few years the interest has gathered pace. At Heidi Museum of Modern Art, Victorian abstractionist Melinda Harper made quite an impact in 2015 with her colourful and sensational recent hard-edged paintings. In 2017 Geelong Gallery hosted Abstraction: celebrating Australian women abstract artists. Earlier this year NGV Australia held a retrospective of the abstract painting of the late Robert Jacks.

 

A boost for abstraction’s current profile has come from The Field Revisited. The much-anticipated exhibition has spawned a number of satellite shows around town, notably Abstraction 2018, a survey of current abstraction from 125 artists held across five Melbourne galleries: Stephen McLaughlan Gallery, Langford 120, Five Walls, Justin Art House Museum, and Deakin University. In conjunction with the gallery directors, the exhibition has been curated by Stephen Wickham, who is also a participating artist.

 

As with The Field Revisited, the works in Abstraction 2018 are hard-edged and geometric. But unlike most of the bombastic-scaled work in The Field Revisited, the work in Abstraction 2018 is of a modest or small size. The 1960s American-inspired work at NGV Australia is confident and brash. Its funky canvas formats and Pop associations (in both the use of bright colour and dynamic diagonals) are quite unlike what we see in Abstraction 2018. In contrast to the sense of fun, experimentation and youthfulness (quite a number of the artists were just starting out on their careers) that marks the 1960s work, Abstraction 2018 has a greater feeling of seriousness and introspection. This difference arguably reflects our less optimistic age. Also reflecting the difference between that era and our own, the artists of The Field Revisited are with few exceptions male, while an approximate gender balance is evident in Abstraction 2018.

 

The colours black and red appear in a number of the works in Abstraction 2018.  Seen in the context of the history of abstract art, the colour and construction of these works bring to mind European abstraction of around the time of World War One. The newly invented abstraction of Russia and central Europe of that time is also associated with the idea of the transcendent – the ethereal world of spiritual longing. Abstraction 2018 seems to evoke this heritage, but this content is not made manifest (as it is in the white and translucent paintings in the Robert Hunter retrospective). I raised the question of transcendent meanings in a conversation with Wickam who downplayed this reading, and emphasised instead the “transformative” role of beauty in the work.  

 

Abstraction can be famously self-referential – not only to the artist, but also to the material properties of the work itself. And while conflating the material qualities of a work with its meaning (known as Formalism) is a feature of The Field Revisited, this way of regarding abstraction still has currency today. As Wickam says, “Greenberg [the highly influential American advocate of Formalism] is part of the vernacular” of the current work. Just as today’s hard-edge abstraction can hint at the transcendent, it also proclaims a concern for the immanent - the material world of the here and now. Untitled makes a return for some of the work in Abstraction 2018.

 

Since The Field showed in 1968, the Postmodern has been and left its mark. It is not surprising then that in our conversation Wickham should assert that by engaging with abstraction’s own identity, Abstraction 2018 is “part of the Postmodern pulse”. This claim is reinforced by Wilma Tabacco, a director of Langford 120 and one of the participating artists in Abstraction 2018. She believes there is “more conceptual content” to the current work than is evident in The Field Revisited.

 

The various influences and contexts that have shaped the work in Abstraction 2018 make for an exhibition that is not easily pidgeon-holed, in spite of an overarching hard-edged style. The work has a “cool” look, yet romantic associations can also be brought to bear on the often minimalist and reductive aesthetic. 

 

In our conversation Tabacco agreed with my suggestion that the recent abstraction presents an alternative to dominant trends in contemporary art and popular culture over the past couple of decades. She said that many people are now “a little bit over installation art” and tiring of the “too many images” that bombard us daily, as embodied by Facebook.

 

Reflecting the zeitgeist, perhaps a new paradigm is in the making, one that offers abstract art as an alternative to everyday experience and anxieties. Its re-appearance may be an expression of a gradual rediscovery of the value of the beautiful in contemporary art.

 

 

 

Posted 22 March 2018

Using photos in painting

 

 

From time to time I am asked if I make use of photographs – as part of a process of

initiating and making work in the studio, or as an adjunct to making work in the landscape

where a photo taken on site is used to complete work back in the studio. But no, I make

no use of photographs. This is because my aim is to convey a direct response, and to

work from photos - a mechanically processed source – is incompatible with the organic

process of seeing nature in real time.

 

This is not to say that many good painters don’t make use of photographs, as art history

shows. Some examples - the 1960s large-scaled portrait painting of American artist

Chuck Close, who sought a hyper-realist fidelity to carefully selected photos. Somehow,

the paintings seem to have more presence than the photos from which they are sourced.

Or the powerfully expressive work of twentieth century British artist, Francis Bacon,

whose studio was littered with discarded and crumpled photos of his own, and torn from

magazines and books, and which he relied upon to source the imagery of his painting.

For contemporary German artist Gerhard Richter the photograph – its imagery and

qualities – are important to the final result. You see the photograph, as it were, in the

painting, though Richter’s signature style of carefully softened edges seems to blur the

photographic moment with memory and romantic longing.

 

Today, in Australia, quite a number of successful contemporary landscapists work in this

Richter-influenced way – using photographs and blurring the paint to evoke a fog-like and

Gothic mood. The phenomena has been well documented in Simon Gregg’s fascinating

book, New Romantics: Darkness and Light in Australian Art (2011).

 

For the plein-air painter, the experience of seeing itself is a core concern. This subjective

response does not preclude any particular style on the part of the artist, which can range

from realist exactitude (for example, Melbourne landscapist Ken Smith) to a gestural or

even abstracted response (for example, NSW artist Elisabeth Cummings). Plein-air

painting can never be “literal”, as interpretation is always involved (nature and painting

are different things). Photos - with their mechanical freezing of a fractional moment

reproduced on a small flat surface - are not useful to a plein-air painter’s methods and

aims.

 

Posted January 2018

Beauty, and the NGV Triennial

 

Something is going on in the art world that heralds change. While issues/conceptually based art has a commanding presence in the art world of public art spaces, there is a new presence – abstraction.

 

While I am not an abstract painter – mine is a real-time response to the visual world - the recent ascendancy of abstract painting is a welcome sign of a renewal of interest in the aesthetic dimension. However, today’s abstraction is not characterised by sensuous and painterly styles; it is mostly hard edged and geometric – reflecting an interest in a 1960s minimalist/Pop Art inspired aesthetic.

 

Abstract painting can offer the viewer a refuge in beauty - an art for our troubled times. The primary concern of abstract painting is the visual language of its own physical properties and processes - enabling the viewer to seek pleasure in the experience of looking.

 

Beauty has long been out of fashion in art discourse. Curators, art writers and artists have been unwilling to acknowledge the role of beauty in contemporary art, lest this be seen to compromise art’s “innovative” and “challenging” credentials. Indeed, the current Triennial at the NGV provides an example where theatrical light effects, colourful and decorative patterning, and plenty of spectacle are on show. While these have much to do with evoking a delight in beauty (present even in the death imagery of Ron Mueck’s Mass), beauty makes no appearance in the exhibition’s accompanying wall text.

 

In fact the look of the work itself is not addressed in the wall text in the Triennial. The wall text bore little relation to my visual experience of the work. It only addressed curatorial pretensions seeking to explain the alleged motivating conceptual issues.

 

I did not notice any abstract painting in the Triennial, though geometric pattering and vivid use of colour are much in evidence. But coming up in April at the NGV is a re-enactment of the 1968 exhibition The Field that opened the St Kilda Road Gallery. Titled The Field Revisited, this exhibition will feature hard-edged and colour field abstract painting. It can be viewed as a retrospective endorsement of the current abstract tide and may enable a heightened awareness of the role of beauty and the aesthetic in contemporary art practice.

 

 

Posted November 2017

This is an updated version of an unpulbished article I wrote some time ago.

 

Branding art: ‘Australian Impressionism’

For a century, iconic Australian artists Arthur Streeton, Tom Roberts, Charles Conder, and several more of their colleagues were known as the Heidelberg School. But, since the 1990s, the Heidelberg School has been re-presented as ‘Australian Impressionism’. Though this re-branding has occasionally been queried and resisted by some art writers (particularly The Australian’s art critic, Christopher Allen) the change appears entrenched. Most recently, in 2017, the National Gallery of Australia exhibited its re-hang of our fore-mentioned artists as ‘Australian Impressionism’.  How did this change come about?

 

In my view there is no compelling art historical case to be made for the labelling, and the name change is an exercise in marketing. Language has been misused for promotional purposes – compromising the integrity of art scholarship and mis-representing the aims and achievements of our Australian artists.

 

Impressionism - previously associated with the nineteenth-century French art movement  exemplified by the paintings of Claude Monet - has morphed into an international brand that has been extended to the Edwardian period. The expanded ‘Impressionism’ now accommodates a pot-pourri of styles including derivatives of French Impressionism, Realism and Symbolism. These styles reflect the complexity of the Parisian and international art world during the late nineteenth century when a variety of art movements, some avant-garde, were jostling for attention and artists were receptive to competing influences.

 

This development has not been confined to Australia; it has occurred in other New World countries - the United States, Canada, and New Zealand – as well as in Europe. The result is confusion about the meaning of the terms ‘Impressionist’ and ‘Impressionism’.

 

An historical account that can address this phenomenon begins with a Parisian critic’s response to a sketchy painting by Claude Monet titled Impression: Sunrise (1872). From this painting the critic coined the term Impressionism.  Monet’s painting was in a group show of artists who wanted to make paintings that engaged directly with the modern world. They were positioning their work in opposition to the ‘machines’ of the Salon: large- sized and dark studio paintings with narrative content. The new Impressionist painting emphasised the artist’s personalised experience of seeing rather than the details of the subject; it was an art of immediacy and movement, of candid poses and compositions. The play of light was expressed in the use of broken and complementary colour, usually mixed with a considerable amount of white. Black was avoided, and there was a tendency to abstain from dramatic contrast of tones. The paint was applied in short, thick strokes. Typically, wet paint was placed into wet paint, producing soft edges and intermingling of colour.The effect of these methods was a light-toned and vibrant surface that celebrated experience.

 

Fast forward to Melbourne 17 August 1889 and a pivotal moment in Australian art history:  the opening of the 9 x 5 Impression Exhibition. The show mostly consisted of small paintings on cigar box lids. Consistent with Impressionist methods, these had been made outdoors (plein-air). The young Australian artists, Arthur Streeton, Tom Roberts, Charles Conder and Frederick McCubbin, would in time become household names. The newspaper review of the exhibition was critical of the ‘Impressionism’ on show. But at this time words like impression, impressionistic, and Impressionism were used interchangeably to describe any style of sketchy painting made in the landscape. Neither critic nor artists had French Impressionism in mind of which they were quite likely unaware. Instead, the primary influences on these artists was the work of James McNeill Whistler, who had shown his small nocturnes in his own 9 x 5 exhibition in London five years earlier, and the French tonalist and realist artist Jules Bastien-Lepage.

 

In 1891 our aforementioned Australian artists were described by a journalist with The Australasian Critic as ‘the Heidelberg School’. He had named the group after the semi-rural area of Heidelberg where they had established one of their outdoor painting camps.  But as the camp at Heidelberg was neither the first (that was at Box Hill) nor the last of the plein-air camps, the identification of the group with Heidelberg was not geographically exact. In addition, the membership of the group at each location varied.  Nevertheless, the naming of the group as the Heidelberg School came into popular usage. At the same time, the description of their work as impressionist persisted.

 

It was not until the 1970s that questioning art historians, notably Ann Galbally, cited ‘mounting contrary evidence’ to challenge the use of the term impressionist to describe the art of the Heidelberg School. Galbally argued that to describe this work as impressionist was misleading and a ‘myth’ by the way it tried to link the Australian artists to French Impressionism when there was ‘no tangible relationship between the works themselves, or in the artists’ own comments about their art’ to support the association. (1) At this time a number of Australian art historians made use of a new and less problematic term, plein-airism, to describe the outdoor work the Australian artists were making. (2)

 

In 1987 a block buster, Golden Summers: Heidelberg and Beyond, opened at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) and travelled to other capital city galleries. This was a comprehensive exhibition of the painting of those same four artists who had first shown together in 1889. In the catalogue that accompanied the exhibition, then NGV director Patrick McCaughey made little reference to Impressionism, preferring to describe the work as that of the Heidelberg School.

 

In the 1990s a shift in naming occurred again, back to the original ‘impressionist’ description. But now art writers were using the terms ‘Impressionist’ and ‘Impressionism’ with a deliberate and self-conscious intent to categorise the style. In part this shift can be seen to reflect the gradual cultural change whereby branding made increasing inroads into all aspects of society, including the marketing of high culture. Also, a change in art historical perceptions was triggered by the publication in New York in 1990 of World Impressionism:  the International Movement, 1860 – 1920 . This comprehensive and well-illustrated book featured chapters from art historians in various European and New World countries on the ‘Impressionist’ art in their countries. The book declared that Impressionism was not only French but global: each country had its own version of Impressionism. The Australian contribution was described in detail by art historian Virginia Spate, in a chapter titled The Sunny South:  Australian Impressionism.

 

Art historians of the calibre of Bernard Smith now cited World Impressionism to validate the claim for an Australian version of Impressionism. In 2003, in an essay introduction to a catalogue that surveyed the collection of the  NGV Smith wrote:  ‘Impressionism is a style devoted to the depiction of light.’ (3) This definition was illustrated by Streeton’s iconic The Purple Noon’s Transparent Might (1896).

 

However, while Streeton’s painting was made on location, is high keyed, and wonderfully captures the intense quality of the Australian light, I would not describe it as an Impressionist painting. The Purple Noon’s Transparent Might is essentially a tonal painting and does not make use of chromatic colour or broken brush strokes, even if freshly painted. Streeton’s masterpiece is less about the seeing of a subject than describing the view itself. The artist himself did not identify with Impressionism or its aims, and always referred to the art of his youth as the Heidelberg School.

 

The branding of the Heidelberg School as Impressionism was given institutional authority by the NGV-initiated blockbuster of 2007, Australian Impressionism. This show again surveyed the same four artists as in 1987, but now also included Jane Sutherland. Everything from outdoor oil sketches to large studio-made narrative paintings in a Naturalist style were included in the exhibition.

 

In justifying the labelling of the artists as ‘Impressionists’, the connection now made was not with French Impressionism but with world impressionism. NGV curator of Australian art at the time, Terry Lane, introduced the catalogue by quoting the new revisionist and internationalist definition of Impressionism from the aforementioned text, World Impressionism. And a catalogue essay titled ‘Some reflections on Defining Australian Impressionism’, by the director of the NGV, Gerard Vaughan, asserted that the Australian artists were part of the ‘international movement’ of Impressionism because their aim was ‘capturing naturalistic effects of light and colour by painting in the open air, and by painting more often than not on lighter grounds to give luminosity and freshness to their canvases and grounds’. (4)

 

There is a two-fold problem with Vaughan’s definition: first, it conflates plein-air painting with Impressionism.  On this basis many artists who were not Impressionists, such as Naturalist painters who made outdoor studies like Bastien-Lepage, or indeed late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Romantics like John Constable, could qualify as ‘impressionists’. Second, much of the work of Australian Impressionism – namely the studio portraits and narrative paintings – did not meet the very criteria posed by Vaughan.  They were neither light nor painted in the open air. The large narrative paintings, among the most iconic of the work of the Heidelberg group, were tonal paintings in muted earth colours that refrained from the use of broken chromatic colour.

 

In 2013 the NGV held an extensive exhibition titled ‘Australian Impressionists in France’.  The exhibition’s avowed purpose was to demonstrate that Australian artists of distinction were working in France, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in a broadly impressionist style. Some of the work on show could be described as Impressionist in colour and technique. However, in casting the net wide, the exhibition included the tonal and dark self-portrait paintings of Hugh Ramsay and the Symbolist-influenced paintings of Charles Conder.

 

The artist most featured in the exhibition was John Peter Russell, who knew the impressionists personally: he painted with Monet a number of times and painted a portrait from life of his friend, Vincent van Gogh. Yet Russell’s work was far from consistently impressionist and showed various influences, including tonal realism, impressionism and post impressionism.

 

The branding of the Australian artists working in France as Impressionists obscured vital differences between the French and Australian achievements: unlike the Australian artists the French Impressionists shared an  identity: they exhibited together, often painted together, and in the process forged a pioneering art movement. To the extent that the Australian art could be experimental by assimilating a variety of new styles, it lacked the focus of shared purpose and originality that is synonymous with French Impressionism.

 

Extending the Impressionist brand to include the Australian artists working in France, alongside the earlier generation of Heidelberg School artists has created an unwieldy group that extends across generations, styles, influences, and aims.

 

The shift in naming is likely to have much to do with marketing. Both governments, which fund the network of public art galleries, and art institutions, are interested in seeing large attendances. Impressionism has excellent ‘brand recognition’ – it is the most popular art movement in history (5).  So to label art as Impressionist is to maximise its attraction for audiences. 

 

To brand art as Impressionist also lifts its prestige by linking it to an art movement that is significant to the story of an emergent Modern art. To view the work as Impressionist places it in a glamorous and progressive light. Other influential art movements of the time – like Aestheticism and Symbolism – that are far less well known and popular with the art-going public than Impressionism, have accordingly been played down. Naturalism - not at all a part of the trajectory of modern art as the history books describe – has been mostly written out of the narrative.

 

The current Impressionist brand has confused and weakened the identity of Impressionism. It incorporates so many varied styles and aims that it has become too unwieldy to fit a narrative of the origins of modern art. As a result, Impressionism has been refashioned into a period piece that stands apart from Modernism. In the catalogue Introduction to Australian Impressionists in France, NGV curator Elena Taylor pointedly differentiated Impressionism from both earlier Realist, Romantic and academic styles, and from Modernism. Modernism was now said to begin in the early twentieth century with the more abstract art of Cubism. Yet arguably, the one key feature that much early Modernism possesses, for all its dramatic and rapid changes in style, is a liberating and investigative use of colour - colour used like never before in the history of art (think Post Impressionism, Fauvism, Expressionism, and Abstraction).  Impressionism in fact played a key role in setting this story in motion and is an integral part of the story of early Modernism.

 

The irony is that to play down the role of Impressionism as an instigator of modern art is consequent upon the ‘upgrading’ to Impressionist status that is sought for the Australian artists. The linking of the Australian art (whether made in Australia or France) to ‘World Impressionism’ may seek to emphasise its international context but comes at the cost of inviting an unflattering comparison with the French originators, which can then position the Australian art as a derivative and weaker emulation. The originality and specificity of the Australian work is diminished in the process.

 

The most recent manifestation of institutional support for rebranding has been the 2017 exhibition, Australian Impressionism, at the National Gallery of Australia. While it may seem that the name change is permanent it is not going unchallenged. Christopher Allen, in reviewing the NGA exhibition (8) argued against calling the work of Streeton, and Roberts et al impressionist.  Allen noted that, among other differences, their nationalist themes were uncharacteristic of French impressionism and specific to the Heidelberg School.

 

What would be fascinating to see in the future is a curated show that critiques the notion of an ‘Australian Impressionism’.

 

Endnotes

 

1     Ann Galbally, The Art of John Peter Russell, Melbourne, Sun Books, 1977, p.9.

2     These art historians were Helen Topliss, Anita Gallaway, Ann Galbally, and Leigh

       Ashbury.

3     Bernard Smith, Two Centuries of Australian Art:  From the Collection of the National           

       Gallery of Victoria, Thames and Hudson, Melbourne, 2003, p.45.

4     Gerard Vaughan, ‘Some Reflections on Defining Australian Impressionism’, Australian         

       Impressionism, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2007, p.19.

5     Exhibitions at the NGV which feature European impressionist or post-impressionist       

       painting consistently achieve record numbers of visitors (the 2004 record for The

       Impressionists was broken by the 2017 exhibition, Van Gogh and the Seasons).  

6     Christopher Allen, Distinct Impressions, The Australian, October 7 – 8   

       2017, Review, pp. 10 – 11.

 

Posted September 2017:

My article Finding the sublime in Williams (related to the Fred Williams in the You Yangs exhibition shown at Geelong Art Gallery in 2017) appeared in The Age on 27 September, p.30. Click on to the relevant link on my curriculum vitae (posted on this website) to view the article as published online.

 

I was interviewed about my article by Sydney writer Matthew da Silva: Fred Williams minimalist Romantic.

 

Posted May 2017:

Seeing nature:

Sarah Ormonde and John Wolseley, Dry sand, wet mud, moving earth, Falkner Gallery, Castlemaine (ends 21 May 2017

In the gallery notes to this collaborative exhibition of prints, drawings and ceramics, Bendigo based artists Sarah Ormonde and John Wolseley state: “In this show we have chosen to focus our enthusiasms on the tracks and traces we find in the dirt around us…this show celebrates the extraordinary beauty we see in the dry sand and the wet mud…”

The fulsome statements the artists make about the experiences and observations that underlie their work speak of an intimate identification with the minutae of  the natural world.  The artists note that just as they make use of mud, sand and wood to make things  (art and studio buildings) so too are termites, beetles and birds busily making  their own structures (burrows, mounds) from these same materials. To most graphically make this point, fragments of termite mounds have been fired in the kiln and exhibited in ceramic form, while sections of tree trunks with termite burrowing are exhibited alongside the frottage derived prints.  The “collaboration” that the artists talk about is inclusive of these creations of the insect world.

In this we can see an idea of Gaia, that is, that nature is a unified and self-governing organism operating in kind of mystical realm beyond conventional science. “I feel my work is about trying to reconnect with those big, frightening but creative forces that are the dynamic of the world we live in”, Wolseley has said. (1)  The artist believes we are of the earth:  an idea made manifest by the materiality, organic form, earth colours and patterns of Ormonde’s ceramics. But a problem in identifying so intimately with nature as the artists do, is that nature, as represented in the world of termites and other micro life forms, can appear as if on a distancing pedestal.

Perhaps a more inclusive way of regarding nature is to view it as one with reality. In this view, comprehensively set out in the writings of American environmental aesthetics philosopher Arnold Berleant, ourselves, the forests and creatures within them, the cars in our streets, supermarkets and everything else in the world, make up the one interconnected reality. This view argues that everything impacts on everything else: the human is necessarily featured (just as we impact on climate, climate impacts on us - hence climate change).

So far as making art is concerned, this way of thinking about our place in nature is well expressed in plein air painting.  The artist places him or herself within the landscape and the ensuing painting represents a bonding of the observed (the subject) and the observer (the artist).  The painting documents the interconnectedness between the two; a sense of belonging, of “being there”, is conveyed, and the presence of the observer is acknowledged. An artist who asserts this idea, in ambitiously scaled paintings up to 5 metres wide, is Mary Tonkin. Her immersive paintings are made in the forest of the Dandenong  Ranges, where she lives and has her studio.

Nature does not necessarily inspire sensual delight or a sense of belonging in contemporary art. A contradictory set of responses may be invoked, or a Gothic like strangeness or sense of disturbance may permeate the work.  The artist may convey an idea of nature and culture (ourselves) as separate and binary opposites. To represent our relationship with nature from this perspective is to acknowledge a gap, perhaps an existential gap, that expresses uncertainty about how much we can know or possess of the world.

A sense of nature’s separateness may take the form of an otherness loaded with spiritual associations and yearnings.  Hence the ubiquity of the void in landscape painting, both in the nineteenth century (for example the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich) and today (particularly where the painting is sourced from photography and other media).

It is not uncommon to find contemporary artists representing our place in nature with an ambiguous mix of the existential, the void, beauty, yearning, and an edgy disconnect – all in the same work.  These are qualities which feature in the work of Rick Amor: an artist who has deeply immersed himself in the visual world (and who continues to this day to regularly paint plein air) while also representing a personal vision that draws inspiration from cinema and crime novels.

Back to Sarah Osborne and John Wolseley:  the artists’ celebration of nature –grounded in a contemporary discourse of the ecological – also echoes pre-modern responses, when eighteenth and nineteenth century European explorations of nature and New World landscapes aroused intense curiosity. The botanical recordings of Joseph Banks, who accompanied Captain Cook on the Endeavour, and the geological drawings of John Ruskin, the art critic who championed J.M.W. Turner, come to mind when looking at Wolseley’s signature highly detailed drawings (however, these are not on display in this exhibition).

The exhibition also invites associations with a pre-modern conception of beauty, where beauty is held to be a quality or element intrinsic to nature (which can be discerned by us to the extent our awareness allows). This concept of beauty seems to be at odds with the modern idea – associated with the ground-breaking philosophical writings of the late eighteenth century German philosopher Immanuel  Kant – that beauty is not a discoverable ingredient in things, but is in the eye of the beholder.  Beauty, said Kant, was a quality of perception – it was experienced subjectively – and could not be objectively ascertained.

Asserting that termite burrows are beautiful is a necessarily subjective view.  For the termite mounds in the exhibition are no longer termite mounds, but ceramic objects in a gallery context (anything in a gallery context is no longer what it was outside that context). The claim that these objects represent a collaboration with nature strikes me as fanciful. However, Osborne’s and Wolseley’s work is an interesting collaboration between these two artists, and the exhibition can awaken our aesthetic curiosity to the microstructures of nature, so that we experience them in a different and more thoughtful way.

 

References

1 John Wolseley, quoted in Artist Profile, Summer 2007, p.31

 

Posted April 2016: 

 

You Yangs -- gallery notes, April 2016 exhibition

Time enters art by both the making and the viewing of the work. For landscape painting time is particularly poignant:  it is inscribed in landforms, rocks and rivers that are thousands or millions of years old, it is inscribed in the trees and plants that grow and die, and in the animals and insect life that animate a place. Skies are on the move and light and shadow are in constant flux.

 

It is a thrill and challenge to bring these various expressions of time into plein-air painting.

 

Unlike a movie or video – which record a succession of passing moments, and unlike photographs – which record a particular moment that forever belongs to the past, plein-air painting is a compilation of the experience of many moments that evoke a sense of presentness.

 

To illustrate – think of a nineteenth century photograph and how it seems to take you back to a long distant past, a different world from our own.  Its feels like time travelling.  Compare with a nineteenth century painting – say a Vincent van Gogh.  The presentness of the van Gogh is there to see in how the world looked in van Gogh’s time. But the painting also seems to intrude into our present too – no doubt a reason why we can experience the work so vividly. 

 

There is a physicality and directness to plein-air painting.  This is not to presume any particular style or method, and it is far from the case that all plein-air painters work in a rapid or sketchy way.  Indeed the first famous school of plein-air painters were the Pre-Raphaelites, and they are the last word in meticulous and careful technique. The large amount of time invested in making such work accorded with the work ethic of the Victorian era (a primary reason for the hostility to the later Impressionist style was the latter’s perceived quickness of execution).

 

For me, it is Paul Cezanne who most profoundly explores time in the genre of landscape painting. You have the timelessness of Mount Saint Victoire and solidly articulated forms on the one hand. On the other hand, the patches of colour and blurred edges evoke foliage shifting in the breeze and a sense of the transient nature of lived experience.

 

Cezanne would have found the You Yangs ideal for his purposes.  You have the ancient granite rocks lying all over the place, an inordinate number of dead trees both standing and lying on the ground, and a virtually ubiquitous wind that is both evocative and a curse for the plein-air painter.

 

I have enjoyed painting at the You Yangs these last couple of years or so, though that has perhaps come to an end as my wife and I are about to move to Castlemaine.  The You Yangs seem both whimsical and strange to me – and these have been a source of my continuing interest in painting this place. Sure, I don’t find it to be a particularly joyful place –the You Yangs seem brooding and even a little spooky.  The You Yangs don’t evoke in me a sense of belonging– I drive down there from the urban world of Melbourne, and the You Yangs do not exactly accord with western notions of the beautiful..  But that difference – that gap of empathy or communication between myself and the You Yangs does, I believe encourage reflection and a sense of otherness.  These responses can underlie feelings of wonder and suggest thoughts of an existential kind.

 

Posted December 2015:

 

The Dressmaker, the You Yangs, and Fred Williams

(Copyright,Mark Dober, 2015)

 

The Dressmaker, the hugely popular Australian movie currently showing at cinemas, is set in the fictional small town of Dungatar, which the film hints at being somewhere in Victoria’s remote northwest.

Surprisingly, the actual movie set was built at the periphery of the You Yangs, the rocky outcrop that provides a scenic diversion from the flat landscape traversed along the Princes Highway linking Melbourne and Geelong.

That the You Yangs and its environs would feature in The Dressmaker engaged my curiosity, because in my capacity as a professional artist I do a great deal of painting at the You Yangs.  I wondered how the You Yangs would be presented in the movie.

 

The Dressmaker is a dark and surreal movie, albeit relieved with comic exaggeration, and the You Yangs frequently appear as a brooding background.  The ubiquitous dead white trees that are featured in and around Dungatar contribute to the bleak mood.

 

While the movie setting is a study in exaggeration, a visitor to the You Yangs is likely to be struck by the inordinate number of dead, broken and fallen trees. Yet the Forest Park is also home to 200 species of birds and offers an extraordinarily diverse native fauna. In combination with the big, rounded rocks and granite outcrops, and the views across to distant Melbourne and Port Phillip and Corio Bays, the You Yangs presents much of visual interest.  Children love climbing over the rocks and piling up long sticks against trees. The walk to the summit – Flinders Peak – is busy seemingly all the time and barbecues are well patronized.  Cyclists can be seen at the You Yangs in large numbers.

 

But in The Dressmaker the You Yangs stand for a much starker view of the Australian landscape, a frequently encountered perspective in the movies where remote and “outback” settings tend to be favoured. Often these landscape settings are depicted as dark and disturbing places.  Australian classics such as Wake in Fright, Mad Max, and Wolf Creek come to mind.  The landscape settings in these movies support narratives that feature drama, conflict and violence.

 

Australian painting today presents a mostly differing perspective. White Australian artists who represent the land as benign, rich, colourful and sensual include Mary Tonkin (Melbourne) who paints in the lush forests of the Dandenong Ranges, John Wolseley (Bendigo) who brings a Naturalist perspective to landscape, and William Robinson (Queensland) who shows the tropical landscape to be a manifestation of Creation.

 

While I don’t see anyone else painting in the You Yangs when I am there, one of the greats of Australian landscape painting – Fred Williams – made his reputation by his 1960s series of You Yangs paintings.

Williams, who famously never learned to drive, would be driven down there from Melbourne by his friend James Mollison, who later became Director of Canberra’s National Gallery of Australia. Williams refrained from painting the topography and you can’t identify any of his paintings with any particular spot or view. But paint plein-air he did, regarding the site as an outdoor studio where he could express the experiential in a generic sort of way.

 

Abstract considerations of mark making, paint texture, and colouring are what concerned Williams in his painting. For Williams the landscape was not to be depicted as such, but was a source from which the artist could extract the elements necessary to make paintings. Any element that had a topographical particularity tended to be edited out: there are no views in Williams’s painting of the distinctive profile of the You Yangs, and the ribbon of distant blue water of Port Phillip Bay is not to be seen in any of the work.

With his You Yangs series it is said that Williams changed the way we see the Australian landscape. Avoiding the scenic and the topographical, it was now said that Williams enabled us to see and appreciate the ordinary and familiar in the Australian landscape.

 

But I am not so sure about that claim.  Today visitors go to the You Yangs to appreciate the scenery, the strangeness of the place, its whimsical rocks, the odd looking gnarled and twisted trees, and the sublime view of a place in the distance they call home. This is pretty conventional but enduring stuff. The Dressmaker taps into this sensibility by the way it panders to our continuing recognition of the peculiarity and otherness of the Australian landscape.

 

Posted 27 April 2015:

 

Immanence, Steps Gallery, April 2015

 

Welcome to my exhibition of paintings. Mostly these are of the You Yangs, and all of the work has been made plein-air (the larger ones over several sessions).

 

As a painter I seem to have the You Yangs to myself – I never see any other artists down there. Which seems strange to me, given its possibilities for painting and its proximity to Melbourne and Geelong.

 

But the You Yangs do pop up every now and again as a subject in the art historical record:

 

There is a painting at Geelong Art Gallery, by Eugene von Guerard, where the distinctive profile of the You Yangs appears in the distance. Titled View of Geelong (1856) the rocky outcrop adds to the picturesque qualities of the scene.

 

Von Guerard’s practice of dramatizing topographical features in his landscape painting was about romanticizing  the new land that was opening up to European settlement. In such paintings nature is presented as scenery, and the scene is pruned within its borders (the frame) and is self contained. Neither artist nor observer are seen to be present to the scene witnessed, for the space of the painting is not inclusive of the viewer.

 

Geelong Art Gallery also has a notable painting from Fred Williams’ You Yangs series.  Titled Yellow landscape (1968) this abstract work is an example of Williams’ celebrated anti-picturesque view of the Australian landscape. It implies a vantage point from within the You Yangs looking across the surrounding flat pastoral country and studiously avoids any picturesque focal point or feature (so far as I know Williams never painted the profile of the You Yangs nor ever referenced Port Phillip Bay, a distant scenic feature seen from the You Yangs).  

 

Looking at Yellow landscape the viewer is not grounded anywhere and is floating or hovering above a landscape that begins somewhere in the distance.  A sense of detachment prevails (in spite of the romantic qualities that the distance evoked in the painting implies).

 

For all the great differences of style and content, the picturesque painting of von Guerard and the anti-picturesque work of Williams share an elusive feature:  in neither case can the viewer spatially enter the landscape. This is because the landscape is not inclusive of the artist’s own standing point from which the landscape is observed.

 

So far as my own work at the You Yangs is concerned, I see it as neither exclusively picturesque nor anti-picturesque but inclusive of both. Picturesque qualities of my work could  include the distant views (including the Bay), and a feeling of pleasure in the presence of nature (I’m not sure why scenery should be so often disparaged and avoided in contemporary landscape art when scenery is the primary means – today as a hundred years ago – by which people seek out an aesthetic experience of landscape).

 

But in a non-picturesque way I am also seeking a sense of one seamless reality in which artist/viewer are included in the landscape. In my painting I usually seek to include the ground where I sit, the screen of trees in front of me, the far distance and overarching sky. All are interconnected, and are a part of the one seamless reality that makes for environment. In the painting a blending thus takes place between the seeing and the seen. By titling my show Immanence I have sought to give a name to this sensory field of experience. 

 

Posted 4 December 2014:

 

Landscape Painting Prizes:  the contemporary Australian scene  (Copyright,Mark Dober, 2014)

 

What place does landscape painting occupy in the contemporary Australian art world? It seems that landscape painting, while less central to Australian art now than during the nineteenth century and the modern period, still occupies a significant place. The position now is not so much insecure as more complex.

 

On the one hand the genre of landscape painting is well represented in many good commercial galleries, and landscape is a recurrent theme in contemporary painting prizes (7 of the 42 shortlisted paintings in the 2014 Geelong Contemporary Art Prize pictured landscape). The choice of landscape as the theme of the forthcoming inaugural Dobell Australian Drawing Biennal is indicative of the continuing importance and relevance of landscape. And several of the prestigious national painting prizes are now specifically devoted to a landscape theme.

 

Yet on the other hand, contemporary landscape painting is largely absent from the public gallery system:  places like Melbourne’s Australian Centre for Contemporary Art never seem to show it, there was little representation of landscape in the recent Melbourne Now survey at the National Gallery of Victoria, and Australian landscape rarely appears at the   prestigious international Biennales. Nor does landscape painting often appear at Melbourne’s ARIs (artist run spaces). 

 

While not viewed as particularly “cutting edge” or “innovatory” by these latter sections of the art world (it would seem), landscape painting is not likely to go away soon, if ever. This may have much to do with the way landscape and painting go exceptionally well together (that is, genre and media are a natural fit). Moreover, it would seem that landscape painting addresses an insatiable human need to find meaning and beauty in the larger visible world that surrounds us. Landscape, after all, is and always will be out there, and it is a significant reality that we all experience in one way or another. Each generation faces the challenge anew: how to reinvigorate and bring new experience to the genre?

 

Landscape painting prizes: an overview

The shortlisted work and winners of the nations’s leading contemporary landscape painting prizes (the John Leslie Art Prize, Fleurieu Painting Prize, John Glover Art Prize, New South Wales Plein-air Painting Prize, Wynne Prize, and Paddington Art Prize), provide a useful guide to how the genre has been travelling in recent years.

 

A few basic facts about these prizes: with the exception of the Wynne Prize they began at around the same time:  the Fleurieu in 1998, the John Leslie in 2000, the John Glover and the Paddington Art Prize in 2004, and the NSW Plein Air Prize in 2008.  The prize money to the winner ranges from $20,000 (John Leslie Art Prize, NSW Plein-air Painting Prize, Paddington Art Prize) to $50,000 (Fleurieu Painting Prize). Three are held in Sydney (NSW Plein-air Painting Prize, Wynne Prize, Paddington Art Prize), one in Tasmania (John Glover Art Prize), one in South Australia (Fleurieu Painting Prize), and one in Victoria (John Leslie Art Prize).  The number of entries in these prizes just keeps growing – the John Leslie attracting over 400 entries this year. Among the best known of Australia’s landscape painters feature in the prizes, though household names – artists of the stature of John Olsen or Rick Amor -- tend to be missing. These prizes can function as a battleground for those artists who aspire to such heights, and for the much larger group of artists who are seeking to get better known, and advance their reputation in the art world.

 

The organizational encouragement and backing in recent years represented by these landscape painting prizes suggests a strong belief in the current and future prospects of the genre in Australia.

 

John Leslie Art Prize

The bi-annual John Leslie Art Prize is held at Gippsland Art Gallery in Sale, Victoria. The 2014 winner was Shannon Smiley, and recent previous prize winners have been Tony Lloyd (2012), Jason Cordero (2008), and Andrew Meier (2006). The winner is invited to be one of the three judges for the next prize. The money for the prize comes from a Sale resident:  John Leslie OBE.

 

A striking feature of the John Leslie Art Prize is the strong representation given to painting making use of photographs and other mediated source material. Though some work shortlisted – whether abstract or plein-air – can be exempted from this generalization, the above mentioned prize winners have all shared this quality. Stylistic features that tend to go hand in hand with the use of photography in contemporary landscape painting were much in evidence in the John Leslie Art Prize: smooth/thin paint surfaces employing fine detail or, its opposite, the void, and the use of monochrome colour as well as theatrical and sublime contrasts of light and dark.

 

Fleurieu Prize

The bi-annual Fleurieu Prize is Australia’s richest painting prize. The prize is financially supported and promoted by the State Government of South Australia (the Premier signing off on Forwards to the catalogue). The prize is viewed by organizers as a means of increasing tourism to the Fleurieu Peninsula: the peninsula is a major wine growing region and the prize exhibitions are spread among several wineries. In addition to the main landscape prize, there are painting prizes on the themes of food and wine, and the local Fleurieu landscape. The publicity aim appears to be to link the art, local landscape and vineyards to enhance the status of all three.

 

The prize catalogues show that a wide range of contemporary styles are accommodated with proportionally more work that could be described as abstract or whimisical, and proportionally less work that is darkly romantic and photo-sourced compared to the John Leslie Art Prize. The winner for 2013 was Fiona Lowry.  The website lists the finalists for 2013 only.

 

Wynne Prize

The annual Wynne Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales began in 1897 and is currently valued at $35,000.  The AGNSW website, which lists images of all of the finalists of the last few years, demonstrates that the prize features the best known artists painting the Australian landscape.  Recent prize winners are Michael Johnson (2014), Immant Tillers (2013 and 2012), Richard Godwin (2011) and Sam Leach (2010).

 

The styles that make it to the final cut are diverse. But there is no online selection of entries: paintings must be delivered to the gallery for selection.  As a result the prize is mostly a snapshot of the work of leading Sydney artists (Tasmanian artist Philip Wolfhagen has previously won the Wynne Prize, but for most artists interstate, having to send a work to Sydney in the hope of being selected does not encourage participation). 

 

An interesting feature of the Wynne Prize is that it allows for work of very large dimensions (up to 3 metres square) while the other art prizes surveyed have more stringent size limitations. This  may be because the AGNSW has more space and bigger walls on which to hang the work.

 

NSW  Plein Air Painting Prize

This annual prize held at the NSW Parliament is for a plein-air painting of a NSW landscape. The prize features many well known contemporary artists, for whom plein-air painting might be only an aspect of their working method. Recent winners have been Tom Carment (2014), Guy Maestri, John Bokor, Isabel Gomez, Rodney Pople, Euan Macleod and Noel McKenna. Familiar places to the artist, including urban sites, are often the subjects painted. Finalists’ work can be seen on the prize website

 

As a result of its specific devotion to perceptual practice, it can be assumed that the NSW Plein Air Painting Prize has boosted the profile of plein-air painting as contemporary practice in the State of NSW. So while many in the art world tend to view plein-air painting as not contemporary – an adjunct to studio practice -- this prize demonstrates that plein-air painting can be a fully fledged contemporary expression and statement in its own right. 

 

A limiting feature of the prize, in my view, is the condition that entries not exceed 100 cm wide and 150 cm high.  This taller-than-wide format allowed is, I am told, due to columns vertically dividing the wall space. And while the modest dimensions allowable may suit most plein-air artists, the overall size restriction does nothing to challenge the assumption that modest scale is evidence of a not very ambitious kind of painting. Actually, a number of the very best plein-air painters – for example, Australia’s Mary Tonkin and England’s David Hockney -- work to a very ambitious scale when painting landscapes outdoors.

 

The Glover Prize

The Glover Prize is an annual $40,000 painting prize on the theme of Tasmania’s landscape. The exhibition is held at the colonial era village of Evandale near Launceston. Recent winners have been Mark Rodda (2014), Janet Laurence (2013), Rodney Pople (2012), and Josh Foley (2011). While the styles and subjects of these and earlier prize winners are immensely varied, the prize attracts more than its fair share of landscapes that evoke brooding loneliness.

 

The aim of the prize, according to the website, is “to stimulate conversations about the meaning and possibilities expressed in the words landscape, painting and Tasmania”. The Glover Prize is open to artists from anywhere in the world, though the subject requirement and the prohibitive cost of interstate art transport to Tasmania, suggest that the great majority of the participating artists are Tasmanian.

 

Paddington Art Prize

This prize began as a private initiative by Marlene Antico and is held annually at her commercial gallery in Sydney.  Finalists’ work from the past 10 years can be seen on the prize website. The kind of work shown, and its quality, is comparable to that of the other prizes I have surveyed, though the 2014 exhibition especially well represents plein-air and vigorous looking work (a characteristic of much of Sydney’s best contemporary landscape painting!).

 

A personal view of current trends

The shortlisted work in the surveyed art prizes shows a great diversity of styles and  qualitative consistency.  It is not possible to determine how the selectors have arrived at their selection.  Selectors like to present their decision as being “difficult” but ultimately  about choosing the most outstanding work: letters to rejected artists usually  imply that their work was not selected because it wasn’t competitive (as in “we had a very strong field of submissions this year...”). 

 

But it may be that selection owes much to selectors seeking the best examples of differing/niche landscape painting styles, in particular work perceived as unusual or “stand out”. Diversity – “something for everyone”—perhaps in itself a good thing, can  result.  Yet this approach tends to work against those good painters who are not among the very best known “stand outs” in their niche/stylistic field. One suspects that when it comes to selection, mannerism and gimmickry can often trump good painting which is overlooked because it more quietly asserts its quality and insights.

 

So far as the choice of winner is concerned, it seems that no overall style is favoured, though we can safely assume that the taste of the judge(s) will play a big role in the result. Again, it often seems that it is the “stand out” look – work that is perceived as different and unique – that is a strong factor in choosing the winner. Yet this is not always the case and quite often the rationale for the judges’ choice is a mystery to most. 

 

A quirky feature of these prizes is that the great majority of the winners are men. Are the artists who paint landscape and enter thes