Born in Cairns, in north Queensland, Daniel Boyd is from the Gangalu and Kudjla people.

His recent works reanimate significant historical images and objects through the use of a scrim-like veil of dots. The subject gradually, if only partially, emerges. As the artist explains: ‘My recent work is about the trajectory of information and how it passes back and forth over time and between cultures. Through the movement of information details and facts associated with historical events and objects are lost. The paintings acknowledge this process and are a remembrance of that loss … My use of dots references the idea of the cultural lens and the fact that we all have different points of view’.[1]

The original source for Untitled (2014) is an iconic photograph titled ‘Badgers’ Creek, Aboriginal Station, Coranderrk, fishing scene’ (c.1870-80) by the German photographer Fred Kruger. The tranquil scene in the photograph presents an idyllic image of the Indigenous residents of the station at leisure, enjoying a respite from cultivating the land, evident in the extensive hop-field which appears in the distance. However, as Jane Lydon has argued, ‘Kruger’s tranquil Aboriginal arcadias also worked to disguise the dispossession of the Indigenous people’ and ‘although hop cultivation had [initially] been a commercial success … it became a problem in diverting resources away from basic subsistence and maintenance of the settlement’.[2] The picturesque quality of the image serves to obscure our view of these complex issues that were at play. Similarly, through the combination of partially rendered details and darkened and shrouded areas of paint and charcoal, Boyd’s painting alternately reveals and conceals, highlighting our inability to ever fully see or grasp a complete perspective on the landscape of the past. The work thereby foregrounds the notion that the depiction of Aboriginal people through historic documentary photography does not represent a ‘truth’, but rather a complex construction.

Further Information:

1. Artist statement, Art Gallery of New South Wales website, accessed on 6/05/2016, URL: http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/92.2014/.
2. Jane Lydon, ‘Photography, authenticity and Victoria’s Aborigines Protection Act (1886)’ in Settler Colonial Governance in Nineteenth-Century Victoria, (eds. Leigh Boucher and Lynette Russell), Canberra: ANU Press and Aboriginal History Inc., The Australian National University, 2015, pp. 154-56.

oil, charcoal and archival glue on linen

213 x 274 cm

Acquired 2014, TarraWarra Museum of Art collection

Stephen Bush is a painter with a longstanding interest in the tradition of painting and, in particular, the representation of the landscape, which he playfully interrogates in his work to unearth a range of troubling questions, uneasy juxtapositions and unresolvable contradictions embedded in its history.

In recent years, the artist has continued to experiment freely with both the colour and the materiality of paint. In this light, the title of his painting, Ficus Elastica (the scientific name for the rubber plant), not only refers to the foliage that has been rendered in the immediate foreground of the work, but also alludes to the elasticity of the painting as a whole, its ability to change in both the process of its making and in the way it visibly morphs and flexes across its surface. This effect is the result of a process by which the artist pours paint directly onto the canvas to create a large field of viscous pools which ooze, marble and swell in myriad permutations. Amidst the ebb and flow of this glistening, fluid surface the artist identifies formations which suggest potential images, adeptly balancing the tension between chaos and order, the irrational and reason, chance operation and conscious control, abstraction and representation.

In this instance, a rustic stone dwelling, a distant alpine mountain top and a serpentine highway emerge as formal, structural elements which introduce a narrative component, albeit quite an ambiguous and surreal one. Here a seemingly solid man-made stone lodge, forcefully ruptured by the volatility of the surrounding elements and rent in two by the descending mountain streams, threatens to be reabsorbed into the swirling, vertiginous landscape/background from which it appears to have momentarily emerged. With its psychedelic landscape of vibrant, high-keyed greens, yellows and pinks mixing in unforeseen and unstable combinations and its more considered, and controlled figurative components, this painting continues the artist’s ongoing investigation into the mutability and changeability of our relationship to, and conception of, the landscape.

oil and enamel on linen

198 x 274 cm

Acquired 2012, TarraWarra Museum of Art collection

Since the early 1980s Tony Clark’s practice has been critically engaged with a range of art historical styles and periods.

Sections from Clark’s Myriorama belongs to an ongoing project Clark initiated in 1985 which deliberately challenges and playfully reconfigures the conventions of the landscape genre. The series is inspired by a children’s game, ‘Clark’s Myriorama’, designed by John Clark in 1824 in which a series of illustrated cards with a shared horizon line could be placed in any order to create myriad panoramic vistas. Tony Clark was drawn to both the serial quality of these reproductions as well as the participatory aspect of involving the subjectivity of the viewer in the arrangement and construction of their own landscape.

While the imagery and style of these works evokes the atmospheric and picturesque paintings of the 17th century by artists such as Nicholas Poussin and Claude Lorrain, the reduced palette of blue, pink, sienna and black, the raw materiality and the coarse painterly technique evident in Clark’s canvases, goes against the grain of such naturalistic, highly finished antecedents. Fellow artist Constanze Zikos has described this approach as a ‘sort of punk classicism’. While the Myriorama paintings certainly create a distinctive mood and employ a familiar compositional style which they share with their Baroque precursors, the potentially endless permutations of the series and its lack of site specificity, means that Clark’s paintings exist more as landscapes of the imagination and memory than of a particular place and time. In this particular diptych, a certain tension is generated between its characteristic, ambient qualities and the misalignment of the composition where the two canvases meet. As much as we try to grasp a continuous, illusionistic space, we are thwarted by this off kilter registration and prompted to acknowledge that our apprehension of the landscape is never as seamless as it appears.

acrylic and permanent marker ink on linen

2 panels, 240 x 360 cm

Acquired 2009, TarraWarra Museum of Art collection

Following in the footsteps of his grandfather and namesake who had been a painter associated with the Heidelberg School, William Delafield Cook trained at Caulfield Institute of Technology, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and the University of Melbourne in the early 1950s.

From 1967, following his semi-abstract phase, he turned to realism, meticulously rendering objects and interiors in sumptuous charcoal drawings and fine acrylic paintings. However, from the late 1970s it was the Australian landscape that became his central preoccupation, and over many years his continuing dialogue with the exterior, physical realm played a crucial role in forming and reshaping his interior landscape: ‘For me they are not just ‘landscape’, they are part of my life. If I’m painting Australia … I’m painting, among other things, my thoughts, my childhood, my sense of place, where I belong’.[1]

One of the recurring responses to Delafield Cook’s landscapes is that, despite their visual immediacy and apparent fidelity, they appear frozen in time, suffused with a sense of tranquillity that is difficult to infiltrate. The deliberate and considered framing and isolation of his subject and intensive amassing of detail, arrest our gaze, enticing us to focus on objects until they become imbued with a heightened significance, as seen in Promontory (1981). Set against a clear and open blue sky, the jutting headland provides a strong structural presence. The artist’s predilection for topographic features with a defined, formal aspect is clearly revealed in the following passage: ‘On the one hand you are going with a kind of romantic alertness, on the other as a formalist artist. You are wanting to structure it and find something that has a classical element’.[2]

Through completely focused attention and the precise, painstaking application of acrylic in which the detailed strata of the cliff face, the spindly limbs of the trees and the fine grasses and foliage are all carefully and minutely described by his brush, the artist transfixes the scene, rendering it motionless. However, the quality of stillness that pervades the work is just as much a product of what he leaves out. Here, as in all of his landscape paintings, clouds – those ubiquitous expressions of the mutable and ephemeral – are banished from the sky and the surface of the sea produces nary a ripple. In this way, the artist’s photo realist rendering of this remote vista is imbued with a timeless aura.

Further Information:

1. William Delafield Cook, quoted in Deborah Hart, William Delafield Cook, Sydney: Craftsman House, 1998, p. 167.
2. William Delafield Cook, quoted in Hart, 1998, p. 168.

acrylic on canvas

121.5 x 209 cm

Gift of Eva Besen AO and Marc Besen AO

Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2008, TarraWarra Museum of Art collection

The art of Russell Drysdale defined a particular image of the Australian outback: remote, drought stricken and sparsely populated.

This image was iconic and popular, and it became a national representation that other artists have both returned to and reassessed. His visions of isolated structures, gnarled tree trunks, barren hills, dusty vistas and solid, isolated figures represent the endurance of both the landscape and its inhabitants. Glowing with warm browns, reds, blacks and ochres, his paintings often depict people at the edge of society or border of a town, captured in their everyday activities. Skies are often dramatic and vegetation is scarce. These works are not simple transpositions of scenes of country life. They are, instead, careful compositions drawn from long journeys in the Australian bush. Throughout the 1940-50s Drysdale travelled to western New South Wales, Cape York, Melville Island, Northern Territory and the Kimberley, spending weeks at a time in remote locations.

Drysdale’s view of our landscape was filtered through changes that were brought about by the magnitude of devastation wrought by World War II, the harshness of drought and the questioning of modernity. In 1944, Drysdale was commissioned to document the drought then afflicting western NSW and his concern for the environment is reflected in the confronting images of dusty landscapes, the stark remains of livestock and the tortured, anthropomorphic forms of dead trees. Moreover, Drysdale continually sought a balance between depicting a unique Australian vision in the context of surrealist figuration in the work of British artists such as Henry Moore, John Piper and Graham Sutherland. Evening (c.1945) is no exception. The lone tree in the background stands like a surreal sculpture, charred by fire and drought. The woman stares into the distance, waiting or anticipating. The stillness of the image has come to represent an iconic Australian outback.

oil on canvas

50 x 60.5 cm

Gift of Eva Besen AO and Marc Besen AO

Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2013, TarraWarra Museum of Art collection

As perhaps the most archetypal form of modernist abstraction, the grid has been employed as a formal, compositional device in countless artworks over the past century.

In ‘Grids’ (1979), Rosalind Krauss’ seminal essay on the subject, she describes this structural device as: [f]lattened, geometricized, ordered, it is antinatural, antimimetic, antireal. It is what art looks like when it turns its back on nature’.[1] However, for Rosalie Gascoigne, the grid was employed as a compositional method in order to generate highly personal and experiential evocations of natural phenomena in ways which transcended the more rigid, impersonal qualities associated with its geometry.

In one of her late works entitled Afternoon (1996), Gascoigne assembled 27 individual panels of found painted timber in roughly similar sizes in a grid-like formation. At a surface level the serial repetition of components arranged and balanced according to vertical and horizontal axes corresponds to a reductive Minimalist sensibility. However, it is the heavily weathered timber with its faded white paint which infuses the work with a resonant and suggestive force. As the artist traversed the open countryside she deliberately sought out materials that she felt were ‘invested with the spirit of the place’ and capable of recalling ‘the feeling of an actual moment in the landscape’.[2] In this light, the vital materiality of the reclaimed painted timber is not only inscribed with the effects of its prolonged exposure to the elements, but it also speaks directly to Gascoigne’s deep and abiding memories of her experiences in the landscape. In Afternoon, the richly allusive quality of the individual boards is suggestive of passing clouds, evoking the ephemeral and transitory phenomena of nature in continuous metamorphosis. Contemplated as a unified pictorial whole, this humble assemblage of discarded and deteriorating matter assumes a metaphysical dimension bordering on the ineffable, one which resoundingly accords with the artist’s desire to ‘capture the “nothingness” of the countryside, those wide open spaces … the great Unsaid … the silence that often only visual beauty transcends’.[3]

Further Information:

1. Rosalind Krauss, ‘Grids’, October, Vol. 9, Summer, 1979, p. 50.
2. Quoted in Deborah Edwards, Rosalie Gascoigne: Material as Landscape, (exh. cat.), Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1997, p. 8.
3. Ibid, p. 16.

natural wood and paint on wood

diptych, overall: 117 x 288 cm

Gift of Eva Besen AO and Marc Besen AO

Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2008, TarraWarra Museum of Art collection

For the past three decades the highly evocative works of Louise Hearman have both beguiled with their seductive, painterly surfaces and unsettled through their disquieting and sometimes arresting imagery.

These contrasting responses point to a deep-seated ambiguity and indeterminacy that charges her small scale paintings with their qualities of suggestion and potentiality. In considering this aspect of her works, the following passage from French artist Odilon Redon’s journal seems apposite: ‘An art that suggests is like an irradiation of things for the dream, where thought also sets forth’.[1] The dream-like quality of Hearman’s paintings is often discussed and this effect largely originates from her adeptness at creating the optical illusion of irradiation – the apparent extension of the edges of an illuminated object seen against a dark background. Emerging from the darkness, the artist’s subjects are imbued with an indefinite, spectral quality as they glow, flicker and hover in a peculiar white light where all is not as it seems.

A prime example of this approach is seen in Untitled #1044 (2003) in which a fairly nondescript tract of Australian bush is transformed into an eerie and mysterious nightscape. At first glance, the impression is of a quiet nocturne in which the brisk and thin strokes of white suggest a field of grass suffused by the light of a full moon. However, the white highlights on the side of the spindly tree trunks and more intense flare on the left side of the composition hint at a more unnatural source, perhaps car headlights, a camera flash or maybe even an otherworldly emanation. Suddenly, any sense of certainty is suspended and a narrative dimension enters into our apprehension of the landscape. By refraining from bestowing a title on her paintings, Hearman further encourages the viewer to speculate and wonder what is about to happen or what may be lurking in the shadows.

Further Information:

1. Odilon Redon, To Myself: Notes on Life, Art, and Artists (1922), Mira Jacob and Jeanne L. Wasserman (trans.), New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1986, p. 21.

oil on composition board
54 x 64 cm

Gift of Eva Besen AO and Marc Besen AO

Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2009, TarraWarra Museum of Art collection

A self-taught painter, Elwyn Lynn was also editor of the Contemporary Art Society Broadsheet between 1955 and 1970. At the time, it was an important platform for the review and discussion of contemporary art.

He was an art critic for The Bulletin and The Australian newspaper and was renowned for his advocacy of abstract art, often at times when it was not widely supported. Until the late 1960s he was a schoolteacher and between 1969 and 1983 his role was Curator of the Power Gallery of Contemporary Art at the University of Sydney. Lynn’s public activities did not, however, impinge on his passionate pursuit of painting.

Lynn grew up in the small Riverina town of Junee, where he observed harsh summers and ploughed paddocks. His painting style is distinguished by an engagement with matter. His chosen use of materials – pigment, PVA glue, sand and found objects and collage – comprised a visual conversation between the landscape and the physicality of the image. Many of his works convey a shifting register in terms of their points of view. At times the landscape is articulated in two dimensions frontal to the picture plane. At other times, it is seen from above. On a trip to Europe in 1958 he observed the work of Jean Dubuffet, Antoni Tapies and Alberto Burri. Each of these artists created a physical texture on the canvas, experimenting with different materials in a manner that could be described as emblematic abstract, as in the case of Tapies, and spontaneously innocent, as in the work of Dubuffet.

Lynn once commented that ‘the aesthetic appeal of Cretan cursive script, of early Sumerian holes and scratches, of decaying Egyptian papyrus and pre-Hellenic markings certainly does not depend on the verbal meaning; there is a fascination in these cuts and graffiti for some modern painters to whom the High Renaissance was simply amusing. Dubuffet and Tapies frequently see the world as though through a long archaeological tunnel; the former will scratch and scribble with the immediacy of a child’s drawing’.[1] The dominant form in the painting Crete (1967) is the Greek symbol omega. It is the last letter of the Greek alphabet, and often refers metaphorically to the end. The pock-marked and pierced surface, the ash greys and golden browns, resonate with the sense of a landscape from above – a ring of fire around burnt paddocks. Crete invokes not only the burnished surfaces of an ancient culture but also the skin of the landscape itself.

Further Information:

1. Elwyn Lynn, ‘Calligraphy’, The Broadsheet of the Contemporary Art Society of Australia (NSW Branch), 06/1959.

PVA, sand and fibres on canvas
122 x 152.5 cm

Acquired 2015, TarraWarra Museum of Art collection

Since the early 1980s, Mandy Martin has forged a highly distinctive, multilayered approach to painting the Australian landscape.

Martin's approach combines the perceptual – firsthand observations of topography; the conceptual – an understanding of the changing depictions of the landscape across different periods and cultures; the emotional – a deep engagement with place and response to natural phenomena; the technical – an approach to materials and methods that evoke the sensory qualities of the landscape; and the imaginary – an ability to synthesise a dynamic and powerful pictorial unity that resonates with the viewer.

The painting Romantic coastal landscape was directly informed by Martin’s in depth study of landscapes of the Romantic movement in Great Britain during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. She was particularly interested in Edmund Burke’s treatise A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), which defined the sublime as a strong physiological and emotional response to terror or danger that, from a certain distance, can conversely be a source of attraction. This notion found aesthetic expression in many landscapes of the period by artists such as J.M.W. Turner, whose paintings evoke the overpowering, awesome and boundless nature of forces beyond human control and comprehension. Through her deliberate choice of title, Martin aligns her painting with this tradition. However, as Peter Haynes suggests, far from a mere imitation in the style of the Romantic sublime, Martin is interested in ‘adapting her experience of the Australian landscape to a set of limitations based on her understanding of an earlier historical formula, and keeping those limitations open to her aesthetic and thematic concerns’.[1] Painted immediately after her series of brooding, industrial landscapes, Martin adopted a tradition that, tellingly, coincided with the early Industrial Revolution.

From a distance, Romantic coastal landscape contains many of the visual tropes one would expect from its title, a remote and rugged scene in which we are exposed to the dynamic interplay between the elemental forces of sea, sky and land. In this imposing, liminal space, human scale dwindles into insignificance amidst the rocky outcrops and eroded escarpments worn down over millennia by the ever lapping tide, while threatening, Turneresque storm clouds encroach along the horizon. Closer inspection of its materiality reveals how Martin accentuates the tactile qualities of these elements, employing richly impastoed and modelled paint layers to evoke the eroded
surfaces of these ancient cliff faces, adding mixed media such as sand (and possibly earth) to suggest geological sedimentation, and allowing solvent to run over and dissolve the blue pigment to mirror the shimmering, reflective properties of the tidal water. In this Romantic re-visioning of a primordial stretch of coast, Martin seems to ask whether, in the widely despoiled landscape of the late 20th century, such vistas of a seemingly unsullied environment, have maintained their capacity to inspire awe and wonder in the viewer, or is the situation more uncertain and illusory.

Further Information:

1. Peter Haynes, Mandy Martin. Painting 1981-2009, (exh. cat.), Canberra: Canberra Museum and Art Gallery, 2008, p. 10.

oil on canvas
180 x 240 cm

Gift of Eva Besen AO and Marc Besen AO

Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2013, TarraWarra Museum of Art collection

Danie Mellor was born of Aboriginal and European ancestry and he maintains strong links with his mother’s Country on the Atherton Tablelands in far north Queensland.

His practice focuses on the historical intersections of people, ideas and culture, and draws upon multiple traditions and perspectives in order to explore changing conceptions of the landscape.

A highly distinctive feature of his meticulously rendered works on paper is the predominant palette of blue and white which originally stemmed from his interest in the popular china produced by Spode, an English ceramic company whose founding in 1770 coincided with the mapping of the east coast of Australia by Captain James Cook. As the artist explains the: ‘Blue and white engravings that were used for decoration on English dinnerware … marked a significant period in which “exotic” cultures and environments were adapted and commoditised as illustrative vignettes on fine bone china … This [visual] language … is used in my work as means to show the transformed environment and country, a place that became changed through its development as part of empire. The colour blue then indicates a European footprint and gaze … The Aboriginal people and animals that are depicted are naturalistic, or “real”; it is their country around them that has become changed’.[1] More recently however, Mellor’s investigations into how conceptions of the colour blue have evolved over time and in different cultural contexts, has seen his application of this colour broaden both in scale and apprehension. In a series of large, unframed multi-panel works, the material and metaphysical properties of the colour are drawn out to full effect, generating a palpable atmosphere that evokes the numinous qualities present in these ancient forest ecologies.

The title of this work translates as ‘spirit in the forest clearing’. As the artist explains, ‘Bayi dambun is a spirit of the forest, and can be used to describe both masculine and feminine properties of a supernatural presence. The jawun, or bicornial baskets, being placed by one of the figures in the image were used as important vessels in ceremony. In some cases these were painted with ochre designs, and used as funerary baskets for the remains of important members of the community’.[2] The large scale of the work immerses the viewer within a monumental rainforest canopy of sprawling fig trees, an evocative space in which we silently bear witness to the enactment of a sacred ritual revolving around the cycle of life and death. It forms part of an ongoing series in which Mellor not only examines ‘the nature of ceremony within the landscape’, but also represents ‘the everyday activities that form part of daily life in rainforest environments’ as a means to ‘emphasise the importance of connection with those environs and ecologies. It suggests a knowledge system is being applied that relates to heightened understanding of seasonal cycles and an awareness of one’s place in nature’.[3]

Further Information:

1. Artist statement, ‘About Danie Mellor’ in Learning Resource written by Gillian Ridsdale to accompany the exhibition Danie Mellor: Exotic Lies Sacred Ties, Brisbane: UQ Art Museum, 2014, p. 5.
2. Artist statement, Primordial: SuperNaturalBayiMinyjirral National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2014.
3. Danie Mellor, email to the author, 15 June 2016.

mixed media on paper
9 panels, overall: 300 x 360 cm

Acquired 2014, TarraWarra Museum of Art collection

Intimate in detail and epic in scope, James Morrison’s The Great Tasmanian Wars (2004) presents the landscape as an elongated and panoramic vision, a fragmented one, seen through a kaleidoscope of collapsing timescales, disjointed narratives, and diverse topographies.

Across 55 small canvas panels, evolution and imagination, reality and fantasy, geology and history, continuously interweave and intersect as Dodo birds, thylacines and platypi co-exist with flitting fairies, giant, mutant insects and brooding vampires in a rich pageant of bright, iridescent colours. As Amanda Rowell observes, this dizzying collage of elements extracted from widely divergent places and times disorients the viewer in a landscape of uncertainty and flux: ‘Oddities from further up and further down the evolutionary ladder dislodge us from the present and cast us adrift in a timeless sci-fi soup that is both primordial and futuristic’.[1]

As the artist reveals, the concept for the work and its unfolding, linear format derived from two key sources:

… a battle that had been raging between various factions of historians on different interpretations of Australian history. The media labelled this ‘the history wars’, it mainly centred on differing views of the extent of the hostility in treatment of the Indigenous population during colonisation … The idea of differing histories, parallel realities, the subjective nature of memories. So there are all these histories floating around out there, different threads, trillions of time lines.

Also in Berkeley I found a book called A Concise History of the World. It was published in America and started at 2.5 million B.C with Homo habilis using stone tools in Africa and ended in 1963 with the assassination of President Kennedy. This was all on a long sheet of paper that folded out of the book … A pull-out format of history that also translated into my elongated ‘Wars’.[2]

With its vast compendium of visual references and styles presented simultaneously in a non-hierarchical procession, Morrison’s painting dismantles the notion of the ‘grand narrative’, a singular, fixed, comprehensive and objective account of history, and supplants it with a
sprawling, multiple, unstable concoction of possibilities and impossibilities. AF

Further Information:

1. Amanda Rowell, ‘James Morrison: a contemporary epic of natural history’, Art & Australia, vol. 43, no. 1, 2005, p. 86.
2. Extract from artist’s talk by James Morrison, Monash University Museum of Art, 13 September 2015.

oil on canvas
55 panels, overall: 30.5 x 1677.5 cm

Acquired 2005, TarraWarra Museum of Art collection

Intimate in detail and epic in scope, James Morrison’s The Great Tasmanian Wars (2004) presents the landscape as an elongated and panoramic vision, a fragmented one, seen through a kaleidoscope of collapsing timescales, disjointed narratives, and diverse topographies.

Across 55 small canvas panels, evolution and imagination, reality and fantasy, geology and history, continuously interweave and intersect as Dodo birds, thylacines and platypi co-exist with flitting fairies, giant, mutant insects and brooding vampires in a rich pageant of bright, iridescent colours. As Amanda Rowell observes, this dizzying collage of elements extracted from widely divergent places and times disorients the viewer in a landscape of uncertainty and flux: ‘Oddities from further up and further down the evolutionary ladder dislodge us from the present and cast us adrift in a timeless sci-fi soup that is both primordial and futuristic’.[1]

As the artist reveals, the concept for the work and its unfolding, linear format derived from two key sources:

… a battle that had been raging between various factions of historians on different interpretations of Australian history. The media labelled this ‘the history wars’, it mainly centred on differing views of the extent of the hostility in treatment of the Indigenous population during colonisation … The idea of differing histories, parallel realities, the subjective nature of memories. So there are all these histories floating around out there, different threads, trillions of time lines.

Also in Berkeley I found a book called A Concise History of the World. It was published in America and started at 2.5 million B.C with Homo habilis using stone tools in Africa and ended in 1963 with the assassination of President Kennedy. This was all on a long sheet of paper that folded out of the book … A pull-out format of history that also translated into my elongated ‘Wars’.[2]

With its vast compendium of visual references and styles presented simultaneously in a non-hierarchical procession, Morrison’s painting dismantles the notion of the ‘grand narrative’, a singular, fixed, comprehensive and objective account of history, and supplants it with a
sprawling, multiple, unstable concoction of possibilities and impossibilities. AF

Further Information:

1. Amanda Rowell, ‘James Morrison: a contemporary epic of natural history’, Art & Australia, vol. 43, no. 1, 2005, p. 86.
2. Extract from artist’s talk by James Morrison, Monash University Museum of Art, 13 September 2015.

oil on canvas
55 panels, overall: 30.5 x 1677.5 cm

Acquired 2005, TarraWarra Museum of Art collection

Intimate in detail and epic in scope, James Morrison’s The Great Tasmanian Wars (2004) presents the landscape as an elongated and panoramic vision, a fragmented one, seen through a kaleidoscope of collapsing timescales, disjointed narratives, and diverse topographies.

Across 55 small canvas panels, evolution and imagination, reality and fantasy, geology and history, continuously interweave and intersect as Dodo birds, thylacines and platypi co-exist with flitting fairies, giant, mutant insects and brooding vampires in a rich pageant of bright, iridescent colours. As Amanda Rowell observes, this dizzying collage of elements extracted from widely divergent places and times disorients the viewer in a landscape of uncertainty and flux: ‘Oddities from further up and further down the evolutionary ladder dislodge us from the present and cast us adrift in a timeless sci-fi soup that is both primordial and futuristic’.[1]

As the artist reveals, the concept for the work and its unfolding, linear format derived from two key sources:

… a battle that had been raging between various factions of historians on different interpretations of Australian history. The media labelled this ‘the history wars’, it mainly centred on differing views of the extent of the hostility in treatment of the Indigenous population during colonisation … The idea of differing histories, parallel realities, the subjective nature of memories. So there are all these histories floating around out there, different threads, trillions of time lines.

Also in Berkeley I found a book called A Concise History of the World. It was published in America and started at 2.5 million B.C with Homo habilis using stone tools in Africa and ended in 1963 with the assassination of President Kennedy. This was all on a long sheet of paper that folded out of the book … A pull-out format of history that also translated into my elongated ‘Wars’.[2]

With its vast compendium of visual references and styles presented simultaneously in a non-hierarchical procession, Morrison’s painting dismantles the notion of the ‘grand narrative’, a singular, fixed, comprehensive and objective account of history, and supplants it with a
sprawling, multiple, unstable concoction of possibilities and impossibilities. AF

Further Information:

1. Amanda Rowell, ‘James Morrison: a contemporary epic of natural history’, Art & Australia, vol. 43, no. 1, 2005, p. 86.
2. Extract from artist’s talk by James Morrison, Monash University Museum of Art, 13 September 2015.

oil on canvas
55 panels, overall: 30.5 x 1677.5 cm

Acquired 2005, TarraWarra Museum of Art collection

Renowned as one of Australia’s pre-eminent artists over the past several decades, John Olsen is an essentially abstract artist whose paintings nevertheless remain grounded in a response to his immediate environment.

As his oft quoted phrase ‘I am in the landscape and the landscape is in me’ affirms, the artist is keenly aware of the immersive, reciprocal and irrevocable interrelationship between his sense of self and his sense of place.

Having already lived in, travelled through and absorbed many different parts of the country, in July 1981, the artist and his partner Noela Hjorth moved to Clarendon in the Adelaide Hills. As Deborah Hart observes, this relocation resulted in a series of paintings that harked back to the vitalist impulses of his works of the early 1960s which expressed: ‘the landscape as a living, pulsing organism suggestive of animalistic shapes and biological forms; of landscape not as a static factor but as process, not only seen but felt’.[1] This description vividly captures the vitality and exuberance encountered in Clarendon bedtime story (1981) in which a broad view across a sweeping horizon line is populated with lively marks and lyrical gestures which animate the scene with movement and energy. The painting captures the twilight period in which the searching, tentacular rays of the sun make way for the rising crescent moon and all is suffused in the milky blue light of the crepuscular sky where nothing is quite as it seems. Although the division between earth and sky and the summary notations and daubs of paint which suggest trees, clouds and stars evoke the qualities of an actual vista, the fantastical, gravity defying figures and forms which seem to tumble and rush down the steep, diagonal sloping horizon/hillside, suggest we are in the realm of an imaginary landscape. As the title suggests, the picture is telling a story, one which includes familiar lines from nursery rhymes such as the ‘cow jumped over the moon’ and the ‘dish ran away with the spoon’, alongside incidental squiggles and blobs suggesting ambiguous creatures of sheer invention. In the paintings of Olsen, we encounter a world of relativity and flux in which fantasy and reality, night and day, the infinite and the intimate are joyously entangled together in a living tapestry.

Further Information:

1. Deborah Hart, John Olsen, [1991], Sydney: Craftsman House, 2000, p. 153.

oil on canvas
166 x 181.8 cm

Gift of Eva Besen and Marc Besen AO 2001, TarraWarra Museum of Art collection

Clifton Pugh’s engagement with landscape extended further than most artists.

A deep-seated concern for the natural environment and native flora and fauna not only formed a major preoccupation of his artistic practice, it saw him become an early and devoted environmental activist. In 1951, the artist purchased a fifteen acre block of land at Cottles Bridge, forty kilometres north-east of Melbourne, the site on which a new artist’s community dubbed ‘Dunmoochin’ (a pun on the Australian slang phrase ‘done with moochin’ around’) was formed. As Christopher Heathcote observes, ‘the early roots of Australia’s conservation movement weave firmly through the loose dry soils of Dunmoochin’, whereby an active environmentalist group worked to regenerate this patch of bushland, pulling up weeds, trapping feral animals, and setting up a wildlife shelter.[1] Living and working in this landscape, Pugh observed up close the devastating impact and invasiveness of introduced species, and this understanding soon translated into an ongoing series of paintings which confront the viewer with their stark imagery of a compromised ecology.

Fellow artist and art critic, Elwyn Lynn, once described Pugh’s landscapes as ‘a theatre of the savage encounter’.[2] This description is clearly apposite for the painting Memory of a feral cat (1960), in which the artist vividly recreates his direct experience of sighting such creatures in the bush. As the artist was well aware, left to fend for itself in the wild, the strayed or abandoned domestic cat quickly adapts to its new environment where it becomes an adept predator who wreaks havoc on populations of small native mammals, birds and reptiles. Appearing front and centre in a close up view of a tract of scrub typical of Pugh’s compositions, the lean, angular form of the striped feline stands poised with its sharp claws extended, while its wide, nonchalant gaze points directly back at the viewer, as if we have intruded on its territory. The slightly exaggerated scale and features and somewhat awkward modelling of the cat are at odds with the simplified, abstract sculptural forms of the red rocks, which also stand out from the richly detailed textures describing the surrounding environment. As James Gleeson suggests, Pugh’s approach is part of his conception that ‘the bush is a battlefield’ whereby his ‘different stylistic treatments in the one painting’ are designed to heighten the sense of incongruity and antagonism and build on ‘the feeling of tension and conflict’.[3] The artist was unflinching and uncompromising in his endeavour to present his firsthand experience of the landscape awry.

Further Information:

1. Christopher Heathcote, ‘Reconstruction Culture 1945–1962’ in Encounters with Australian Modern Art, (ed. Maudie Palmer), Melbourne: Macmillan Art Publishing, 2008, p. 22.
2. Elwyn Lynn, The Australian landscape and its artists, Sydney: Bay Books, 1977, p. 128.
3. James Gleeson, Modern Painters 1931-1970, Melbourne: Lansdowne Press, 1971, p. 96.

oil on composition board
91 x 137.1 cm

Gift of Eva Besen and Marc Besen AO 2001, TarraWarra Museum of Art collection

Whether painting his whimsical self-portraits, intimate domestic scenes, or spectacular vistas, William Robinson’s art has always been made in response to his subjective experience and his immediate surroundings.

Since the mid-1980s, when the artist and his family first moved to a property on the Beechmont Range in the Gold Coast hinterland of Queensland, Robinson has been creatively entangled with the dense rainforest environments of this region. As the following statement attests, his long term immersion in the landscape is vital to his process: ‘I did not paint these works as a visitor to the landscape, but as one who lived in it and experienced it every day’.[1] In Robinson’s paintings the natural world appears to be in a state of constant metamorphosis,reflecting the artist’s continuing and changing observations of place.

One of the ground breaking developments of Robinson’s landscapes is their unconventional composition which depict multiple points of view simultaneously. In Purling Brook escarpment (2005), this multidimensional perspective confronts the viewer with a sense of both enclosure within a steep, plunging gully of abundant trees and foliage, and disorientation, as the sky and ground undergo multiple inversions. For the artist, this sense of fluctuation and instability is one that he has come to understand from living close to nature and witnessing its rhythms unfold both spatially and temporally:

Living in the country everything moves—the seasons, the clouds, nothing is set. There are things behind you, all around you and you are in it. … You begin to realise that you are in a landscape that is really the crust of the earth. It is air and ground. We’re all just spinning through space. There is something about the paintings that is indefinite, not solid. We don’t really have an orientation in this infinity. … You begin to question what time is ….[2]

For Robinson, the landscape has not only profoundly transformed his understanding of the larger cycles of the cosmos, but also greatly enhanced his appreciation for its minutiae of forms, patterns and textures. With a rich palette of delicate impasto paint work, he treats each discrete tree fern frond and drooping eucalyptus leaf with the same intimate attention to detail, conveying his appreciation for their small but intrinsic presence within this complex ecology. Looking up and out to the revolving sky through the tangled foliage and towering canopy of this sprawling web of interacting lifeforms, the viewer is drawn to contemplate the grandeur of this ancient forest and is instilled with a sense of reverence for its numinous beauty.

Further Information:

1. Quoted in Lou Klepac (ed.), William Robinson: Paintings 1987–2000, Sydney: The Beagle Press, 2001, p.40.
2. Quoted in Deborah Hart, ‘William Robinson’s artistic development: An intimate and expansive journey’ in William Robinson: The Transfigured Landscape, Brisbane: Queensland University of Technology and Piper Press, 2011, p. 33.

oil on canvas
128.5 x 183.6 cm

Gift of Eva Besen AO and Marc Besen AO

Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2008, TarraWarra Museum of Art collection

Informed by a deep-seated humanistic impulse, over many years the prints, drawings and paintings of Latvian born artist Jan Senbergs have expressed a highly distinctive, imaginative response to his observations of the often uneasy relationships between the endeavours of humankind and the environment.

From his haunting Port Liardet series (1979-81) of industrial landscapes based on Port Melbourne and its history, to the destroyed mining region of Mt Lyell in Tasmania in the menacing Copperopolis series (1982-83), right through to his more recent densely mapped aerial perspectives of cities and coastlines, the dynamic and often discordant intersections between the man-made and the natural world have been a constant preoccupation for the artist.

The large scale painting South face (1985) is the result of a commission by Ray Marginson, then Chairman of the Melbourne Board of Works and Vice-Principal of the University of Melbourne, who invited Senbergs, along with Michael Shannon, Dale Hickey, Clifton Pugh and John Olsen, to paint the recently opened Thomson Dam in West Gippsland, Victoria. Constructed to hold a capacity four times greater than Melbourne’s next largest reservoir, this massive infrastructure project was designed to ‘drought proof’ the city’s water supply. By composing the work from an elevated perspective, Senbergs powerfully conveys the overwhelming scale of the dam which engulfs the entire canvas. The vigorous brush marks and sinuously carved lines express the sheer brutality by which this landscape has been disfigured by the heavy machinery in order to confine and control the flow of the river. Fellow artist Fred Williams once referred to Senbergs as an ‘industrial surrealist’, and, although perhaps not as pronounced in this work, the addition of an actual household tap emerging out of the painted concrete barrier of the dam wall, provides an unexpected jolt and a sardonic reminder for the viewer of our complicity in this monumental imposition on the landscape.

acrylic on canvas
167.8 x 212.9 cm

Gift of Eva Besen AO and Marc Besen AO

Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2008, TarraWarra Museum of Art collection

For the past three and a half decades, Vivienne Shark LeWitt’s astute wit and subversive humour have underpinned her discursive and allegorical paintings which pointedly, and at times poignantly, reveal the peculiarity, complexity and absurdity of the human condition.

Drawing upon both art historical and literary sources, the artist subtly interrogates past traditions, quoting different elements in ironic combinations which confront and confound the viewer with their ambiguous and enigmatic narratives.

Tellingly, the title of Shark LeWitt’s painting The game of love and chance (1986) is derived from a comedy of manners written by the French playwright Pierre de Marivaux in 1730, in which identities are exchanged, roles are reversed and social conventions are transgressed. In this work, the word ‘love’ clearly references the tender and intimate exchange between two lovers in the foreground, however the reference to ‘chance’ introduces an element of uncertainty, while ‘game’ undermines the sense of certitude and sincerity by suggesting the nature of human attraction and attachment is arbitrary and a mere diversion for our amusement. The artist stages the scene in an idyllic, cultivated landscape strongly reminiscent of works by Rococo artists of the 18th century such as Antoine Watteau, whose elegant parkland settings were often the site for the enactment of romantic liaisons.[1] Situated behind the incongruously modern looking couple, a barefoot clown and musician cast expectant glances stage left, perhaps in anticipation of the arrival of another person, while a strange, devilish figure leans forward over the table. This impish character, derived from the famous engraving Le stryge (aka The vampire) (1853) by Charles Meryon which depicts a gargoyle overlooking Paris from its vantage point atop Notre-Dame, is a recurring feature of other paintings by Shark LeWitt from this period including The look of love (1982), Charles Meryon the voyeur 1827-1868. La belle et la bête (1983) and Goodness always triumphs over evil (1984). In this later painting, the creature, now wingless, nonchalantly gazes at a tabletop in an expression of boredom and ennui, perhaps all too familiar with the predictability of human desires and the ultimate fleetingness and folly of our affairs.

Further Information:

1. Catalogue entry for Vivienne Shark LeWitt, The omen, ‘That wascally wabbit’ (1987), Art Gallery of New South Wales Contemporary Collection Handbook, 2006. URL: http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/364.1988/, accessed on 31 May 2016.

oil on canvas
90 x 120.5 cm

Gift of Eva Besen AO and Marc Besen AO

Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2011, TarraWarra Museum of Art collection

Following his early training under John Brack at Melbourne Grammar School in the 1950s, Guy Stuart studied painting at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 1961–62.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s Stuart experimented in a wide range of media in which he explored the formal properties of objects, primarily in the shape of bowls, vats and discs. Having visited Japan twice in the late 1950s where he learned Sumi-e, the Japanese form of ink wash painting, Stuart returned there in 1985 in order to draw the landscape. This experience has proven to be highly influential with the landscape emerging as the major concern in his practice ever since.

As the artist reveals, ‘the simple main reason I work with landscape is that I feel the experience personally’,[1] and therefore a vital part of his process involves the immediacy of sketching his subjects directly on site. Back in the studio, the artist works from memory, internalising the landscape in order to clarify his response whereby his aim is to ‘lay down a range of marks equivalent to the essentials of real locations’.[2] As seen in Coppabella upright (2000-01), the artist’s abbreviated, improvised and notational outlines that delicately punctuate the vista and economically summarise the shapes and rhythms of the rocks, trees and hills, resemble a kind of calligraphy or handwriting which retains the immediacy and impulse of drawing. Beneath these lines, the broader abstract bands of muted orange, green, blue and purple dispersed in various lengths and angles, provide suggestive accents which further enhance our sense of the contours and movements present within this southern New South Wales landscape. With its high horizon line on an elongated canvas, this painting not only emulates the composition and format of Japanese scroll painting, it spiritedly translates the directness and simplicity of Zen painting to the unruly features of the Australian countryside.[3]

Further Information:

1. Guy Stuart, ‘Notes on my recent paintings’, (exh. cat.), Melbourne: Charles Nodrum Gallery, 1996.
2. ibid.
3. See Peter Doherty quoted in ‘Guy Stuart: Writing the Picture: Recent Paintings’, Stella Downer Fine Art website, August 2008. URL: http://www.stelladownerfineart.com.au/news-details.php?newsID=24&exhibitionID=10, accessed on 20 May 2016.

oil on canvas
198 x 122 cm

Gift of Eva Besen AO and Marc Besen AC 2015, TarraWarra Museum of Art collection

Situated in the Mt Disappointment State Forest in the Kinglake district just north of Melbourne, the majestic Strath Creek Falls is the subject of one of Eugene von Guérard’s most iconic works, Waterfall, Strath Creek (1862).

In the tradition of the 19th century German romantics, the colonial artist depicted the site with great precision and detail in rich layers of oil, capturing on canvas the ragged beauty of this natural landmark. Composed from the base of the falls, von Guérard’s painting invites the viewer to share the sense of awe and wonder shown in the gestures of the diminutive figures who marvel at the sight of the water cascading down the sheer, rocky cliff face which towers above them.

Over a century later, Imants Tillers revisited this composition in Untitled (Deaf) (1989) which stands as both a distinct work in its own right and as a ‘subset’ within a larger ongoing ‘canvasboard system’ in which the artist explores and elaborates his concerns. One of Tillers’ main preoccupations is the vexed issue of Australian identity and how our relationship to the land of this vast continent underpins our sense of place and belonging. Here the artist addresses these questions through the amalgamation of disparate sources, styles and media. Through the combination of painterly gestures, the dramatically increased scale, and the fragmentation of the image into a grid pattern, Tillers sharply distinguishes his work from the realistic and illusory presence of the original. These approaches highlight the notion that the landscape is a highly constructed space and our conception of nature is always already culturally mediated.

This is made even more explicit through the introduction of text. As curators Paul Fox and Jennifer Phipps suggest, the stencilling of the word ‘deaf’ in upper case at the base of the waterfall ‘speaks the silences of the frontier’, a quiet conspiracy in which the settling of the colony ‘required one not to look, not to speak, to cultivate in an attempt to mask the presence of the other, and to transplant in an attempt to fictionalise land into landscape’, all means by which they ‘silenced the indigenous presence’.[1] Furthermore, for Tillers, the relatively short history of European settlement continues to impinge upon our sense of identity and connection to place. This is powerfully conveyed through the curious inclusion of an ornate filigree pattern stencilled directly in front of the waterfall. Appropriated from a painting entitled Now and Then (1988) by one of Tillers’ contemporaries, the American artist Philip Taaffe, this transplanted ornamental design effectively obscures our view and blocks our access to the central feature of this landscape. Perhaps the artist is suggesting that in the era of post-colonialism, the conception of the landscape as painted by earlier artists is no longer accessible, and the terrain of our relationship to the landscape has been fundamentally altered.

Further Information:

1. Paul Fox and Jennifer Phipps, Sweet Damper and Gossip: Colonial Sightings from the Goulburn and North-East, (exh. cat.), Benalla: Benalla Art Gallery, 1994, p. 22.

synthetic polymer paint, gouache and oilstick on 48 canvas boards
213 x 165 cm

Gift of Eva Besen and Marc Besen AO 2001, TarraWarra Museum of Art collection

Born in Lilydale outside Melbourne, Whisson studied briefly at Swinburne Technical College before training under Danila Vassilieff in 1945-46, where he gained direct access to and influence from the Heide circle of figurative expressionists.

With their reduction of form and distorted perspective, his early work was indebted to Nolan as well as Tucker, Boyd and Perceval. Following his move to Perugia, Italy in 1977, where he continues to live and work, Whisson ceased to paint on composition board and instead began to paint on linen.[1] The resultant change of support corresponded to a new approach in which thin brushed lines replaced larger flat passages of paint whereby the white primed support was often left unadorned to allow for an airier, lighter spatial quality in his work.

There is always a time-based or temporal aspect to Whisson’s works which are often produced from memories. As seen from the river (15/7/09 & 20/7/09 & 30/7/11) was painted on three separate dates over a period of two years which brings an experiential dimension to the process and begs the following questions: How has the artist changed in the intervening time? How has the landscape itself altered? How does his memory and recollection shift and alter the imagery? This approach lends a restless, provisional quality to the composition whereby the sense of perspective and spatial relationships seem to shift and slide in a state of flux. The artist once stated that ‘painting takes place at the point where the brush touches the canvas’[2] and this is evident in the agile and sketchy quality of his mark making which intuitively walks the line between abstraction and figuration, whereby the picture plane at once evokes a landscape – water, reeds, trees and other man-made structures – while also becoming a field for formal experimentation. The directness and immediacy of Whisson’s approach results in works in which any final resolution or tangible conclusion slips through the viewer’s grasp and instead we are presented with a series of subjective observations on the landscape and notations on the nature of relativity.

Further Information:

1. Glenn Barkley and Lesley Harding, ‘Sometimes a madhouse sometimes a palace: Thinking about the art of Ken Whisson’ in Ken Whisson: as if, Bulleen, Victoria: Heide Museum of Modern Art; Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2012, p. 24.
2. Ken Whisson, ‘Talk 1994: Technique and intuition’ in Ken Whisson: Paintings 1947-1999, Melbourne: Niagara Publishing, 2001, p. 144.

oil on canvas
90 x 120 cm

Acquired 2012, TarraWarra Museum of Art collection

While largely self-taught, Brett Whiteley attended life-drawing classes at both the National Art School and the Julian Ashton Art School in Sydney in the late 1950s.

At just twenty years of age he won a scholarship, judged by Russell Drysdale, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, which enabled him to travel to Europe. Success arrived early following exhibitions in London at the Whitechapel and Marlborough galleries when the prestigious Tate Gallery purchased his work. Following two years residing in New York and several months in Fiji, Whiteley returned to Sydney in 1969, settling in Lavender Bay with his wife Wendy and young daughter Arkie. His return to Australia resulted in some of his most memorable landscape paintings.

In 1974 Whiteley completed the large scale painting/assemblage Australia (1970-74), in which he presents a vision of this continent that is familiar to all who live here. The densely populated cityscape of Sydney precariously clings to the coastline, whilst beyond the tangle of sprawling eucalyptus branches which divides the composition, the vast ‘Red Centre’ teems with native wildlife. It is difficult to determine whether the artist intends this to be an epic portrait of contemporary Australia or if it is an ironic combination of a series of clichés found in any tourist brochure, replete with images of Bondi Beach, the Opera House, gum trees and kangaroos. Is Whiteley making a statement about the vacuity and artificial nature of lives eked out in the chaos and clutter of a sprawling metropolis, an existence which is now far removed from the ‘authentic’, ‘genuine’ Australia represented by the desert interior? Or has he created a work that overtly expresses the irresolvable tensions that continue to endure in this country between the lure and romance of the mythical ‘outback’ and the daily, more prosaic realities of urban life?

oil, charcoal, dried reed, eucalypt branch, rubber snake, taxidermied Scaly-breastedLorikeet, collage and plaster on plywood
203 x 324.5 cm

Gift of Eva Besen AO and Marc Besen AO

Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 2008, TarraWarra Museum of Art collection

Fred Williams is an artist who, perhaps more than any other, challenged the colonial gaze, dismantling the classical perspective of traditional European painting.

In its place, he presented a more immediate and experiential vision of the Australian landscape. He studied in Melbourne at the National Gallery and George Bell schools (1944–49) before moving to London in 1952 where he studied at the Chelsea School of Art. Upon returning to Australia in 1957 Williams was struck anew by the light, scale and featurelessness of the landscape and it became the main preoccupation of his practice. He applied the formal lessons learnt from the French Post-Impressionists Georges Braque and Paul Cézanne to create his own abstract language to describe the unique qualities of the Australian bush.

From 1963-69, Williams lived with his family at Upwey in the Dandenong Ranges outside Melbourne. The title of his painting Lysterfield (c.1966) refers to a nearby semi-rural area to which, attracted by the sparseness of its landscape, he frequently returned. Unlike more traditional approaches to the landscape which are structured around significant formal features in the landscape, Williams sought to capture its unremarkable aspects, its qualities of sameness and repetitiveness. As the artist acknowledged in an interview with James Gleeson: ‘Yes, it is monotonous … it is perfectly true that in Australia there is no focal point … ’[1] In this work, Williams translates this observation into paint utilising the formal devices of abstraction: flattening the picture plane and dividing it into horizontal bands to denote foreground, middle ground and sky. This geometrical division generates the space upon which the artist applies his fluent daubs and textured strokes to evoke the trees and scrub which populate this nondescript stretch of bushland. The narrow range of earth tones and densely coloured array of sculpted painterly forms uncannily corresponds to our experience of this kind of endless but instantly recognisable landscape of scattered trees and open plains.

Further Information:

1. Fred Williams, ‘James Gleeson interviews: Fred Williams’, Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 3 October 1978, p. 5, http://nga.gov.au/ Research/Gleeson/pdf/Williams.pdf accessed 10 February 2015.

oil on canvas
100.8 x 110.8 cm

Gift of Eva Besen and Marc Besen AO 2001, TarraWarra Museum of Art collection