Under a Southern Sun

Under a Southern Sun

The artist-explorer Thomas Baines painted the Watering party . . . (No.1) to recapture a scene enacted thirteen years earlier when he led a group to Quail Island near Port Patterson, fifty kilometres south-west of Darwin, in search of water. He was a member of Augustus Gregory's 1855-56 expedition from Sydney to Northern Australia. In the background one of the two ships has run onto a reef. In the foreground two men are sitting on water barrels while two other members of the group are topping up a third barrel from an ancient Aboriginal well whose presence had been signalled by the clump of pandanus. One man is chopping a dead tree and another is standing on a mound of sand and proudly surveying the new land: the epitome of the explorer.

Baines's second work in this exhibition, Gouty stem tree . . . (No.2), illustrates a later episode when the expedition was camped on the Victoria River, four hundred kilometres south of Darwin. A giant baobab, also called a bottle tree, recorded by Baines as eighteen metres (fifty-eight feet) round, dwarfs the two men at its base. At right the artist can be seen sketching under an improvised shelter of blankets and branches, among the stacked saddles and saddlebags. In both these paintings every leaf and twig is shown in meticulous detail.

This is not the case with Near Fernshaw (No.3) by Louis Buvelot, in which the different foliages are suggested in a painterly way rather than scientifically delineated. Nor is there any suggestion here of grandeur or heroism. Under towering eucalypts and tree ferns a man leads packhorses along a forest track about sixty kilometres north-east of Melbourne. The seemingly casual handling of the paint suits the informality of the scene and the artist's interest in the untidiness of the bush. A limited range of colours has been skilfully used to suggest depth, as in the distant purple hills, and to bring out the play of sunlight and shadow on the many types of vegetation.

Arthur Streeton's From McMahon's Point — fare one penny (No.4) was not a comment on the air pollution from the three smoke-belching vessels on Sydney Harbour, but a celebration of the artist's ability to capture — with bravura brushwork — the atmosphere of a clear and busy sunny day. Above the mauve foreground where a child holds a sailboat and a black cat sits on a slate roof, a very wide expanse of blue water rises, in the manner of space in a Japanese print, to a high horizon line and a creamy sky.

Under a southern sun (No.5) by Charles Conder is a depiction of the rigours of pioneering life in a landscape seared by the drought of the late 1880s: a man with an axe leans against a tree, a little girl wanders beside the debris from his earlier work. Conder transforms this scene into a charming and decorative painting by the use of compositional devices familiar in Japanese prints, such as the tall, narrow format and the emphasis on the elegant slenderness of the tree and the asymmetry of its placement on the right. By painting in the open air before the subject, and by letting the brushstrokes show over most of the surface, he has retained the freshness of his immediate impression. His high-keyed colours and the lack of tonal variation between earth and sky brilliantly convey an effect of intense heat and light.

In January 1910 Frederick McCubbin spent the summer with his family at Mount Macedon in central Victoria. On a morning walk he saw this view through the trees to the town Of Lancefield and beyond to the Cobaw Ranges. The outcome was Hauling rails for a fence . . . (No.6). The vista of cultivated farmland on the left and the near-untamed bush on the right are united by the two small figures straining at the wood cart. McCubbin employed an unusual technique when he polished thin underlayers of paint with pumice stone before applying fresh paint with the edge of his palette knife. This, together with dabs of red, blue and green, conveys the scratchy, dry textures and the flickering light of the Australian bush. An interest in subtle, cloudy light distinguishes his work from the landscapes of his colleagues Streeton and Conder.

In George Lambert's Weighing the fleece (No. 7) Mr and Mrs Lee Falkiner, in their woolshed at Wanganella Estate in the Riverina district of New South Wales, watch with complacent self-satisfaction the weighing of a record-priced fleece from one of their two champion rams. The standing men in the centre and the seated wife and stooping assistant make a triangular group that is repeated in the sloping sides of the hanging fleece and in the roof beams which diagonally cut off each upper corner of the picture. Everything about this scene, including the social status of each person, appears stable and unchangeable.

Margaret Preston was a strong and vigorous painter who mostly rendered flower arrangements which she turned into striking designs, as in Banksia (No.8). She chose vases whose shiny modernity contrasted with the ancient and informal shapes of the Australian native plants they contained, but whose cylindrical forms echoed that of the blooms. A fallen leaf is evidence of the struggle to arrange the self-willed stems; their angularity is repeated in the surrounding shapes and shadows. The whole composition is unified by the use of severe greys and black with only touches of brighter colours. Preston's belief that she could make a new national style based on Aboriginal art is in evidence in the dots and cross-hatchings on the flowers, in the restricted range of colours and in her concentration on essentials in her design.

The magic of Bay Road (No.9) by Clarice Beckett lies in the seeming effortlessness with which she has managed to catch an evanescent mood of nature. She lived with her parents at Beaumaris in Melbourne, never leaving Victoria. Without any straining for effect, she took an unremarkable view down a street and over Port Phillip Bay and filled it with a light and an atmosphere which are instantly recognizable. The elimination of distracting detail and any hard edges gives her work a characteristic softness of focus, leaving subtleties of colour and tone to do most of the work.

The stiff and angular elegance often associated with gladioli was not what Arnold Shore was seeking in Gladioli (No.10). The flowers are arrayed informally in a fishbowl-like vase and their closely related colours make it difficult to distinguish one from another. An indeterminate but multicoloured background adds to the air of blooming profusion, with the staccato brushwork of the background carried through into the more economically rendered swathes of the tablecloth. The vase's transparency ensures that it merges with its surroundings rather than imposes on them, leaving the whirling floral explosion which issues from its mouth to astonish the viewer.

In at least a dozen places in Dorrit Black's House-roofs and flowers (No.11) a sharp edge of darker colour quickly fades to a lighter tone. Seeing some surfaces fade as they slope towards us and others fade as they slope away upsets our normal expectations about space. Other devices, such as the stylized wavy lines representing roof tiles, alert us that the artist was not interested in rendering a photographic likeness. The predominance of diagonal lines over horizontals and verticals fills the canvas with movement. This dynamic patterning of forms in ambiguous space contrasts with the restrained use of colour, mostly ochres and blues.

By contrast, in Domestic interior (No.12) by Eric Wilson the greatest care was given to representing figures in a three-dimensional world. The circular canvas and frame are appropriate to the inward curving of this intimate scene and to the roundness of arms, arm-rest, hair, hat and knees. The cat curled on the floral cushion completes the family circle. The colours and tones are subtle, as is the extensive use of blue. Examine closely the modelling of the younger woman's upper arm on which a strip of blue separates the skin in sunlight from the skin in shadow. Note also the strips of yellow along the inside edge of both her arms to indicate the luminous reflected light which exists in the shadows of this small but complex work.

In Little sisters, Fitzroy (No.13) by Danila Vassilieff two girls taking their doll for a walk look nervously in our direction. They are so close that only the tops of their bodies can be seen. The emotional immediacy of their chance involvement with the painter is emphasized by the hand caught in mid-gesture at the mouth and by the bold strokes of the outlines. There is an equally intense apprehension of the billowing clouds, of the flame-like foliage of the trees, and of the heaving roadway. A flurried sketchiness gives a sense that everything is equally volatile. Vassilieff drew with paint, leaving large areas of the white underpaint exposed; this, together with his sparing use of colour, gives the surface an appearance in keeping with impoverished inner-city Melbourne.

Grace Crowley's Woman (No.14) was not painted as a realistic portrait, or to tell a story, or to be erotic or symbolic. Rather it was the occasion for creating painted patterns which work against the figure of the woman in some respects and enhance it in others. The strong geometric lines and angles which criss-cross the work create ridges and rifts which are alien to the expected smoothness and roundness of a female torso. But, together with the artificially bright pinks and greens, they give her a dramatic and imposing presence. Interesting ambiguities result from different parts of the subject being viewed from various angles, and from the denial of three-dimensional space involved in the fragmentation of background and figure alike. The result is both analytical and decorative.

Miners working in wet conditions (No.15) was Noel Counihan's tribute to the wartime efforts of the coal-miners at Wonthaggi, a town in Gippsland, Victoria. In a low gallery, hemmed in by roof supports and with snaking hoses underfoot, two men stoop to their arduous work. The surrounding gloom is pierced by the yellow and near-white light from the men's acetylene headlamps. The textured brushwork, so apt for the broken rock and timber surfaces, adds to the sense of one's vision being blurred by the flashing lights.

The second wartime painting is Soldier reading (No.16) by Nancy Borlase. A uniformed soldier in boots and gaiters sits disconsolately at a table, so preoccupied with his thoughts that he does not look at the open book. On the table is a still life of teapot, fruit in a bowl and draped cloth. There are strong resemblances to the painting by Dorrit Black described earlier, for example in the use of blues and ochres and in the artifice of contradictory fadings from dark tones to light, but Borlase's reduced forms are more solidly blocked in to give a pattern in three dimensions rather than two.

William Dobell often ate at Maxim's, a famous Sydney society restaurant owned by his good friend Walter Magnus. In Chez Walter (No.17) (French for 'At Walter's') Dobell shows Walter so in control of his surroundings that anyone entering cannot avoid his powerful presence and quizzical gaze. His domed head balances uncertainly on the ballooning rotundity of his body and the wide arc of his drooping shoulders and arms. Spinning off from these solid curves is a fantasy world of playful arabesques: in the bentwood chair peeping out from under his bulk, in the circular table on which he rests an elbow, in the alcove behind him and in the lobster's antennae. The painting is an extravagant confection of curves in warm reds and red-browns, appropriate to a convivial interior.

In Storm on the Swan (No.18) Elise Blumann has applied the paintbrush to the paper with an intensity to match the violence of the wind and rain. Two trees on the bank of the normally placid Swan River in Perth, Western Australia, are bent horizontal by the force of the gale. Long grey streaks of paint suggest the waterlogged river bank and leaden clouds, and these are cut through diagonally by sheeting rain. The vigorous stylization perfectly expresses the artist's disturbing experience of the fury of nature.

One of Arthur Boyd's workers in Boat builders, Eden, New South Wales (No.19) kneels to attend to some timber, another fits a plank. A girl plays with a black dog by some open doors, and further down the hill someone is about to enter a smaller shed. The tiny scale of this last figure indicates how far the eye has already travelled into the busy scene. Yet it is nothing compared with the huge swoop down the hill, across the peninsula and up to the distant headland and the very furthest shores of Eden's Twofold Bay. The artist contrasts reflective oil paint for the sea and matte tempera (pigment mixed with egg yolk or white) for the distant hills and sky. The people here go about their daily lives unaware of the cosmos behind them.

Even the sky in Russell Drysdale's Emus in a landscape (No.20) is earth-coloured, as if to emphasize the all-pervading menace from heat and drought in inland Australia. Propped up in the foreground against a low horizon line are the twisted sculptural remains of a human dwelling, a monument to dashed hopes. The ugliness of the flapping sheets of corrugated iron is partly redeemed by the repetition in their forms (three times down each side) of the beautiful curves of the emus' necks. There is another repeated pattern of circles and near-circles. This is a grotesque kind of beauty, the air is luminous and the flat earth is timeless.

In Sidney Nolan's Central Australian landscape (No.21) there is little besides the red land and the cloudy blue sky. They meet at a high and far horizon towards which the eye is led by the S-curve of a dry river bed disappearing behind the broken column of a central volcanic core. Endless, timeless, silent, it could be the surface of the moon, so alien is it to any human presence. Yet in its eroded grandeur Nolan discovered an almost sublime image of the vast and dry continent to hold up before urban Australians. After flying over the Red Centre in 1949, he experimented with enamel on composition board, thinning the paint with turpentine so that he could streak it over the white underpaint. In the result the convoluted slopes and ravines never lose the evidence of their origins in the brushed-on strokes of paint.

Men's wear (No.22) by John Brack shows us an elderly salesman resting an outsized hand near a stand of garish neckties, his dour visage a striking contrast to the cheerful look of the dummies. The lifelike upper halves of the dummies leave us unprepared for the lack of legs below, where the feet of the wooden stands appear to be twirling in clever dance steps. The artist's silhouetted reflection in the mirror has no feet either; his presence raises the teasing question of who is looking at whom among salesman, artist and dummies. The precision of the lines, the frieze-like arrangement and the restricted range of colours from yellow to brown contribute to a sense of conformity and artificiality, a fair comment on much city life.

In her late painting Interior in yellow (No.23) Grace Cossington Smith pushed her distinctive style to the point where it perfectly expressed her vision of the world bathed, even in the shadows, by the bright light of God's glory. The painting portrays the bedroom of her house at Turramurra, Sydney, where she lived for most of her life. It is transformed by the predominance of yellow and by the introduction of many more colours than could possibly be sourced to the daylight streaming through the window reflected in the mirror. On the plain cream wall near the door, for example, are flecks of blue, white, yellow, green, orange, and so on. This profusion of colours, together with her technique of applying the oil paint with a broad square-headed brush, works to disintegrate her surroundings into fragments of colour and light.

John Olsen paints exuberant and prolific life forms sprouting from the fecund earth in his Dappled country (No.24). The paint is as slippery as in finger painting, or is spattered on like a scattering of spores. If we allow our imaginations to be as fertile as the artist's invention, we might see faces, insects, trees, flowers, fungi and strange animals. This happy profusion is tied by numerous tentacles to a central axis — the artist's thoughtful if playful control over his composition. The title was inspired by the poem 'Pied Beauty' by the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, which celebrates the teeming variety of life:

Goobalathaldin (or Dick Roughsey) grew up in the Gulf of Carpentaria in North Queensland. Spread out along the central band of his Crabbing in the mangroves (No.25) are six Aborigines in pastel-coloured clothes. Their heads are at the same level, but their different sizes indicate how deeply some of them have penetrated into the forest of mangroves. The generally upright columns of the trunks are criss-crossed in intricate patterns by the light-coloured deadwood of fallen trees, the roundness of all of them emphasized by a strong light coming from one side. The columns fork at the top to support a canopy of leaves, and at their base, as in a mirror image, fork out into bony roots. Delicate sprays of fern-like fronds stand out, like the roots, against the dark mud to create a lower band which in texture and colour matches the band of foliage at the top. Thus the prosaic activity of catching crabs (and the nearest man is about to drop one into the woman's bag) is turned into an almost abstract and very decorative exercise in pattern-making.