Skip to main content

Light and nature in The Australians

The Hunter by Arthur Boyd 1944


'The Australians' (a two hundred survey of Australian art linked by the theme of landscape at the Royal Academy) held two traditions in parallel. The indigenous tradition of Aborigine art, with which the exhibition opened, has continued to develop its own unique and powerful styles and, periodically, you noticed it having an effect, leaving traces in the contemporaneous tradition of 'Western' art.

At the outset of 'Western art' in Australia, artists confronted by a radically new land, confined themselves to painting their new settlements and their immediate surroundings but they soon branched out in Romantic, Impressionist and Modernist directions, making an art that was both indebted to European forms and yet held something other, conditioned by a new landscape and especially new attributes of light and space.

Aborigine art is of a landscape peopled with meaning, a place spiritualised and though that can mean spiritual drama, of warning and failure, the ultimate sense is of it being a welcoming home and the 'Western' art selected for the exhibition accompanied, rather than antagonised, this vision of placing, leaving you to wonder where was the art of anxiety? Australia is a highly urbanised culture on a fragile continent: a culture forged in colonial displacement and the unearthing of natural resources but that Australia was only present, all too understandably, in the Aborigine art except perhaps in the work of the above where Boyd has a hunter aggressively intrude into a nurturing nature.

Most of the 'Western art' was of a sympathetic landscape (with or without its indigenous inhabitants) and a city is a landscape too...

However, this editorial query aside, the whole exhibition is a wondering delight from the large Aborigine canvases, apparently at first sight abstracted yet concrete with symbol and story through to modern pieces of beautiful lucidity and light, including a ceiling painting of sunlight, suspended from above, as if dangling over Sydney Harbour!

 Long Spirit of the Plains by Sydney Long

My favourite painting was 'aberrant' as the only obviously 'Symbolist' painting in the exhibition (above) with a piping female figure followed by dancing cranes across a wooding landscape. It had the ethereal nature of vision and yet felt deeply anchored in the visionary potential of an actual place. And the artist 'discovered' was undoubtedly Arthur Boyd whose three works were 'expressionist' masterpieces of stark commentary on human nature (as above) and a wonderful, Bruegel like, painting of a mining camp, spilling with human fallibility and the seductions of greed.

It was all enhanced by the RA's extraordinary ability to write excellent captions to all the works - masterpieces of compressed illumination.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...
13 comments
Read more

Luminous Spaces - the poetry of Olav H. Hauge

Don't give me the whole truth, don't give me the sea for my thirst, don't give me the sky when I ask for light, but give me a glint, a dewy wisp, a mote as the birds bear water-drops from their bathing and the wind a grain of salt. It began with a poem, this poem, in Mark Oakley's 'The Splash of Words: Believing in Poetry' - a wonderful series of meditations on particular poems, one each chapter. The poet is the Norwegian, Olav H. Hague (1908-1994). I immediately ordered, 'Luminous Spaces: Selected Poems & Journals' and was enjoying dipping until, at the weekend, recovering from a stomach bug, I decided to read them through and fell wholeheartedly for a new friend. Hague was born on a farm. His formal education was brought short by a combination of restricted means, an inability to conquer mathematics: and, a voracious diet of reading ranging beyond the confines of any confining curriculum. He went to a horticultural college instead an...
1 comment
Read more

Red Shambala

Nicholas Roerich is oft depicted as a spiritual seeker, peace visionary, author of numberless paintings, and a brave explorer of Central Asia. However, Andrei Znamenski in his 'Red Shambala: Magic, Prophecy, and Geopolitics in the Heart of Asia' has him perform another role - that of geopolitical schemer. The scheming did have at its heart a religious vision - of a coalition of Buddhist races in Central Asia that would establish a budding utopia - the Shambala of the title - from which the truths of Buddhism (and co-operative labour) would flow around the globe. This would require the usurpation of the 13th Dalai Lama to be replaced by the Panchen Lama guided by the heroic saviour (Roerich) who appears above dressed for the part. In the achievement of these aims, the Roerichs (including his wife, Helena, who had a visionary connection with 'Mahatmas' whose cryptic messaging guided their steps) were willing to entertain strange bedfellows that at one time include...
Post a Comment
Read more