Ron Dowd
Near Tilba Tilba
acrylic on board, 2009, 35cm x 30cm
{ 0 comments }
Posts tagged as:
Landscape
There’s a nice review by John McDonald in the SMH of Murray Bail’s revised biography of Ian Fairweather. McDonald speaks of Fairweather’s bizarre attempt to travel by self-made raft from Darwin to Bali, and how it changed Fairweather:
The raft voyage exorcised Fairweather’s wanderlust. After he made his way back to Australia in 1953, following a forced, unhappy return to England, he settled on Bribie Island and built his first hut. He set to work and produced Monastery in 1961; Monsoon, Shalimar and Epiphany in 1961-62; Turtle and Temple Gong in 1965. These are masterpieces but many people still have affection for the dry, early paintings on Chinese and Balinese themes.
Ah, those early paintings – here’s one I stop by and see from time to time at the AGNSW.
Ian Fairweather
Chinese Mountain, 1933
Oil and gouache on cardboard, 49 x 59 cm
{ 0 comments }
Here’s an artist whose work I love – Billy Benn Perrurle Artetyerre. The Aboriginal collection at the AGNSW is currently closed for renovations so, not being able to see his energetic works there, I’ll post some here.
Billy Benn Perrurle Artetyerre
Bindi, Acrylic on board, 10 x 16 cm
Billy Benn Perrurle Artetyerre
Acrylic on linen
Billy Benn Perrurle Artetyerre
Harts Range, pre 1997, Utopia, acrylic on fibreboard panel
(Collection of the National Gallery of Australia)
It can be hard to track down information about Aboriginal artists, but this Indigenart exhibition page has some interesting background on the man. I like this quotation from Catherine Peattie, Arts Co-odinator at Mwerre Anthurre Artists:
Residing in Alice Springs the Mwerre Anthurre Artists only occasionally get to visit their country. As a result, they paint their county from memory. Remembering and painting country becomes a bittersweet experience. It is a celebration of connection to place with each new painting reinvigorating their culture, contrasted against a sadness at their separation from such a significant space. Carrying the country within, Billy Benn says when he sees that country in his mind’s eye his spirit is there, and his spirit lifts. The paintings are imbued with such a sense of place that laws of time and space become circular as we the viewer are transported to this country.
These are works that connect with my own interest in remembered landscapes, that inevitably become, in part at least, landscapes of the imagination. Such landscapes can also be strong reminders from what is behind landscape, behind our own psychic landscapes – that other landscape of the noumenal, our essence, which I continue to write about and attempt to articulate in my own art making.
{ 0 comments }
Here are two new albums from our Christmas jaunt down into South-East NSW – taking the road to Canberra, then down the Monaro Highway to Cooma via Nimmitabel; thence down Brown’s Mountain and via Candelo to Merimbula and related coastal locales (Pambula, Tura Beach and Eden): SE NSW Christmas 2008 (1) and SE NSW Christmas 2008 (2).
Amanda-Karima took at least one photo in each of the albums so this is a collaborative effort – and anyway, when it was me clicking the shutter it was always with the support of my fellow traveller.
{ 0 comments }
This morning I walked and photographed from before dawn in Centennial Park, a haven in the middle of Sydney’s busy Eastern Suburbs.
I’m reminded now of Robert MacFarlane’s statement in his wonderful recent book The Wild Places:
I had learned to see another type of wildness, to which I had been blind: the wildness of natural life, the sheer force of ongoing natural existence, vigorous and chaotic. This wildness was not about asperity, but about luxuriance, vitality, fun. The weed thrusting through a crack in a pavement, the tree root impudently cracking a carapace of tarmac: these are wild signs, as much as the storm wave and the snowflake.
It’s good to be reminded that we can experience wildness in the heart of our city, and not think of this as less than the wildness that is “out there” in the Australian bush.
Some images from this morning:
MacFarlane goes on to say:
I had come to see wildness as a quality that flared into futurity, as well as reverberating out of the past. The contemporary threats to the wild were multiple, and severe. But they were also temporary. The wild prefaced us, and it will outlive us. Human culture will pass, given time, of which there is a sufficiency.
There’s a sign in the park that reminds visitors that the ponds drain large volumes of rainfall from suburbs such as Bondi Junction through the Botany Aquifer to Botany Bay, via a complex system of streams, drains, and groundwater flows. And there’s good evidence that in the Northern parts of the Aquifer at least, the sandstone filtration produces water quality better than that coming out of our taps. It’s encouraging that a wild system system can maintain its health in one of the most densely populated areas of Australia.
And finally, a poem relating to Centennial Park that I wrote last year:
the way we walked
we could feel it in our bodies,
had already slipped into our mythology –the gravel path, the darkening sky
the swamphen strutting on the lilies –how the green leaves gorged the lagoon
how rain fell upon them, drumminghow we attended to the beats
saw flashes in the westsaw the swamphen, purple
moving over the extent
{ 0 comments }
Eucalyptus woodland at the Australian National Botanic Gardens (Canberra). Something about the open aspect of this woodland, the way the ground is revealed, its dryness and heat, and those qualities in the trees themselves, is appealing. It creates for me a “hook for dreams”, a potentiality for revery.
{ 0 comments }
Australia’s ACT (the Australian Capital Territory) strikes me as a powerfully symbolic territory (of a different sort to Winton’s territory occupied by the ratepayer) and one that has a place in our collective psychic life.
This fact has not been lost, of course, on the original inhabitants of this land, who for 36 years have resiliently maintained the Aboriginal Tent Embassy near old Parliament House, and right on the Griffin land axis.
The Griffins delineated a land axis, aligned with the summits of four local mountains. It went from Mount Ainslie to Mount Bimberi in the Brindabellas, passing through Camp Hill and Kurrajong. Crossing this at right angles was a water axis along the river, which in the plan became a chain of ornamental basins. By integrating the site’s topography with their design, the Griffins presented the site itself as a symbol ‘of a democratic national identity’ (Vernon, 2002). (The Ideal City)
I found the Griffins’ land and water axes to be palpably powerful, on a beating hot New Year’s Eve walk that we took last year, past some of the war memorials of Anzac Parade.
Hot letters on the Australian Service Nurses National Memorial:
A shimmering Royal Australian Air Force Memorial, also hot to the touch:
There seem to be many rich layers of land and water “markings” at play in these axes, several cruciform incisions at the heart of our democratic system, overlayed with the complexities of histories and current-day relationships between indigenous and “imported” cultures.
Dispossession is the shadow side of this occupation of territory in such a grand way – I was drawn to this in my poem on the land axis.
on the land axis
dispossession strikes a chord with me –
you want to make this place
eucalyptichave set your gunyas
here on the levelled lawnslet in long summer evenings
the smokes of your dreamings
mingle with the scents of roses –me, going from door to door
looking for what’s been lacking –returning, in the end
to the little timbers
the jetty, watching the meteoritethat falls and boils its way
into the churning sea
There are also some thoughts on Canberra in canberra, new year’s eve.
canberra, new year’s eve
the big lamps hover
in ceremonial attendance
over the wide empty waythe avenue, the monuments, the dry leaf-strewn earth
vent the day’s heavy heatat the nurses’ memorial
they touch cast letters –
A for australia’s like a small body
exuding body heatat the air force shrine
bright steel’s hot to touch,
bronze searingover at vietnam
a quiet thermal outpouring’s going on
while three pink and greys
haggle noisilykorea’s faired best –
granite and stones having reflected
much of the day’s onslaught –three bright-metal conscripts
standing fresh and prepared
like sentinels for an evacuated citythe inhabitants having made
other plans for the evening
Energies can potentially be evoked by such national symbols on this grand scale – something I was attempting to consider in some recent linocuts (especially meteors over a field and meteor falling on a slope) – perhaps there can be a redemption for Winton’s youths suffering the occupation of the ratepayer; a potentially more inclusive and energised life for them, rather than one of social and cultural marginalisation.
And I had in mind in my figure on a land/water axis linocut (at recent linocuts) a figure in touch with some kinds of ceremonial or “knowledge-based” markings in the land and/or water.
{ 0 comments }
