From the time of his arrival, European man has been bewildered by this strange and vast land. At first he sought to conquer it; now, belatedly, in his better moments he tries to understand it. This fascination and ambivalence are reflected in the strong and unbroken tradition of Australian landscape painting. These books deal with the interaction of four painters with the Australian landscape.

Orienteering: Painting in the landscape forms part of the ‘Iconic Language’ course offered by the School of Humanities in Deakin University’s Open Campus program and the book was prepared in collaboration with the course team. It was conceived by Roderick Carmichael, chairman of the team. In essence the book consists of two distinct parts, a discourse divided into an introduction and five chapters and then ‘Three Case Studies’.

The first section is the most unsatisfactory part of the book. It sets out to expound a ‘new’ approach to landscape painting, drawing on such diverse examples as Chinese Art, a schematic diagram of the London Underground, golf courses, mariners’ maps, and, probably most legitimately, Aboriginal Art. Thrown in for good measure are discussions on kinetic sculpture, Cubism, Duchamp, painters’ use of photography suburban gardens, and bits of gratuitous information such as the origin of ‘posh’. It reads like a committee report and perhaps that’s just what it is because Carmichael is much better as himself in ‘Carmichael on Carmichael’ in the second part.

The clearest indication of the main thrust of the argument occurs right at the beginning of the ‘Introduction’ when the writer declares artists’ ‘interests can extend to encompass the whole biosphere or the unique totality of the ecosphere in which all living things interact and are independent’ and that term ‘landscape painting’ is too restrictive to cover Australian painters whose work is based on an interaction with the land. Hence the introduction of the name Orienteering, borrowed from sport which ‘carries implications of greater concerns than simply knowing one’s present location in a physical sense’.

Whilst it is true – although not all that new – that artists are open to a much more diverse range of influences, approaches and modes of expression, that boundaries between art forms and subject matter have been eroded or broken with a consequent richness and confusion in art, the addition of a new label does not help either the viewer’s attempt to comprehend or the artist’s effort to express. Once an area of art activity is captured by the critics and historians, pinned down, labelled, and dissected, it begins to die.

For a textbook issued under the imprint of a University Press, Orienteering: Painting in the landscape is sloppy and unscholarly. Many of its assertions do not stand up to scrutiny. Most inexplicable of all is the claim, ‘Australian artists have never been castigated for importing modern ideas in art and using them in their pictures as up-to-date means of depiction’. Bernard Smith in Australian Painting records that Dattilo Rubbo and Roland Wakelin were adversely reviewed in 1916 for having ‘joined the pointillists’ and powerfully entrenched opposition to the real or perceived overseas avant-garde influences remained part of Australian art up to and beyond the Dobell Archibald Prize of 1944 and the Ern Malley hoax of the same year.

Russell Drysdale is held to be banal and to have been unable to discern the reasons why twentieth century art appeared different from art of the past. To support this assertion two illustrations are juxtaposed. One is Drysdale’s ‘Desert Landscape, 1952’ and the other Henry Moore’s ‘Two Piece Reclining Figure No. 3’. Now the latter, being sculpture in the round, could of course be viewed or photographed from any angle. The angle chosen however, is such that the abstracted head and torso of the figure appears to the right of the photograph in a similar position to a vertical rock form in the Drysdale painting to which it bears a superficial resemblance. To this misleading use of illustrations is added the suggestion that Drysdale was directly influenced by Moore:

We can suppose that in seeking to render nature comprehensible by depicting it in metaphorical way he perceived Moore’s reclining figures, which have a weather eroded empathy with sea-worn rocks, as allegorical statements about nature and humanity in harmony.

No evidence is offered to show to what extent Drysdale was aware of Moore’s sculpture let alone influenced by it.

When authority is quoted for the assertions that are made it tends to be quite inadequate. Kenneth Clark’s theories about the Douanier Rousseau expressed in ‘Landscape into Art’ are discredited. Clark’s opinions may warrant revision but the authority put forward by the author is scarcely reassuring. It is given simply as an account by a young American in Reader’s Digest in the late 1960s.

The second part of the book is much better. Entitled ‘Three case studies’ it consists of ‘Carmichael on Carmichael’, ‘Makin on Makin’, and ‘Wolseley on Wolseley’.

‘Carmichael on Carmichael’ is an autobiographical account of how, as a newcomer to Australia in 1974, he has attempted to come to grips with the Australian landscape. Unlike the first section it purports to be nothing more than an artist’s personal testimony of his philosophy, working methods, influences, and progress. Its chatty, interesting, informative, and fluent. From it emerges a picture of a painter with a broad knowledge of art, committed to abstraction yet moving towards the introduction of a ‘human presence’, living in and influenced by a long-settled and tamed countryside. He sees quite clearly and there is no conflict between the figurative and the non-figurative styles and that they can coexist in a single work.

‘Makin on Makin’ is in fact an interview with Makin by Carmichael. Although he studied in Australia it was not until he left art school that Makin began to learn about Australian art. His earliest influences were Gauguin, encountered in high school through books, Cloisonnist methods and the current abstractionist fashion. It was only when he moved to Melbourne in 1970 that his abstracts began to take on landscape references. There Fred Williams became a strong influence. Makin argues strongly about what he sees as both the beneficial and the inhibiting influences on Australian painting and makes a plea for the primacy of the landscape tradition in Australian art.

Wolseley writes his own account of himself and his work. Of the three artists dealt with in this book, Wolseley most closely typifies the thrust of the book’s argument. After the obligatory autobiographical statement with insights into important influences such as explorer’s charts and European travel, Wolseley presents his diary of his sojourn, shared with his two young sons on a visit from their home in England, at Gosses Bluff, south of the Macdonnell Ranges. Entries are accompanied by reproduction of drawings or notes produced on each day and a diagram indicates their position in the final large collage Wolseley produces. Naturalistic drawings of his boys, animals, stones, and birds intermingle with wandering contour lines and the dotted lines of tracks. The litter of travellers, called by Wolseley ‘Found Objects’, is listed in the diary and sometimes included in the painting.

Wolseley rejects the perspective and compositional conventions of Western painting and uses notated and drawn images on paper, each expressing an intense experience of a section of the land, as elements of his large finished picture. He does not stand back and view the landscape; he enters into it.

The book is well illustrated with numerous black and white reproductions and a number of fair quality colour lates. One of these is ‘Shoalhaven’ by Arthur Boyd, and the author claims that since Boyd’s return to Australia his paintings reflect a new and deeper perception of the land and in fact may be his best work.

The Artist & The River: Arthur Boyd and the Shoalhaven by Sandra McGrath

Bay Books $5.95, 312 pp

The Artist and The River by Sandra McGrath is entirely devoted to the phase of Boyd’s life and art, from his first visit in the summer of 1971–72 to his paintings of 1982. The wild, untamed beauty had a profound impression on Boyd and although he returned to England, he successfully negotiated for the purchase of 100 acres and the renovation and enlargement of the cottage on it. The book deals with Arthur Boyd’s paintings and works on paper produced as a result of his earlier visit and his later permanent residence there. It is a lavishly produced book, large in format, with many colour plates of exceptional quality. The author’s stated purpose is ‘to take up where Franz Phillip’s book ends’. She recounts the history of the Shoalhaven district, Boyd’s first encounter and infatuation with it and, briefly, his artistic activity prior to the Shoalhaven years. There is a chapter on the Shoalhaven paintings in which McGrath examines Boyd’s development from the first Shoalhaven picture, ‘River Bank, 1972’. This work, done under extremely hot and uncomfortable conditions is ‘rudimentary and sketchy’ and gives no indication of the rich body of painting that was to follow. However, the Australian landscape had once again captured Boyd’s imagination, and on Boyd’s return to England he painted a large number of Shoalhaven pictures on small copper plates which were shown at the Australian Galleries in Melbourne in 1976. These small, tight, hard-edged paintings with their dominant horizontal bands of sky and river represented a new departure for the artist.

Sandra McGrath draws our attention to the sexual references found in these landscapes, which she argues are all the more powerful because of the absence of figures. Figures reappear in his paintings when Boyd takes up permanent residence on the Shoalhaven. The author traces the introduction of narrative elements arising from incidents involving family and friends, and the reintroduction of biblical and mythological themes, all now set in the matrix of the Shoalhaven River.

In the final chapter, ‘Latest Directions’, McGrath discusses the ‘Bundanon’ series of 1982. These small oil-on-board landscapes, with their freedom, movement, and dashing spontaneity, contrast greatly with the earlier paintings on copper. Perhaps the stylistic distance between the two is the measure of Arthur Boyd’s mastery of this particular part of the continent.

Boyd’s own comments appear in the text as responses to interview questions and with the plates. The main body of the book consists of just under 100 full-page high-quality colour reproductions of paintings and drawings, each juxtaposed with an almost blank page which carries only the picture’s title and details and a brief statement by the artist. Interspersed among these are double page spreads of details and photographs of the sections of the countryside which are the subjects of some of the pictures. The high quality of these plates enables the reader to comprehend the viscous, sensuous paint quality of Boyd’s work. He is revealed at close quarters as an artist of great emotional power, a master of his medium, and in harmony with his landscape which envelopes him.

These two books serve as a reminder that, despite the impact of overseas fashions and trends, Australian painting has always been strongly influenced by an obsession with the landscape; and obsession which seems likely to continue.