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Australia & Somerset Lanes

Recent Journeys Exhibition Summer 2011 Western Australia, Northern Territory to the Somerset Lanes.

 

This exhibition shows recent works painted during an overland trip across Australia in July august and September of 2010 and a subsequent series of oil paintings completed after returning home in the autumn. The work I think shows how the experience had brought the Somerset landscape alive for me. The Australian landscape provided many challenges. I knew it would take a while to adjust to it after the watery mists and soft light of Old England.


My first impressions were heat, red earth, harsh light and intoxicating colour. Wide open, featureless plains with huge skies and infinite horizons, and a lack of any man made features let alone church spires old buildings and farmland. It was impossible to approach painting the landscape in the same way. I suppose I was forced to look beyond my customary view. I became interested in the underlying patterns of the rock formations and vegetation and building these into compositions. In Broom I came across the paintings of Emily Kame, from the Aboriginal Utopia tribe. Starting to paint at the age of 80 years old she created large colourful canvases - abstract-looking dots and splodges or repeating patterns of flowing colour and landscapes almost reminiscent of Hodgkin’s paintings. But these paintings represented important things in her culture and the physical world I had been looking at. In a way they weren’t abstract but very representational, entitled, ‘wild flowers’ or ‘yam.’ They summed up the landscape I had been studying and I felt as though things had started to click.


Further along road I visited Arnhem Land, one of the largest aboriginal lands and with the opportunity to travel right off the beaten track into the bush I visited sacred sites belonging to local Aboriginal groups. The traditional way of life as nomadic hunter and gatherer meant people would always move through the land and were not settled (corralled) in communities like today. I had the opportunity to meet some of the local anscesters and I became more aware of the close link between the landscape and the ritual world of the people that belonged to it.


In the Dreaming when the universe was created, creator beings moved across the land and as they went they left impressions in the form of these sacred places. Rock outcrops where honey could be collected or special pools where there was good fishing, trees or plants with fruit, materials or medicinal value, places to find food or shelter, springs or waterholes, places of worship, ceremony, fertility, men’s places, women’s places and so on…these places did have a magical feel almost out place in what I had first seen as a wasteland.


The dreamtime paths, the routes of the creator beings across the land sometimes up to 100kms or so are known as songlines. They were recorded in art, music and dance and passed down through the generations like cultural maps so the routes could be navigated generation after generation by recounting them. All land is sacred for the aboriginal and for the land to stay alive and continue to provide for them the songs must be sung and the routes recounted. This all fascinated me and got me painting more fluidly.


Perhaps this new awareness allowed me to get into the Australian landscape without the need for church spires, buildings and man made foci, but at the same time made me think of Somerset where I was born and bred. I thought of the ancient trackways and prehistoric sites and the routes between them. I recounted the work of author and historian John Michel who spoke of the importance of energy channels of the planet, lamenting a golden age of people living in harmony with the natural order. There seemed to me a great synergy with this and what I was experiencing in Australia with the surviving aboriginal land and culture.


When I returned home in autumn the first thing that hit me were the Somerset lanes around where I live and grew up. For me they symbolised all the places I knew and remembered; iron age forts, springs, hidden places to go and fish, play, have picnics, party or even paint. The overhanging trees formed tunnels with the leaf-dappled effect of sunlight pouring through. The branches swirling round leading me forward to places that existed in the landscape and in my mind. I then realised these were my songlines perhaps having that same indescribable sense of belonging that the outback tribesman might have felt.


The evening sunlight pouring through the branches seemed so lush and almost liquid after the harsh light of Australia and the depth of colour made me turn to oil paints. Flat white canvas or paper however seemed wrong. I needed a surface with some real texture. I still had a box of handmade paper from Africa made from elephant dung that I had brought back from Malawi in 1996.  With the sticks and branches showing in the fibre and a buckled bumpy surface it this provided the perfect substrate.