Art Gallery of South Australia: Part One

The Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide contains the largest collection of Australian art in the world, so of course I went to look at it. Photography is allowed without flash, so I recorded the panel explanations of favourite artworks, to study them later. Here are some of them.

Portrait of Captain Matthew Flinders, RN 1774-1814 (1807) by Toussaint Antoine de Chazal de Chamarel

This portrait painted by the French amateur painter de Chazal is the only known life-size oil portrait of Captain Matthew Flinders.

Matthew Flinders made a voyage to Australia in 1801-03 as captain of the Investigator. It was on this expedition that the South Australian coastline was charted for the first time by a European explorer. Returning to Britain in 1803, Flinders was detained, for almost seven years on the French colony of Mauritius on charges of being a British spy. It was during his detention that this portrait was painted.

I've become fascinated with explorers' exploits and I particularly like Flinders because of his affection for his ship's cat, Trim, about whom he wrote a book (as did Bryce Courtenay several years later). I think this portrait, hinting at sensitivity and secrecy, makes him look like the type of chap who could love a cat.

Self Portrait (1815) - Colonel William Light

Colonel William Light arrived in South Australia in 1836 to survey the colony. As well as a meticulous draughtsman, he was regarded as an excellent watercolourist. The first European artist in South Australia, he made numerous drawings and watercolours that recorded the first landing and the first settlement. He designed Adelaide, the colony's capital, and surveyed more than 600,000 hectares of surrounding land.

I like how he has portrayed himself nonchalantly leaning against a rock with suitably craggy and romantic scenery in the background and a folded-up telescope in his hand. Apparently this style is representative of the Regency fashion - studied or calculated informality designed to make "young upwardly mobile dandies look dashing or at least interesting in a Byronic way.'

Captain Cook on the coast of New South Wales (1860) by Joseph Blacker

Joseph Backler was a talented forger in London before he was caught making false money orders in 1832 and transported to New South Wales for life. Once in Sydney his talent for drawing marked him out as a special convict and he was assigned to the Surveyor general's department as a draughtsman. After he was pardoned in 1847 he made his income as a landscape and portrait painter.

This portrait of Captain James Cook was made from copies as Cook died in 1779. He is depicted standing on a rocky legde with cliffs in the distance, suggesting the East coast ocean cliffs near the Heads of Sydney Harbour, resting his hand on a globe of the world, on the northern hemisphere, likely to be England.

Fish Catch and Dawes Point, Sydney Harbour (1813) by John William Lewin

This is the earliest known oil painting to have been painted in Australia. John Lewin, Australia’s first professional artist, arrived in Sydney in 1800 after training as a natural history painter in London. The arranged fish catch from the harbour waters is positioned on the shore at Kirribilli Point. The view looks south across Sydney Harbour to Dawes Point, from which the Harbour Bridge spans today. This painting is an oddity being neither a straight forward natural history painting, nor simply a decorative still-life, nor a sporting painting of a proud fisherman’s catch – all popular subjects in Britain in the early nineteenth-century. Rather, it is a combination of all of the above.

A View of the artist's house and garden, in Mill's Plains, Van Diemen's Land (1835) by John Glover

This painting of Glover’s Patterdale farm at Deddington in Northern Tasmania depicts the artist’s new shingle-roofed stone house and wooden studio-gallery surrounded by his flourishing garden in bright sunlight in the summer of 1934-35. Glover has delighted in depicting each of the English annuals in the new squared garden of his farmhouse, and he has also taken pains to depict accurately the distinct qualities of the native Australian trees beyond.

Group of natives of Tasmania (1860) by Robert Dowling

Robert Dowling was Australia’s first locally trained professional artist. He arrived in Tasmania with his parents in 1834 at the age of seven, and later settled in Launceston. In the 1840s he studied in Tasmania, under several artists including Thomas Bock. Dowling relied heavily on Bock’s 1830s watercolour portraits of Aboriginal Tasmanians to create this group composition when most of the sitters had passed away.

The painting depicts notable Aboriginal Tasmanians who, due to their connection to G.A. Robinson’s Friendly Mission, were the repeated subject of major Tasmanian artists.

In the Sassafras Valley, Victoria (1875) - Isaac Whitehead

Isaac Whitehead’s detailed paintings provide some of the most evocative depictions of natural forest stands in Australian art. In this painting ancient eucalypts create a towering, protective canopy through which dappled sunlight filters onto the fronds of tree-ferns and the creek beneath. The giant scale of the trees is emphasised by the inclusion of bushwalkers and figures seated around a campfire, dwarfed by their surroundings.

Whitehead worked as a framemaker in Dublin before arriving in Victoria in the late 1950s where he established himself as Melbourne’s leading framemaker. He made frames for the leading Melbourne painters Nicholas Chevalier, Thomas Clark, Louis Buvelot and Eugene von Guérard. This painting is framed by an example of his 1868 international prize-winning frame.

Evening Shadows, backwater of the Murray, South Australia (1880) by H.J. Johnstone

This painting was the first work of art acquired by the Art Gallery of South Australia. Since it was first displayed at the Gallery’s opening in June 1881, it has been one of the most reproduced and copied paintings in the collection.

H.J. Johnstone arrived in Victoria in 1853. After an unsuccessful attempt at prospection on the Victorian gold fields, he established himself in Melbourne as a photographer and then as a landscape painter of scenes of Victoria and South Australia. Johnstone left Australia in late 1876 but continued to paint Australian landscapes, often from his photographs, in the United States, London and Paris for the Australian market. Evening Shadows, painted in either London or Paris, is typical of Johnstone’s landscapes, all of which are characterised by an uncanny photographic stillness.

Frances Hodgkins, Femme du Monde

The Dunedin Public Art Gallery is compact enough to view in an afternoon and interesting enough to keep you thinking all night. The wooden floors and solidly coloured walls – mint; sage green; berry red; mustard yellow – set off the art works far better than the boringly clinical white walls and concrete floors favoured of many galleries.

When I visited there was an exhibition of furniture, ceramics, sculpture and paintings such as might conjure up an 18th Century English interior. Marble and bronze sculptures by Italian masters and mahogany, pine and oak tables, dressers and chair in the style of Sheraton, Hepplewhite and Chippendale amongst others, looked perfectly at home here on the other side of the world.

The highlight, however, is the Frances Hodgkins collection of works entitled Femme du Monde. The Dunedin-born artist travelled extensively throughout Europe and many influences were brought to bear on her adapting and developing style. Landscapes, portraits, still lifes and even printed textiles display a love for life and a curiosity about design.

You can see the influence of Cezanne in the French paintings and the groups of families, mothers and daughter and single bachelors. Whether pen and ink pictograms or watercolour and charcoal paintings and sketches, the characters come alive on the walls before you – I feel like a child in a storybook who can step through the frame and into the image at any moment.

Another room includes a couple of paintings by her contemporaries, including Petrus van der Velden who used the same sitter for a portrait as Hodgkins had done for Old Salt. Her portrait is in the Impressionist style and is more than a mirror with subtley and hints of implication. According to the accompanying catalogue, it ‘shows the hand of the true artist, not the mere picture painter.’

Here also is a painting by her older sister, Isabel Field, By Tranquil Waters. The watercolour is rustic and simple; with exquisite greens, greys, and blues, it is wonderfully calming and gentle. On the other hand, Hodgkins’ ‘bold use of colour and her confident and daring brushwork take a traditional subject to a new, almost surreal level.’ Hence, the French market scene pictures bustle with life and colour.

Orange Sellers, Tangier is a fabulous image of a hazy bazaar. In a letter, Hodgkins complained that Tangier was not as colourful as she had hoped, being ‘all browns and whites and muddy creams’. So she manipulated the scene and painted a watercolour in which ‘tumbled oranges and red-skinned onions radiate a fiery glow and the glittering, blinding sunlight bleaches and disintegrates the forms of people and buildings.’ After creating this masterpiece, she wrote almost petulantly, ‘I am going to eschew vegetables after this with a comfortable feeling that I have done my duty by them.’

This is going to sound very familiar, but Frances Hodgkins was not appreciated in New Zealand until she became famous overseas and then people began to follow her with respect and bemusement – someone else says she’s good so she must be.

Red Cockerel painted in 1924 is an oil on canvas in the cubist style using flattened forms and abstract shapes within the context of the traditional ‘vanitas’ painting – a meditation on the transience of all life. Yudi Y Moro depicts two cream and brown dogs curled around each other with quivering insouciance. The shapes are not dogs as we know them, yet we know they are dogs.

The artwork is remarkable, and has been called neo-romantic; signifying nostalgia for a rural past and a fascination with ruins and rustic decay. Her wartime paintings of weirs and Welsh farms are among my favourites. Landscape with Engine (1941) embodies the motif of the machine in the garden and what might have been simple decay is elevated to a new level. The catalogue remarks there is ‘no particular grandeur but Frances’ delicate colour and exquisite mark-making transport the viewer into a magical landscape tapestry.’

She had to defend her art as she made little money of her own and relied upon financial gifts from her family – as a woman she was expected to repay this with a more conservative career than roaming the continent with a paintbrush. In a heartfelt letter she writes to her mother, ‘I have slogged. I do want to make all these years worthwhile and make you all proud of me.’

Yet despite the pressure of the debt and the knowledge that she is misunderstood back home, there is the essence of joy in her work. The Weir is not the dark and depressing oil on plywood that it could have been, and in the words of the catalogue, ‘Patterns of paint dancing across the surface of the paper give Mill House Ponterwyd a bright ebullience.’

The exhibition is stunning and uplifting, beautifully displayed and a triumph of the Dunedin cultural collection. The gift shop and cafe attached are also excellent and the delicately spiced gumbo sends me back out into the Octagon with a spring in my step.

L’Arté Café and Gallery

At Café L’Arté in Acacia Bay, Taupo, everything is made from mosaics. In the ‘mosaic room’ is an armchair, sofa, fireplace, table and standard lamp in shining stone fragments.

A sign, made out of mosaic pieces itself, announces that the splintered steps are slippery when wet. It’s bright, quirky, colourful and fun.

It’s also a gallery where there are insects, birds and flowers on pottery spikes among natural blooms. Wooden ruru, kerepu and kingfishers perch on benches.

Piles of gaudy individual painted stones are threaded together to form pebble pillars. Clunky jewellery incorporates sparkling mirrored spiders. Bullrushes with leaves of corrugated iron provide a cool contrast to the soft furry buds of the real things.

Inside the café even the counter is decorated with colourful collages. Nothing will go to waste here. I indulge in a hot strong milky cappuccino, which is the best I’ve had in Taupo, and a deliciously rich passion slice. It's so good, I'm in bits.

Lunchtime art

What to do on a cold, wet lunch-hour, but head to an art gallery? Art makes me happy. It’s something I can admire without aptitude. I don’t paint, draw, sculpt or sew myself, so I simply enjoy other people’s work without any sense of artistic envy. I don’t necessarily wish I had their talent (like I do maybe with performers or athletes), but I’m glad that they have it so I can appreciate their creations.

I read a review of the South Coast Gallery on Cuba on the Texture website. This passage particularly caught my eye:

Cameron allowed me the space to look over the work, then when I’d had the time to take the exhibition in, asked me what I thought. I mention this because I’ve too often been subject to a) the owner who jumps on me as soon as I open the door (Desperate) or b) the one who ignores my presence completely (Snob). Made a nice change I can tell you.

I’m a big fan of the South Coast Gallery in Island Bay and have been known to stop by on my weekend bike ride. So I thought I’d check this out and I’m glad I did. The featured artist was Gennie De Lange who fires ceramic glazes in kilns. The results are bright and quirky – that’s the design as much as the technique.

Many of her colourful squares feature my favourite things; cats, wine and often a cyclist glimpsed through the window, although I’m not so sure about reclining in the nude and a feathered hat.

The glazes produce glossy, warm or cool colours – The Sheep Takes a Dip looks pretty chilly while Hitting the Right Note is comfortably cosy. There is often a mottled patterned effect, which is ideal for less than perfect flesh, and the voluptuous ladies are justifiably admired by the spindly men.

My favourite is Free Spirits, not just because the ladies are wearing fabulous frocks (although it is one of the few pictures where they are clothed, and that’s not to say I’m a prude) but because they look like they have just stepped off the stage – perhaps two of the witches from Macbeth, letting their hair down but still plotting schemes.

Gennie writes, “What I get most from these works is the great sense of companionship. In each and every case there is a realized companionship and in a few instances there is the addition of a distant, unrealised. Desired companionship.”

There is also a selection of Tony Drawbridge’s drawings of Wellington junctions. Trolley buses and cable cars sit alongside horses and carts in these bustling depictions of intersecting lives from Te Papa to Thorndon; Kelburn to Island Bay. I find myself scanning the pictures for recognisable features – taking childish delight in the Lady Norwood Rose Gardens; the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary; the City to Sea Bridge; the bucket fountain; the wind wand; and, of course, the South Coast Gallery.

I am fascinated by the image of the Basin Reserve like a fortress surrounded by a moat and patrolled by a ship. A skewed perspective enables everything to be laid out before your eyes and although the streets appear strangely flattened, there is also a heightened dimension.

You can see things from above while others are in profile. If Escher and Picasso ran a town planning office, their designs might look like this. The mixture of strict technical drawing with elaborate whimsy creates a unique ‘artist’s impression.’