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For this month’s work, I have chosen a work by the Dutch landscape painter Jacob van Ruisdael.  One of the best things about selecting one work a month to discuss is discovering the bredth of the collection that the Gallery holds.  It really is an international collection with artists and genres from everywhere represented, and it is a credit to the Gallery’s history (and largely thanks to the Felton Bequest) that such a diverse colletion of works had been established in the Twentieth Century when the major centres of (Western) art were very far away.

The Watermill was painted c. 1660 when Ruisdael was roughly mid-career and painting with his most important pupil, Meindart Hobbema.  He specialised in these imposing woodland landscapes as well as painting the sea and the city.  The Watermill depicts the large watermill in the mid-ground, with the river occupying the foreground in front of it and some trees behind, all set against an ominously cloudy sky.  Although difficult to see in the painting, and especially more so in the reproduction, there is a small lone figure with a dog, going about his work.  When you spot him, it is as if you have intruded on his life in some way, disrupted his quiet labour.  This figure is tiny in comparison to the landscape around him, he is completely dwarfed by him.  This has been described as an increase in the heroic quality of Ruisdael’s paintings with the forms becoming larger and more massive and space increasing in both height and depth (Seymour Slive, Dutch Painting 160–1800, p.199)

It has a pictorially quite flat quality, with a very little motion in the water of the mill.  This is in no way a fault of the painting- in fact it seems to be a by-product of the rich surface and detail in every aspect of the scene.  Ever part of the composition is rendered with the same attention to detail as the next.  Actually it is similar in this way to the work of William Delafield Cook, the Australian painter whose exhibition I reviewed a few months ago.

Dutch landscape painting is a very intriguing, almost mystical genre- not just a style of painting, but an entire society that you can imagine so clearly by looking at their paintings and Ruisdael is a very important figure in the scene.  There is so much more that can be said about his work.  However, for now I will be content to know that I can view an excellent example of his work right on my doorstep!

The NGV work of the month for March is not a painting, or a sculpture, or a work on paper, but a ceramic object.  I like ceramics a lot, but this is a very unexpected type of ceramic object.  It is a Cabbage Tureen.  There are two things that I like about this piece- the first is obvious….the fact that it looks so much like a cabbage, but the second is how old this cabbage is.  I would expect that a work like this would maybe date from the 1920s or 1930s perhaps- a centre piece of a bustling dinner party in a large country house, with Jazz and flapper dresses.  A frivolous tureen for a frivolous age.  In fact, this Cabbage Tureen ould have been the centre piece of a dinner party in a large country house, but a country house in the 1750s.  It is the work of a Strasbourg Manufacturer called the Paul Hannong Factory which specialised in a type of trompe l’oleil tableware, recreating everything from birds, to shells, and farmyard animals.  What a great piece of functional art!

It has been another warm and balmy day in Melbourne today, and it is the weather that has informed February’s choice for work of the month.  I came across a Constable exhibition, entitled ‘John Constable- The Natural Painter’ that was held at the National Gallery of Victoria (and the Auckland Art Gallery and Art Gallery of New South Wales) in 1973.  This exhibition was organised by the then Keeper of Prints, Drawings and Paintings at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and presented an opportunity to see works by an ‘old master’ that were seldom seen in Australasia. Unlike today when if we want to look at a painting we can simply Google it, back in the 1970s the options were much more limited.  Reading newspaper articles from the time illustrate the excitement at seeing Constable’s works in Australia  It was an anticipation of seeing artworks which doesn’t seem to exist in quite the same way in today’s Internet Age.  Although there were eight (and still is) Constable works in collection at the time, it must have been an event to see o many works in the flesh.

As an avid Turner fan, reading these articles and looking at the images, re-introduced me to what an exceptional artist Constable was.  I looked up the Constable’s in the NGV collection and came across this painting ‘Clouds’ from 1822.  Probably intended as a study for another painting, it is a beautiful and delicate rendering of clouds caputuring both their fluffiness and heaviness in the sky.  The darker shading on the underside of the clouds really adds a gravity to them, and when you see the painting in the flesh, these darker clouds swell up the right side of the painting, showing the ominous signs of impending rain.  The pinkish tones, which hint at sunlight are actually not tones at all but the colour of the cardboard, so as well as being an exceptional study of clouds it is also an exceptional study of ommission in painting.  For such a small study of clouds, this painting has such vitality and character, which goes to expressing just how much of an exceptional artist that Constable was.

(image from NGV website collection database - http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/col/work/3862)

I for one absolutely love vintage travel posters, especially those advertising places to travel in Britain.  Shell Oil produced a series of posters demonstrating various destinations you could get to using their product- “Everywhere you go, you can be sure of shell” was their promise and the Underground has produced some excellent posters since the turn of the twentieth century.  Artists such as Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland have contributed their artwork to poster designs, as well as lesser know artists who were more prolific poster designers, like Edward Bawden.  Broadly speaking, poster design in Britain ran parallel to a resurgence in modernist print making, especially lithography and the coloured lino.

I am interested in what makes these posters so timelessly appealing, and am attempting to make a travel poster-style painting of the Sydney Opera House (which maybe I will post about when it is finished).  I became aware through the news, and the excellent website Apartment Therapy, of people taking modern movies and re-imagining them as vintage posters.  My favorites were the brilliantly simply, Titanic poster, the glamourous and sunny coastly scene for Cars 2, the “Visit South America” theme using the house from Up! and the dreamscapes of Inception.

I think that these posters work so well because people have seen the movies and understand the motifs from them.  As original advertising I wonder if they are too minimal for today’s desire for mass information.  Movies today have trailers and websites and twitter feeds and facebook pages to intice us to watch them, as well as print media campaigns.  Although having said that these posters are truly a delight!

(Images from Apartment Therapy)

Over the summer season  here in Australia there does seem to be a lot of high quality art exhibitions around at the major galleries.  The Art Gallery of New South Wales has Picasso, Queensland Art Gallery has Matisse and the National Gallery of Victoria has the German painting of The Mad Square, British Watercolours and the beautiful installations of Ranjani Shettar.  Having seen all of these except Matisse in Queensland, there is a lot of art to choose from to be the work of the month for January. 

However, I am writing this post at the end of another 35 degree day in Melbourne, which made me think of a very specific work in the NGV’s International Collection.  Landscape of the Summer Solstice was painted by Paul Nash in 1943.  It was painted during a period when Nash was consolidating his landscape painting and at a time of intense production.  This painting was one of several Nash painted of the Wittenham Clumps, a collection of small hills topped with ancient birch trees.  Like many similar structures in the south of England, the Clumps have an archeaological significance as they contain hill forts dating from the Bronze and Iron Ages.

It is the representation of heat in this painting that is so effective.  This heat is generated by the orb-like sun emanating rays across the bleached sky and the pale ochre and brown colours of the landscape covered with a dusty hue from the sun’s rays.  The undulating hills and foliage in the painting are suspended somewhere between reality and abstraction.  It is almost as if the Wittenham Clumps in the central mid-ground are in focus, whilst everything is slightly out of focus.  Everything else that is except flowers at the very front of the painting that are painted with representational accuracy.  You almost have to look past these in order to see the rest of the image.  Their presence is intriguing.  They add a prettiness to the painting, yet equally a disquiet  They are precisely laid out in a line in a way that is unatural, that is not of the landscape.  Nash himself never elaborated on the symbolism of the flowers, although he did write that ‘the prescence of these magic flowers somehow influences the atmosphere of the picture’ (Cardinal, 1989, p. 115).   Clearly it is up to you to interpret why these flowers are here. 

I have heard some comments that Nash’s landscapes of this period- and specifically Landscape of the Summer Solstice have a certain melancholy to them, but I don’t necessarily read them as such myself.  They have an intensity which I think can be interpreted as melancholy, but to me this intensity can also stem from a frentic energy and engagement with the very essence of the landscape.  For me, Nash achieves something very special in his landscapes- a sense of experience that goes beyond just looking.

Ref: Cardinal, Roger (1989) The Landscape Vison of Paul Nash, London: Reaktion Books

At the TarraWarra Museum of Art is an survey of the landscape painting of Australian painter, William Delafield Cook.  He paints photo- realistic images of the Australian Landscape, ironically from his studio in London, the TWMA website informs us.  However, when you see Delafield Cook’s work, this fact is not really that ironic at all.  These highly detailed, photo-realistic scenes of sun-bleached land set against luminous cloudless skies are painted from the close study of an image not en plein air.  You can detect this is the shadows and light that sit tight to the surface of the canvas.  It is a painting born of intense study and scrutiny, not from capturing the fleeting effects of light on the landscape, and such intense study and scruity would be impossible painting on the spot, out of doors.  The photographic attention to detail is technically remarkable and loses none of its intenstity whether you are close-up or at a distance. 

There is also an interesting flat quality to Delafield Cook’s work, making them seem ethereal and somehow suspended in an otherworldliness.  The flatness, which is quite extreme when you see the paintings up close comes from the exact replication of the light and shadows.  There is an actual surface flatness that contributes to this.  His paintings are almost always painted with acrylic, yet there is no trace of the paint on the canvas; no blobs or brush marks or variations of thickness.  Such consistency is commendable in itself.  It is an interesting thing that I have found myself when painting a landscape is that sometime exactly what you see doesn’t always convert to canvas and paint and in order to make a composition work you might have to crop a bit here or change the direction of a line or two there, but Delafield Cook represents everything, just as it is.  The paintings achieve total flatness through this precise almost dead-pan approach to representation.  You can see this in a comparison between his A Waterfall (Strath Creek) and Waterfall, Strath Creek painted in 1862 by Eugene Von Guerard.  Delafield Cook has not copied Von Guerard’s painting, but instead travelled to the exact place that Von Guerard painted the waterfall. 

Where Von Guerard has added painterly touches, Delafield Cook has focused, photographic details.  One is has an almost Romantic quality whereas the other presents stark observation.  I have to be honest here, for me they are equally weighted.  I enjoy the golden light and orangey hues of Von Guerard’s painting but I also enjoy the stillness of Delafield Cook’s painting.  The inclusion of figures gives Von Guerard’s painting a sense of narative, whereas Delafield Cook is completely devoid of human presence- it just is.  In an interview for ABC’s Art Nation Delafield Cook says that if you look at something enough it starts to become impregnanted with meaning, and his paintings are so curious and pristine that I can’t stop looking….

This is just a quick post to share the truly amazing spectacle that is the Harbin International Ice and Snow Festival.  Held in the Heilongjiang province in China, where temperatures regularly hit -38 degrees, this festival is so much more than a collection of ice sculptures.  You can read more about it and see more pictures in this article at The Telegraph.   In my opinion this festival qualifies as a spectacular form of installation art.  It achieves awe in the use of materials and a sense of disbelief at its transcience.  In July, when the average temperature is 18-23 degrees, all of this will be gone!

For anyone who grew up with Christmas, probably all of in the Western world, December is all about Christmas, so naturally, this month’s work should have a Christmas aura to it. A Renaissance Virgin and Child perhaps would be appropriate and certainly not in short supply at the gallery. However not being particularly religious this wouldn’t represent what Christmas really means to me. For me, especially living away from my parents, Christmas is about family; getting together with a meal and a Christmas Tree and having fun together. So for this reason the work of the Month for December is The Pybus Family c.1769 by Nathaniel Dance.

Pybus was a prominent official in the East India company. His choice of the fashionable Nathaniel Dance as the artist for this group family portrait indicates both his social aspirations and the wealth he had accrued abroad. This painting shows John, his wife Martha and their four children. They are seated in a landscape-a popular pose for portraits of this time (such as Mr. and Mrs. Andrews by Joshua Reynolds, 1750). There are touches of informality amongst the family members, with the older daughter resting her hand nonchalantly on the younger ones shoulder, whilst she gazes out off of the frame, the son lounging on the ground and Pybus himself looking, hand on hip, at his wife and child.  The portrait is no doubt formally arranged, but these touches make it seem like an incidental moment, almost like a photograph of a family in the process of getting their portrait painted.

During last week in Hong Kong, the auctioneers Phillips de Pury and Company sold off 1 quite remarkable lot- 4,370 watches, representing every prototype and production watch made by the company swatch.  Swatches have had a cult following since their launch in the mid-1980s, and have used artists like Keith Haring and Helmut Newton to make special edition watches.  As well as being the simple watch, the Swatch also represents a part of the visual culture, echoing trends and fashions within society.  I wrote a little about how an everyday item can be come a cultural product in relation to tableware and I think that the same can be said of these watches.

The auctioneers have an online catalogue featuring all of the watches in the lot.  It is definitly worth a look!  You can see it here

For the NGV work of the month for November I have chosen a work that isn’t actually, erm, in the National Gallery of Victoria.  Regular readers will recall that last month I wrote about how I volunteer at the gallery and get to come into regular contact with the collection there; well this month as part of the research that I am undertaking I was required to go the State Library, and the painting that I have chosen comes from there.  I feel justified in including this painting as the it is part of the Cowen Gallery, which occupies a room that once housed the McArthur Gallery when the NGV shared the same building as the Public Library.

It was in 1944 that the collection of the Public Library became seperated from that of the National Gallery of Victoria, when the Trustees of the Public Library, Museums and National Gallery of Victoria were seperated into different boards.  The State Library’s La Trobe Journal has an in depth look at the Cowen Gallery itself, although what I became interested in was one work in particular, Elizebeth Parsons Point Ormond, St. Kilda (Oil on Canvas, 1881).

It depicts a beautiful sunny scene, with windswept trees leading the eye onto the yellow sands and blue waters.  In the middle of the painting, the red umbrella of the promenading ladies makes a striking contrast aginst the sun-bleached pastel colours of the coast.  It makes me feel like I am on the promenade too, looking out across the crystal waters and feeling the breeze on my face.  What makes this painting so sucessful is not the subject or composition, but the sun-bleached colours- on a bright sunny day in summer this is how the colours appear. Elizabeth Parsons had managed to truly evoke the atmosphere of being at the seaside.

Rather intriugingly, the back of the painting carries an excerpt from a peom by Lewis Carroll, The Walrus and the Carpenter:

The sea was wet as wet could be

The sand was dry as dry

You could not see a cloud, because

No cloud was in the sky.

No birds were flying overhead-

There were no birds to fly.