City artists get a taste of frontier living

BY BIWA KWAN
Landscape painting tends to move in and out of fashion, but a major exhibition featuring the work of nine leading painters suggests that landscapes are firmly back in vogue.
“For a lot of years landscape painting was seen as an inferior genre,” said Archibald Prize winner Euan Macleod.
“There does seem to be a bit of a return to the whole idea of en plein air [outdoor painting], which was unfashionable for so long. They had a prize for it a year ago.”
In May this year, nine artists spent eight days in the Flinders Ranges in South Australia, travelling along one of the world’s longest paths, the Heyson Trail, named after the South Australian landscape painter, Hans Heysen.
The group included Lucy Culliton, Elisabeth Cummings, Neil Frazer, David Keeling, Euan Macleod, Chris O’Doherty (aka Reg Mombassa), Adrienne Richards, Leo Robba and David Usher.
The group paid their respects to Heyson, but were keen to explore their own creative paths.
“Before we went on the trip we got out art books and had a look at what he has done, said the trip’s convenor, Leo Robba. “We all love art and art history, so obviously you look at artists like him, but he is painting in a different time to us.”
The group woke to paint in the cold morning light and worked well into the night, with a bit of friendly competition thrown in.
“You would wake up in the morning and it would be just be crack of the dawn, before the sun,” said Lucy Culliton.
“You would see Euan [Macleod] painting and you go ‘Aw shit’ and then you see Chris [O’Doherty] painting and go ‘Oh no!’ so you would have to get up. I would squeeze my paints out in a little set-up before I went to bed at night so I could wake up and paint.”
Said Chris O’Doherty: “These are all well-known artists so you think ‘I can’t do anything too crappy. I am up against these people.’ You do have to kind of raise the bar.
“For me I always work hard to produce a certain number of works ‘ 112. It is my record and every trip I try and do better. It means you have to work fairly obsessively at night and before you get up in the morning just trying to beat the others.”
For many of the artists it was the first time they had travelled on the Heyson Trail, and the physical conditions, as well as the presence of the camera crew, was unnerving at first.
“I did find the first few days quite challenging… but I found as the trip went on I relaxed a lot more,” said Macleod.
“You go on the trip with a lot of expectations, you go with a lot of desires, but I think gradually a lot of those have got to be dropped.”
The exhibition provides nine very different interpretations of the South Australian landscape in paintings, drawings, sketches and ceramics.
Examining the visions of the artists, it becomes easy to understand the attraction of Hans Heyson to the remote wilderness of the Flinders Ranges.
Those paintings depict the painters’ struggle to come to terms with the remote desert landscape and capture its austere beauty.
“It is kind of harsh and alien. But particularly when it is lit at certain part of the day, in the early morning and in the late afternoon, it looks best then,” said O’Doherty.
Macleod echoes this sentiment: “I love the landscapes where there is a sense of weathering and you can get a sense of the how they were formed. They are really harsh landscapes, but there is a real beauty in them too.”