Art Writing Prize

Motherload, Nien Shwartz and the Deceptive Beauty of Industry

by Daniel Glover

Artwork: Nien Schwarz, Motherlode, 2023, high vis work shirt, metallic threads, dimensions variable, Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art, The University of Western Australia.
Exhibited in 2024 in Stuffed Bolstered and Upholstered

Daniel Glover - Motherload, Nien Shwartz and the Deceptive Beauty of Industry.PDF

Clarice Becket, Ship at Sea

by Paul Senycia

Artwork: Clarice Beckett, Ship at sea or Warship on the bay, c. 1925, oil on canvas on board, 30 x 41.2cm, Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art, The University of Western Australia.

Part of the Cruthers Collection of Women's Art

Paul Senycia - Clarice Becket, Ship at Sea.PDF

‘Boong’ _ Reframing the Utility Vehicle as Colonial Weapon

by Jimi De Priest

Artwork: Curtis Taylor, Boong, 2022, repurposed bull bars, lights, digital audio, 5:48 minutes, courtesy of the artist and Sweet Pea, commissioned by Dark Lab for Dark Mofo 2023

Exhibited at Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, 2024 in Jintulu: People of the sun

Jimi De Priest -‘Boong’ _ Reframing the Utility Vehicle as Colonial Weapon.PDF

Ailsa Lee-Brown and Modernism’s Failure

by John Toohey

Artwork: Woman Pilot (1931) by Adelaide Perry, from The University of Western Australia Art Collection, and exhibited in 2019 in Cosmopolitan: Art from the 1930s in the University of Western Australia Art Collection and the Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art.

In the 1920s and ‘30s, Adelaide Perry painted landscapes that owed a predictable debt to Cezanne and could be hard to distinguish from Dorrit Black’s work, and she made prints of Sydney with silhouettes of cranes and office blocks that looked a lot like the linocuts Adrian Feint was producing. She also painted portraits of her female friends. Whoever’s work these resembled, they were her own.
We know the sitters were her friends and not commissions because the paintings have an intimacy commercial portraitists never achieve, let alone aspire to. The women look away, distracted by minor annoyances. Betty looks down with tight lips and a pensiveness suggesting a dilemma that began with one phone call and will end with another.(1) Rachel Roxburgh looks to a point just over the viewer’s shoulder, absorbed with some small but nagging regret.(2) Marilla taps absent-mindedly at a drum or tambourine as though waiting for a friend who is always late.(3) The mystery in Perry’s sitters lies in their ordinariness. They are teachers, musicians and other artists. They wear cardigans and twin sets and are demure without being prudish, and they are always quietly self-possessed.
Perry’s 1931 painting, Woman Pilot has that same intimacy. With her flying helmet and goggles covering her hair, she looks past the viewer, musing rather than worried yet nevertheless indifferent to the painter’s presence. Unlike the other sitters she is outdoors, though it would have been odd in the 1930s to paint a pilot in costume and sitting in her living room.
And like Perry’s other sitters she has a face that is vaguely familiar, not a friend so much as someone whose office is just down the corridor, who catches the same train in the morning, who lines up at the supermarket with a trolley full of groceries: someone whose responsibilities occupy enough of her time that she need not concern herself with your existence. Her name is Ailsa Lee-Brown. She is a pilot, but in 1931 she is better known as an artist.
Mascot aerodrome and Botany Bay lie behind and below her, washed in sunshine. Three years after Adelaide Perry paints this portrait, Ailsa’s husband, Dr Robert Lee-Brown, will take off in a Tiger Moth from that aerodrome, lose control and crash it into Brighton Le Sands, killing himself and his passenger.(4) This is still an age when flying isn’t a profession so much as a calling, when a writer pilot like Antoine Saint-Exupéry can list off fellow flyers who’d disappeared inured to the eventuality he will go the same way. We might want to read that existential insouciance in the portrait of Ailsa Lee-Brown, but Adelaide Perry was after something else.

II

In the 1920s, Adelaide Perry and Ailsa Lee-Brown studied together at Julian Ashton’s Sydney Art School.(5) The teachers and students who came through the school that decade: Thea Proctor, Roy de Maistre, William Dobell, Black, Feint and others, would define Sydney Modernism in the 1930s, which itself would dictate how a generation across Australia thought about the stuff of their lives, everything from the design of their houses to the furniture in their lounge rooms to the pattern on their neckties. It was the first real break Australian popular culture made from Victorian conventions, so there could be an underlying assumption that Perry and Lee-Brown were caught up in a movement, maybe not at its centre but close enough to draw from its energy, to think, as anybody would in that situation, that they were at liberty to change the world. And what could be more bohemian than a woman pilot, scorning not just danger but all the social constrictions placed upon her?
A photograph Harold Cazneaux took at Ashton’s Art School in 1931 casts doubt on that.(6) It shows a life model class in progress. Some twenty students, mostly women, have crowded around the model on the dais. Three, a man in the left foreground and two women in the main audience, are working on their easels. All the female students have their hair cut in fashionable bobs and they look up at the model with a concentrated seriousness. She is nude and covers her face from the camera with her arms, her figure twisted, like Eve in the garden hiding from God. In the background, several casts of classical statues, also in states of undress, look on. One has his arm extended as though pointing accusingly across the room to the life model. Every detail in the photograph is staged of course; the model hides her face from Cazneaux, not the students, because to show it to the camera while naked would have pushed the photograph into uncertain legal territory. Some students were given easels, but not too many otherwise the scene would have been cluttered with their frames, so most sit and merely observe with that unsmiling intent, maybe aware of the absurdity of the scene but under instruction not to reveal that.
Cazneaux was no social progressive; read his correspondence arguing why women shouldn’t be allowed in the Sydney Camera Circle. What he wanted from the photo was something perfunctory, a positive view of the school drawn from the essential information: dedicated students, rigorous methodology, a tradition stretching back to Greece and Rome, but despite the life model’s unambiguous presence in the scene, the students might as well be wrestling with the technical problem of how to depict a cube in one dimensional space. For an art school, Julian Ashton’s looks oddly straitlaced and joyless.

Maybe it was. Art schools today have reputations to maintain as breeding grounds for social experiments opposed to the mainstream. The photos from Ashton’s Art School have something else to say. They share with Perry’s portraits the evocation of a suburban homeliness that lay in the heart of Australian Modernism. Like the bush, the central city was a place to visit. The task of living, joyful as it could be on occasion, took place in the suburbs. That middle class modesty is present in the identical haircuts the female students have, (We know Ailsa Lee-Brown had the same bob because in 1927 Thea Proctor drew her with one.) and in the understated evidence from Perry’s portraits that most of her friends are sitting in their living rooms. Students and sitters; they might be fascinating but they’re not rebels.

III

“A woman who has the care of a home and family needs special courage and determination to practice an art which gives her self-expression”.(7)
Thea Proctor said that at an opening of an exhibition of Ailsa’s in 1938. If it sounds self-evident, under only cursory scrutiny it comes across as hollow and banal, something that could easily have been printed on the frontispiece of the Golden Wattle Cookbook. It appeared at the head of a review of the show in the Sydney Morning Herald and we can’t quite trust it. Like sports journalists, art critics had the bad habit of putting their ideas in other’s mouths. It was also possible the hack spied Thea Proctor leaving the opening and hurried over to grab a quote. Ms Proctor remembered something she’d said recently that pleased her and tossed it out again before hurrying off to her next engagement. In 1938, no one really cared what artists thought.
We want to believe that a woman pilot in the 1930s was a pioneer, possessing daredevil nerves and suffragette grit, and when Ailsa Lee-Brown posed for Adelaide Perry in helmet, goggles and jacket, she was calling out to all women to join her in the sky. In the same way, we want art school students to have been free radicals, striking out for new territories of the mind. Except that in the history of Australian Modernism, one reason the names of the dissenters and agitators remain vivid is that they were so rare. Most artists followed Thea Proctor’s advice and sought self-improvement through elegant domesticity. “Generally speaking,” she once piously advised. “One cannot wear the same clothes in Sydney as in London”.(8) The secret to Perry’s painting, why she called it Woman Pilot instead of Ailsa, is that her sitter’s identity doesn’t matter. She could be any woman.
A year after Robert Lee-Brown was killed, Ailsa married her flying instructor George Allan, better known as Scotty.(9) He had a résumé that would have made Biggles jealous: fighter pilot on the Western Front, copilot with Charles Kingsford Smith, pilot on a record breaking flight from England to Australia and an early sign-up with QANTAS. With that list of achievements, he inevitably smothered his wife’s ambitions. Before long she was merely described as a “keen flyer”. As an artist, she took Proctor’s advice to its logical conclusion, into neglect. Then she was killed, not in a plane crash but after being hit by a bicycle, which sounds like irony for someone who deserved it, though she didn’t. That was in 1943, when she was forty five. The obituaries referred to her as Scotty Allan’s wife.(10)

Footnotes

1.  Australian Art Sales Digest. https://www.aasd.com.au/index.cfm/list-all-works/?concat=perryadela&direction=0&order=1&start=51&show=50 (accessed November 2019)
2.  Ibid.
3.  Ibid.
4.  Sydney Morning Herald,1934, p17.
5.  Moore, C, in Edwards, D, Mimmochi, D (eds). 2013. P 86.
6.  Bullock, 2008. P57.
7.  Sydney Morning Herald, 1937, page 9
8.  Lister, J. 1922, page 37.
9.  News (South Australia), 1935, page 6
10.  Sydney Morning Herald, 1943, page 10.

References

• Bullock, Natasha. Harold Cazneaux: Artist in Photography. Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2008.
• Edwards, D and Mimmocchi, D. Sydney Moderns: Art for a New World. Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2013.
• “Fatal Crash”, Sydney Morning Herald, Wednesday 11 April 1934, p17.
• Lister, J. “Australians must Develop Taste says Miss Thea Proctor”, in The Home, June 1st, 1922, p37.
• “Notices”, Sydney Morning Herald, Friday, February 12, 1943, p10.
• Quin, Sally. Cosmopolitan: Art from the 1930s in the University of Western Australia Art Collection and the Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art. Nedlands: Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, 2019.
• “Scotty Allen Marries Mrs Ailsa Brown”, News (South Australia), Saturday 22 June 1935, p6.
• “Women Artists, Thea Proctor’s Views”, Sydney Morning Herald, Friday 14 May 1937, p9.

Wudjula Yorgah (White Woman): Duality and Dynamism

by Jessica Stewart

The intensity of the blue, the shimmering luminous quality of the skyscape, compels you toward Julie Dowling’s portrait of Sheila Cruthers. But it is the mesmerizing figure herself that draws you in, demanding that you look, then look again. Nearly life-sized, the art collector dominates not just the canvas, but the wall, even the entire gallery over which she presides.

Given the title Wudjula Yorgah (White Woman), though painted with dark skin, Dowling’s image of Lady Cruthers is an engrossing balancing act. The Australian artist, of both First Nation Badimia and non-Aboriginal heritage, has cast her friend in a similar mold. Though created in 2005, just six years before Cruthers’ death, Dowling’s work imbues her subject with extraordinary power. As reflected in its title, the portrait is a study in duality and in dynamism.

Through Dowling’s employment of the Renaissance devices of triangular structure, and the Golden Mean, the diminutive Lady Cruthers has herself become mountainous in form, more colossal than the mountain range she is presented against. The artist renders her as distinct from, yet denizen of, both the earth and the sky that serve as her backdrop. In nature, but removed from it, she radiates a commanding sense of physical presence.

The figure’s hands are what arrest you first: massive, and in utter stillness, suggesting a self-contained potency. It is not just the scale of her limbs, but their placement that denotes vitality. Lady Cruthers’ legs are crossed in opposition to her hands: where the proper right hand is laid atop the left, the proper left leg drapes over the right, effectively sealing the body inward. This rhythmic balance is repeated throughout the pictorial structure, with a sense of alternately closed and open, different and like.

Whorled and veined, through their remarkable heft, Cruthers’ hands invite comparison to her face. Though of more delicate scale, her visage is chiselled, worn like leather, and of its hue. The skin is composed of red ochre, literally of the soil, and Cruthers is at once weightily grounded in the verdant green grass, yet somehow hovering. She is haloed in iridescence, her hair echoing the shape, rhythm, and palette of the clouds. They are white, yes, but a white that announces its spectrum: saturated in, and composed of, colour. Cruthers’ own energetic nimbus expands outward above them, in dazzling rainbow formation, to the edge of the canvas and beyond, a tremendous primordial force issuing skyward.

In attire, Cruthers appears an icon of suburban womanhood, clad in sensible blue trousers and matching striped shirt. She is bejewelled, yes, but not in the glitter of diamonds one might expect. Instead, she has donned a lengthy strand of pearls, presumably fake, of a bright cold white that rhyme with her blouse buttons. At first glance, she appears serenely aunty-ish. But belying that initial suggestion of warmth, Dowling’s sitter is aloof, her gaze entirely inscrutable. This is a portrait of the art collector as next-door-neighbor/goddess. Enthroned in her cheap plastic armchair, she exudes not frailty but preternatural strength.

In contrast with the statuesque immobility of the figure, Dowling has created a dramatic effect of just-arrested movement throughout the canvas. Even the sedate clothing appears to ripple, to undulate, the sleeves particularly sinuous in their folds. The stripes are not uniform, but become wider and more ragged at points, sustaining visual interest throughout. The blue lines establish a darker effect in some places (proper left chest) and a lighter one in others (proper right). The proper right shirt side remains untucked, displaying more fabric, while the proper left collar appears to fly upwards, launching a diagonal emphasis. The navy trousers have a richness, a texture of velvet, and they are highlighted with a white which intensifies that sheen. Adding to the chromatic complexity of the clothing, the white of the shirt, like the hair, the clouds, and the chair, has taken on a pinkish-ochre hue.

Enhanced by Cruthers’ just off-center placement, even the ubiquitous rigid suburban lawn ornament becomes organic in its hint of irregular curves. And Dowling holds our attention fast with more diagonal thrust.  A gap between proper left arm and chest reveals a portion of the seat adorned by the slightest patch of green grass, while on the proper right, more lawn and chair are visible, but adjoining the leg.

The immediacy of a freeze-frame, of stilled motion, is perhaps most prominent in the lushly-layered blades of grass that surround the seat and its occupant. An intense dynamism is conveyed through their variegated colouration and electric stippling. The implied movement in the vegetation draws our eye upward to the mountains, to the sky, and back toward the sitter, in a perpetual cycle. And the many-coloured spheres in both earth and sky lead our imagination to Aboriginal painting writ large, to the elders. This is no ordinary portrait. Sphinx-like, it gives little away, but asks you to decode its mystery. Siren-like, it requests your return.

Space to See Light in the Darkness

by Rose Van Son

When I was at
            The Mission…
                               J.R.

Such a relatively small canvas, simple, only a few words, handwritten, but the colours are telling: ochre background, blood-red writing, Signed J.R. Seemingly stray letters to the right of the picture; the artwork itself approximately 400cm x 600cm.

           one could imagine this
           is a blank canvas
           one spare     left
           for you to fill in

Artist, June Walkutjukurr Richards, says, ‘I was born in the bush at the Kaltjiti, the clay pan on the other side where the powerhouse is now in the community. I remember always when I’m walking around in the bush with blue flowers, purples flowers and I feel good, when it was like that in the mission time’ (Remote Avant-Garde: Aboriginal Art under Occupation, Jennifer Loureide Biddle, 2016, p. Lxi).

Flowers do not bloom in Richards’ painting but there is light in the darkness, the shadows of a long-ago time, of a time Richards remembers. Her life in only a few words seeps through the canvas; her words are full of meaning, the life at the mission broadened with ellipses. The dots are laden: her story, her language, her history. Richards’ language is English when needed but her indigenous language, Ngaanyatjarra, is her mother tongue. Ngaanyatjarra is the language she speaks of in her painting, the missing words, the gaps where darkness lives, where light penetrates the ochre landscape of her country. No flowers or trees adorn this artwork, but the flowers and their silhouettes are there, nonetheless, when the light, through trees, pierces the dark.

           without flowers
           words bloom     speak
           for themselves

Richards was born in the Warburton Ranges Mission, Mirlirrtarra, Western Australia in 1951. She died in 2010 leaving a legacy of words and art, art in words, colour and sound, and mood, particularly mood, and light.                          

*

Albert (Elea) Namatjira was born in 1902 in the Northern Territory. He painted ghost gums: the colours and light of these eucalypts in his works are extraordinary. Mount Sonder, MacDonnell Ranges, c 1955, was the artwork exhibited at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, 2019.     

Mount Sonder, the highest point in the MacDonnell Ranges lies 130 km west of Alice Springs, in the West MacDonnell National Park at the end of the Larapinta Trail. In Namatjira’s artwork, the mountain is sleeved in colour, light and shadow, its shoulders smoothed by the elements and brush.   There are so many colours here: blue, purple, charcoal, pink and mauve. Namatjira paints a masterpiece; his palette knife blends with the soft hues of evening sun and the expectation and surprise of sunrise. Namatjira is at one with his landscape, his country. He knows the movement of the sun, the seasons and their influence on texture, colour and light.     

Albert Namatjira studied art at the Hermannsburg Mission. His language was the Western Arrernte language; his watercolours sold exceedingly well at his first solo exhibition in Adelaide, 1939. At that time he had been painting for three years.                           

* 

I have travelled to the northwest of Western Australia and have seen ghost gums in the morning light. It is an extraordinary sight. There is life and there is light. Namatjira has captured the complexity and simplicity of these eucalypts: the trees blooming in the outback. Like Richards’ work, there are no flowers, yet the flowers are there:  from the imagined strokes taken by Namatjira: the light brush strokes, silver on grey, white on light, sunlight on shadow. There is silver here but there is gold, the golden eye of Namatjira; his unique way of seeing; of bringing the desert to life. 

I remember driving one September morning on the Great Northern Highway between Kununurra and Wyndham and the trees, the ghost gums, along the highway beside me were, essentially, a Namatjira painting. I held my breath. To view these trees in morning light is a sight not easily forgotten. Namatjira captures this light, pens it, so to speak, watercolour on paper: ghost gums and mountain ranges in all their timelessness.  Mount Sonder in the MacDonnell ranges is a vista particularly overwhelming at daybreak or in the superb frame of evening. In this way, through simplicity and colour, dark and light, sheen so overwhelming, Namatjira brings the desert scene back to a coastal and international audience.

To view a painting as the chiaroscuro of life within the realm of the camera: seemingly fixed yet flexible, that is the greatness of Namatjira. The movement is there, gentle breaths in and out, for like all of Namatjira’s paintings, Mount Sonder is a gentle landscape, and the bloom is there, too, like the bloom of Richards’ ‘Mission’ artwork: only hers in words and yet the colours bloom with horizon and story, (his) story and (her) story, separate yet together, transmuted in order for nature and art to speak for itself.

          outback driving   
          bloom of ghost gums
          follow the road beside me

Although Namatjira’s Mt. Sonder, MacDonnell Ranges, (c 1955) does not clearly denote ghost gums, they are there, an imprint of his vision, in his commitment to story, the story of country, coupled with the soft hue of mauve and distilled blue of the MacDonnell Ranges. In the foreground, the afternoon glow of the landscape, in the shadow of trees, dark now, silhouette memories of a recollected time. 

Namatjira’s camera eye view encompasses the whole scene to frame the story: trees, rocks, hillside and plateau belong in his mind’s eye. He employs a photographer’s eye to capture the light, the landscape, the story, to frame and balance the picture within the containment of its canvas.  Namatjira died in 1959. 

June Walkutjukurr Richards’ and Albert (Elea) Namatjira’s mission lives helped shape them and enabled and highlighted their commitment to culture and to cultural understanding, their story, their passion, their country:  the country of generations of their ancestors exposed, to keep knowledge for those who came after. For art has a layering effect: layer-upon-layer of texture, culture, beliefs. What these artists have done is drawn from both inside and outside the perceived lines of light; Richards with space, seemingly endless space, though at first an apparent nothingness, yet all her story is here: boxed, packaged and signed with her initials: J.R. In this way she highlights her country’s timelessness, so full of her past. What more is there to say, she may well ask? Time is her tool for understanding. Namatjira, however, with his innate knowledge of country, trees, mountain, colour, shadow and sheen, allows the landscape, the trees to speak for him as he speaks for them in his art. And although there are no flowers in his chosen space and light, he knows the flowers are there and will return to bloom in their own season.