Philip Hunter: a painter who walked the flat country

Philip Hunter (1958 to 2017) was a Melbourne painter whose subject, for about four decades, was the Australian land, and in particular the wide, flat wheat country of the Wimmera in north-western Victoria, where he grew up. He was born in the small town of Donald, his family moved to Melbourne in the 1960s, and he kept going back to the Wimmera every year. If you have only seen one of his pictures on a museum wall, you may remember it as dark, dense and quietly enormous. It rewards a longer look than most people give it, and the way it was made explains a lot about why.

What the paintings look like

Hunter's best-known canvases are built from a restricted palette: earth colours and white, browns and ochres and blacks that sit close together in tone. The National Portrait Gallery's note on him describes the paintings as large, layered and visually dense, and that is a fair summary of the first impression. There is rarely a single view of a single place. Instead you get something closer to the experience of a terrain: lines that might be fences, furrows or creek beds, small marks that might be stubble or stones, a sense of a horizon that is there and not there.

Later in his career the colour opened up. In a 2016 interview with Studio International he talked about wanting to widen his palette, enrich the field of colour and bring a kind of architectural framework into the more complex spaces of his newer pictures. He mentioned spending time with the work of Milton Avery, Roger Hilton, Georgia O'Keeffe and Helen Frankenthaler while he did so. Those later paintings, from a group he called Geophonics, are smaller than his largest canvases but still read as vast.

How he made them

Drawing came first, always. Hunter said he could not remember a time when he did not draw, and that if he wanted to know a place properly, what it looked like and how it felt, he drew it. He kept a set of sites he returned to again and again, most of them within a few hours' drive of his Melbourne studio, and he made straightforward drawings out of doors. Some of those turned into paintings and prints. Many simply stayed in the studio as a store of experience.

There was a second, separate kind of drawing done at home at night. For years after art school he worked on building sites or taught during the day and painted in the evening, and on nights when he was too tired to paint he still tried to draw. He described the clarity that working after dark gave him, with nothing to distract the eye except what was happening on the page, and he kept the habit for the rest of his life.

Printmaking mattered too. In the mid-1980s he began working in drawing, painting and printmaking side by side, a little of each every day, on a project called The Territory: 1st Hemisphere, which was shown at the Monash University Gallery in 1992 after about five years of work. He used it to see how a small wood engraving or mezzotint might change the look of a painting of the same subject. Some of the marks you see in his paintings began there, as translations of the way a burin cuts into copper or end-grain boxwood. In his last years he was making linocuts of storm clouds on sheets he had first washed with watercolour, an unlikely medium for something as soft as a cloud, which was the point.

He summed up his method with an image worth keeping in mind in front of the work. His approach, he said, emulated "the act of walking through a terrain and exploring it firsthand". The picture is found slowly, by going backwards and forwards, looking under stones.

Hunter and Nolan's Wimmera

Any painter of the Wimmera works in the shadow of Sidney Nolan, who painted the district in the 1940s while posted there during the war. Hunter was frank that it took him a long time to warm to Nolan; as a young artist he had been more drawn to abstraction. In 1984 some of his drawings from a series called The Pastoral Hero Suite were shown in New York in an exhibition called The Australians, alongside work by Nolan, Fred Williams and Arthur Boyd, and later that year a Pastoral Hero painting was bought by the National Gallery. In the late 1990s he made a body of work that imagined a long-distance drawing conversation with Nolan, from one Wimmera lookout to another, and that work was shown with Nolan's Wimmera paintings at the Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne in 2001.

How to look at a Hunter painting

These are not pictures that give you everything at three metres. Here is a ten-minute routine I use for dense, low-key paintings of this kind, and it suits Hunter well.

1. Minutes one and two: Stand well back, three or four metres if the room allows. Do not read the label yet. Ask only where the light is coming from, or whether there is any. Find the lightest area and the darkest area.
2. Minutes three to five: Walk in to about arm's length. Pick one small section, no bigger than a dinner plate, and look at how the marks are made. Are they scratched, brushed, dragged, rubbed back? Can you see earlier layers through later ones?
3. Minutes six to eight: Step back halfway. Try to read the painting as ground seen from above, then as ground seen from standing height. One of those usually clicks.
4. Minutes nine and ten: Now read the label. Title, date, medium. Go back to the painting once more with the title in your head and see whether it changes anything.

If you like the idea of walking through a picture, Hunter's paintings are close to ideal for it. The flatness of the Wimmera, where a fence line can run to the horizon, suits a painter who wants you to move slowly across a surface rather than into a deep perspective. For a very different approach to the same big Australian distances, the essay on John Olsen's landscapes is a good companion read.

Career points

Hunter studied at Prahran College of Advanced Education in Melbourne in the late 1970s, later completed a Master of Fine Art at the Victorian College of the Arts and a doctorate at Deakin University, and taught painting and drawing at the Victorian College of the Arts. He held his first solo exhibition in Melbourne in 1982 and went on to show more than twenty solo exhibitions, along with many group shows. Over the last fifteen or so years of his life he worked on what he called The Flatlands Project, and in his final years he was drawing in Tasmania, on the Skullbone Plains near Lake St Clair, and along the Great Dividing Range. His work is held by the National Gallery of Australia and the National Gallery of Victoria, as well as regional galleries. The National Portrait Gallery in Canberra holds a 2004 photographic portrait of him by Julian Kingma.

A closing thought

Hunter said he had never been motivated by simply finding a picturesque view. That is a useful warning for anyone looking at his paintings for the first time. There is no postcard here to recognise. What you get, if you give it the time, is the slow build of a place known by walking and drawing it for years, set down in brown, black and white. Hang that thought next to the painter notes on this site, and read the note on the German-born painter and sculptor Vera Möller, whose invented species come at the natural world from the opposite direction.