Jo Bertini: an expedition artist's deserts in oil

Most of us picture the Australian desert the way the colonial explorers described it: red, empty and hostile. Jo Bertini has spent much of her working life arguing with that picture, on foot. For about ten years she walked with camel expeditions through some of the most remote country on the continent, drawing for scientists as she went, and her paintings of those places are full of water, plants, birds and colour. Later she carried the same habits to the deserts of north-western India and the American Southwest. Her pictures are a good test of how we look at landscape painting, because they ask us to drop the clichés first.

Early years and training

Bertini grew up on a property near Oberon, in the central tablelands of New South Wales. Her CV records a Bachelor of Arts in fine arts at the University of Sydney in the early 1980s, followed by most of a decade travelling and living abroad, including years in Italy and France, where she worked as a writer and illustrator. Back in Sydney in 1991, she studied life drawing, painting and printmaking at the National Art School.

Writing has stayed part of her practice. In 1995 she wrote and illustrated a book, A Man and His Camel, for University of Queensland Press, and in the same year she wrote a weekly art column for the Sydney Morning Herald. Residencies followed at Bundanon in 2001 and at Hill End, through Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, in 2003.

Walking with camels

After Bertini returned to Australia she began making regular trips to Alice Springs and to remote communities, wanting, as Outback Magazine put it, to reconnect with her own country. From 2006 to 2016 she was the expedition artist for Australian Desert Expeditions, which uses camels to support scientific and Indigenous research in arid country. A trip could last up to eight weeks: walking with the camel string by day, sleeping in a swag at night.

The job was more practical than romantic. Outback Magazine describes her documenting every part of the surveys, making scientific sketches, mapping areas of Aboriginal significance and recording the changing moods of the country. The American Scholar adds a reason drawing mattered so much: photography was often not permitted, and archaeological sites could not be disturbed, so quick drawings of people, plants and animals became part of the scientific record. She has said what she wanted most was to change the idea of a barren desert. "I like to change people's perception of the red, barren desert," she told Outback Magazine, describing instead a desert garden with birds, frogs and even fish.

A book of this work, Jo Bertini Fieldwork, was published in 2014.

Two prize paintings

Two finalist entries at the Art Gallery of New South Wales show how the fieldwork turns into studio painting. In 2010 she was hung in the Sulman Prize with Tracking the night parrot, a title that names one of the rarest and most elusive birds of inland Australia. In the 2015 Wynne Prize she showed Mound spring, oil on canvas, 168 by 198 centimetres. Her statement describes a mound spring on a rocky escarpment between the dunes of the central Simpson Desert: a permanent water source and an Aboriginal sacred site holding cultural material, ancient relics and its own plants and animals.

That is a characteristic subject. Water in the desert, and the life and meaning gathered around it, is a long way from the empty red plain.

India and New Mexico

Her work moved beyond Australia in the mid-2010s. Her CV records Australian and Indian government support for work in Kutch and Gujarat in north-western India in 2016 and 2017, and an exhibition, Living Lightly, at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in New Delhi in 2016. The same year Murray Art Museum Albury showed Hortus Conclusus, The Enclosed Garden.

She then settled in northern New Mexico, near Abiquiú, the high desert country associated with Georgia O'Keeffe. In 2022 the Galleries of Contemporary Art at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs showed Deep in Land, large canvases of the Four Corners region, and in 2023 the Blumenschein Museum in Taos presented Mountain of the Watchful Heart.

How the paintings are made

The method has stayed consistent across continents. Artist Profile magazine describes Bertini making plein air sketches in gouache and watercolour, often while walking, and building them into oil paintings back in the studio. Recent canvases are big, around two metres a side, and often on French polyester canvas rather than linen; one 2022 work adds iridescent pigments to the oil.

The colour surprises people. Writers on her New Mexico work list bottle greens, lavender, magenta, teal and grey-blue alongside the yellows of local shrubs and trees, and swirling pinks and oranges. She has said she is not after photographic accuracy, though the colours come from what is around her. In her 2024 artist statement she describes her paintings as composites of different times and places, joining the passing details of seasons to the much older forms of desert land.

How to look at a Jo Bertini

Paintings made from walking reward a walker's way of looking. Try this the next time you stand in front of one of hers, or any large painting of open country.

• First, find the ground. Is there a horizon, or are you looking down at the land as if from a rise? Painters of open country often tilt the ground up toward the viewer.
• Next, look for water and life: a spring, a creek line, a bird, a stand of trees. These are often the real subject.
• Then read the colour as information. A lilac shadow or a green flush across sand can record a season or a time of day.
• After that, find the places where the painting changes speed, from loose washes of colour to more detailed drawing. Those passages often come straight from a field sketch.
• Finally, read the title. Bertini's titles tend to name a place, a creature or an idea, and they change how you see everything else.

My own habit with paintings of country I have never visited is to look for a minute before reading anything, then read the title and statement, then look again for five more minutes. It is surprising how much the second look finds.

A short close

Jo Bertini's paintings are a record of long walks, careful drawing and a refusal to see deserts as empty. They sit well beside other Australian painters who have worked through the land on foot; the essay on John Olsen, who painted Lake Eyre and the inland, and the note on Guy Maestri make good companions. For more on reading landscape painting, try the looking closely room and the painters page.