Reading an Australian landscape painting

I grew up in the Hunter Valley, where the land runs out in long folds to the ranges and the light at noon flattens everything into the same tired gold. It took me years of standing in front of paintings to realise that what I was looking at, in the Australian rooms of the state galleries, was a long argument about exactly that problem. How do you paint a country where the light is so hard, the distances so large and the horizon so often a ruler-straight line with nothing much on it?

Australian painters have given very different answers. Knowing a few of them makes any landscape painting easier to read, whether it hangs in a public collection or in a small show down the road. This piece follows three broad approaches, then sets out a way of reading space, viewpoint and mark-making in any landscape you meet.

Light first: the Heidelberg painters

In the late 1880s a group of young Melbourne painters, among them Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton, Charles Conder and Frederick McCubbin, took to painting outdoors at camps on the city's fringe, at Box Hill and later around Heidelberg. They worked directly from the motif, in the open air, trying to catch the light and atmosphere of a particular moment. The French called this painting en plein air, and the Australians brought it home to bush paddocks and dry creek beds.

In August 1889 Roberts, Streeton and Conder staged the 9 by 5 Impression Exhibition in Melbourne. Most of the works were small oil sketches on panels about nine by five inches, many of them painted on cedar cigar-box lids. The size matters. A little panel can be carried anywhere and finished in an hour, so it records a glance: a patch of sky, a cart on a road, the hot white of a wall.

When you stand in front of a Heidelberg painting, look at how the light is made. Streeton in particular pushed his palette towards high, bleached blues and creams to suggest glare, and you will often find that shadows are not black or brown but violet, blue or green. His 1891 painting Fire's on, in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, shows the cutting of a railway tunnel through the Blue Mountains; the rock face glares almost white, and the figures are small against it. The space in these pictures is still conventional. There is a foreground, a middle distance and a horizon, and you look in from a fixed point, as if through a window. What is new is the heat.

Looking down and getting inside: the mid-century

By the 1950s and 1960s the window was being taken apart. Many painters had their first experience of flying in the late 1940s and 1950s, and the view from the air (no horizon, the land spread out like a map) offered a way out of the old foreground-to-horizon box.

Fred Williams

Fred Williams, working around Melbourne, spent the early 1960s rethinking what a landscape painting needed. In his two series of paintings of the You Yangs, the granite ranges near Geelong, painted in the mid-1960s, the horizon often all but vanishes. The ground becomes a broad, tilted field of colour, and trees and shrubs are reduced to scattered marks, dabs and flicks of paint across it. You are not looking at a view so much as at the texture of a place, the way scrub is distributed over a hillside.

Later, Williams painted from the air, and towards the end of his life he made his Pilbara series after visits to the north-west of Western Australia in 1979, combining aerial views with close views of the ground. Those late paintings are a good place to watch the two viewpoints, high and near, working against each other.

John Olsen

John Olsen went further in another direction. His You Beaut Country paintings, made in the early 1960s after time at Hill End in New South Wales, are full of wandering, scribbled lines, small creatures and patches of colour, with no single viewpoint and often no horizon at all. You seem to look down and move through at the same time, as if the painting were a record of walking and noticing rather than standing still. His paintings are often described as putting the viewer inside the land rather than outside looking at it, and his later paintings of Lake Eyre continue that idea on a vast, dry scale. Our essay on how to look at John Olsen's landscapes goes into his line and his creatures in more detail.

There were other routes too. In the 1940s Sidney Nolan, posted to the Wimmera in western Victoria during his army service, painted flat, open country under huge skies, a region later painters have kept returning to. The Melbourne painter Philip Hunter, who grew up in the Wimmera, is one; our note on Philip Hunter looks at how he works with that flat country.

Later approaches: country, maps and the long look

From the early 1970s, at Papunya, west of Alice Springs, Aboriginal men began painting on boards and canvas, and the Western Desert painting movement grew from there. Many non-Indigenous viewers first read these works as aerial maps, and it is easy to see why: concentric circles, tracks and dotted fields can look like a view from above. But that reading only goes so far. The paintings relate to Country and to Ancestral stories held by the artists and their communities, and much of what they mean is not public. The honest approach for most of us is to look carefully at what is visible (structure, rhythm, colour, the sheer labour of the surface) and to read what the artist or their community has chosen to share, rather than guess at the rest.

Among contemporary painters, the landscape is approached in many ways at once. Some work from long immersion in a single region, returning to it over years; Jo Bertini, who spent a decade as an expedition artist in remote desert country, is one example, and our note on Jo Bertini follows that thread. Others paint memory, weather, damage, or the marks of farming and mining on the ground.

How to read space, viewpoint and mark-making

Whatever the period, the same handful of questions will open up almost any landscape painting. If you have tried the method in how to look at a painting slowly, these slot neatly into its composition and surface stages.

Where is the horizon?

Find it first. A low horizon gives you sky, air and distance. A high horizon gives you ground, and tends to make the land press up towards you. No horizon at all usually means you are above the land or among it, not in front of it.

Where am I standing?

Ask where the painter has put you. On a road looking along it? On a hilltop? In the air? Too close to see anything but grass? The viewpoint tells you what kind of relationship with the land the painting proposes: survey, memory, walking, intimacy.

How is distance made?

In a traditional picture, things get smaller, paler and bluer as they recede. Look for whether the painter uses these cues or refuses them. A flat field of evenly sized marks denies distance and keeps your eye on the surface.

What are the marks doing?

Step close. Are trees painted as trees, or as a single flick of the brush? Are there drawn lines over the paint? Is the paint thick and dragged, or thin and stained? The marks are often where the painter's feeling about a place lives, more than in the subject.

Where is the light coming from?

Is there a single sun casting shadows, or an even glare without shadows at all? Hard, shadowless light is one of the oldest Australian problems, and every painter answers it differently.

A worked example

Imagine a painting about 150 centimetres wide. The top fifth is a flat band of pale, almost white blue. Below it, the ground is a warm field of ochre and dull rose, scattered with small dark marks, some round, some like commas, thinning towards the top. There is no road, no fence, no figure. Near the bottom edge, a few marks are larger and more loosely painted.

Reading it with the questions above: the horizon is very high, so the ground dominates. The larger marks at the bottom and smaller ones higher up give a faint sense of recession, but the even colour keeps the field flat, so you hover between looking across and looking down. The marks are clearly scrub, but painted as gestures rather than plants. The light is a shadowless glare. You could say that the painter is less interested in a view than in the feel of standing in hot, open country with low scrub around your boots.

Nothing in that reading needed a label. Once you have done it, the label (a place name, a date) becomes a check on your own looking rather than a substitute for it. And the next time you see a Heidelberg sketch, a Williams hillside or an Olsen tangle, you will know which questions to ask first.