The exploration of a spiritual journey through the light of the Australian desert

Abstract

What is landscape painting? This research, my studio practice and the body of work that has resulted from both, attempts to establish a framework for the relevance of this question. Though the answer shifts according to prevailing theory and practice, there is a cohesive logic to the movements of our feelings about and around landscape painting. Each and every image has a story to tell. Landscape painting is an articulate language with a grammar capable of describing the link between a visible, external reality and current ideas around the environment and its sustainability. My investigation of landscape painting is motivated by spiritual and environmental concerns and a belief in the intrinsic value of nature. This project investigates the Australian Outback (arid zone) landscape as a metaphor for transcendence. The paintings associated with this research were begun during field trips to the Imaging the Land Research Initiative (ILIRI) research station at Fowlers Gap, north of Broken Hill. Through this body of work, I propose the re-establishment of a post-modern relationship with land, where place is embraced as the site of the experience of the transcendent. I use simplified or elemental landscape imagery as a vehicle to evoke the sublime at the ‘cusp’ of spiritual abstraction, where the potential for ambiguity is greatest and most resonant of the value of nature’s impact and culture’s explicit relationship to that. Through the act of painting, I seek to bring forth a turning point in the viewer’s imaginative comprehension by challenging conventional or orthodox interpretations of what painting is, and encouraging a reorientation of preconceptions towards an expanded definition of both painting and the subject of landscape. To further investigate the relevance of the sublime and the tradition of romanticism in contemporary landscape painting, the works of Caspar David Friedrich, Joseph Mallord William Turner and John Constable, whose works and way of seeing parenthesise my own, are examined. Some of their key paintings and their approaches to their subjects, most notably the land, are considered, and provide a contemporary context within which to situate this project.