John McDonald’s review of the Australian Impressionism show, currently on at Melbourne’s Ian Potter Centre, applauds Tom Roberts’s eschewing of Victorian art’s ‘literary baggage’. (The Sydney Morning Herald 19-20 May 2007, p.16)
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In his 9″x5″‘s, Tom Roberts chose to convey small moments of the everyday rather than lengthy literary allegories. Neither do they illustrate a political or literary theory. Visual improvisations set in paint, these small pictures are immediate responses to particular places at particular times.
Improvising with paint in response to the changing light of Australian bush, Tom worked his brush with quick, investigative strokes, as an explorer marking new ground. No bush walker, he seldom ventured far from the comforts of a camp or patron’s homestead, but as an artist he trod new ground. He painted each new image with the eye of one seeing something for the first time.
Enlisting just enough of the Victorian painting conventions of his day, he bridged the Europe he knew with the moment he was discovering. The way he made and framed his loose gestural marks acclimatized his European audience to the strangeness of Antipodean land. Using oils with the flat Impressionist brush, his palette varied only slightly from the conventional palette when compared with his French contemporaries. Framing the cigar box lids in heavy wood frames provided windows through which the white man’s eye could see ‘landscape’.
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When things went well with his painting, Tom would often dance, or burst into song. Art making was to be enjoyed. The agonies undergone to complete the “Big Picture” (The Opening of Parliament, 1901), was an aberration that followed a wrong path seeking fame and fortune. His final years, working between Tasmania and mainland Australia, produced some of his most joyous pictures, according to his grandson (my father). After his lifelong wife Lillian’s death, he married her childhood friend Jean Boyes. Jean brought him financial security as well as great happiness.
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Aware of the unique qualities of Australian light, Tom and his followers sought “to obtain first records of effects widely differing, and often of a widely fleeting character” (5×5 exhibition catalogue, 1889).
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Aware of the unique qualities of Antarctic light, those who have witnessed it are often drawn to record its changes. Time-lapse photography is a popular response of Antarctic base workers, with examples capturing light glistening on grease ice, and the hues of cloud and ice in Casey Bay changing in the lowering summer sun.
Changes in the Antarctic light over a year, witnessed by so few, have been eloquently described in the diaries of winterers such as Jack Ward. The changes he describes in the external landscape, and its reflection in the internal landscape, will be the subject of another Journey.