Exhibition:
Sydney Nolan: a new retrospective
Art Gallery of New South Wales
2 November 07 – 3 February 08
Today I looked again into the work of Sydney Nolan.
I had been to see his Antarctic paintings in March this year, at the Mornington Art Gallery. The Post, An expeditioner’s gesture describes how it was there that I met Jack Ward. This meeting was perhaps the beginning of my interest in the gestural responses that people can make to the Antarctic landscape. It was they way that Jack gestured in response to the paintings that intrigued me.
The cold blue lines of Nolan’s Antarctic Bird (1964) connect the albatross and ice as if in a single movement gesture.
I imagine melting dress dummies amongst icebergs when looking into Convict in the swamp (1958) and Woman in Billabong (1957). Like the albatross, the man and woman have merged with the landscape. As a creature comprising mainly of water, I imagine myself a melting berg.
There is a sense of theatre in some of Nolan’s, of characters playing out classic scripts. He used myths, such as that of Icarus and Kelly the Australian bushranger, to express his own personal stories. His Icare (1939-40) stands between the sun and moon – and in a rainbow – merging with the landscape,
Reading how the idea came to Nolan for his painting Boy and the moon (c1940), I imagine a mind-map of Antarctica, containing, as our own minds do, multiple perspectives of a place:
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This was a large exhibition of Noland’s work, including landscapes made in response to various places: Australia, Africa, China, and Antarctica.
What stood out for me in all his work was a sense of a sense of his physical presence in these places. His responses were made through gestural applications of paint. And his gestures were different, reflecting the different landscape he was in.
His African gestures were like the strident dappling of light through foliage, and the patterns of the leopard.
His Chinese gestures were soft sprays of cloud shrouding mountains.
In his Antarctica (1964), paint was pushed and scraped with more energy than in other landscapes. It’s as if the paint emulates the natural forces that formed Antarctica – and lines are harsh and sudden.
Nolan described Australian landscapes as softer, smoother places, reminding us, in the exhibition’s accompanying video, Nolan – in his words (2007), that the perception of Australia as ‘harsh’ was a European one, and that Aborigines do not see it in that way.
Engraving Perspex blocks with diatoms and ‘Icare’-like creatures – merges fact with fantasy in a kind of suspended animation, or dance, frozen in ice.
Loosely drawn, they gesture amongst themselves, suggesting a sense of community.
Uncoloured, the lines are best seen as shadows cast on light ground, or against darkness.
The Perspex is thick, and lines both sides interact to form the whole image. Movement of the eye creates a sense of space, through muliplaning.