Townsville
Overcoming artistic preconceptions concerning landscape is one of the greatest challenges when an artist is faced with a hitherto artistically unexplored natural environment. And though most natural environments lie passive, there are qualities about the tropics that make nature active, aggressive even; the everpresence of parching heat, the potential of cyclones and torrential seasonal rain.
While the artists discussed in the previous Letter from Townsville dealt with this challenge by conceptualizing and personifying the forces of nature, the following artists: James Brown and Anne Lord, take a more optical and perceptual approach.
Anne Lord has a strong bias towards the perceptual. Having grown up in the area west of Townsville, she claims this landscape as her birthright, "home to grow up in, home to return to". She came back to the North after completing her studies in Sydney. Her prints, drawings, and large paintings have almost colourless fields of very high tone broken marks, resulting in an often densely described but very airy surface. Stylistic elements are appropriated from the Impressionists and Jackson Pollock. Not frightened by the monotony of the environment she makes it her job to point out its subtlety, (in case one had overlooked it) and forces us to reconsider in her work the clichés of landscape construction. The almost total lack of colour in her work contrasts very strongly, with the previous artists I have discussed. Her work comments on the intensity of the tropical sun that bleaches out almost all colour sensations. Anne was a participant in the Working on Paper exhibition in the Perc Tucker Regional Gallery, during September 1987.
James Brown’s work, though using landscape as a vehicle, is really about pleasure: the
Robert Preston, Detail, Sketchbook Page, 1986
