landscape

East+West Annandale Galleries, 26 June - 3 Aug
Roy Jackson Stone Country Paintings Mary Place Gallery, 26 June - 7 July
Michelle Hiscock Paintings Australian Galleries, 18 June - 6 July
James Morrison Port Davey,Tasmania Darren Knight Gallery, 9 July - 27 July
Max Watters New Paintings (Broomfield and Stewarts Brook) Watters Gallery, 17 July - 10 August

Over the last few months space travel has been a much-discussed topic in the news. Civilians are paying enormous sums to journey into space, and with the discovery of water on Mars we have heard speculations about the establishment of human colonies there. Harrison Schmitt, an ex-astronaut on tour in Australia to promote space exploration suggested that humanity's natural will to explore, coupled with the desire to secure resources, guarantees the colonisation of space. The question, he said, is not whether this will occur, but when.

An unasked question in these reports was whether it would not be wiser to moderate the use of Earth's resources, rather than yoking other planets to the supply-demand economy. For is not the will to explore and exploit space an extension of the same drive that sees the ongoing environmental degradation of this planet? A planet which, even as we abuse it, continues to be uniquely hospitable to humanity's needs.

In such a climate, landscape painting (which in its broadest sense extends to address a great range of environmental phenomena) has the potential to be an extremely important activity. It is a way of affirming that humanity belongs and depends on Earth and, at its best, proposes constructive ways of looking at and thinking about the world. Like any genre of painting, its continued success as art demands a great deal of the artist. On the one hand an intelligent and creative relation to the tradition(s) of painting, and also a full, engaged response to present-day realities. Through July and into August an unusually varied range of exhibitions in commercial galleries hinted at the breadth of landscape painting being produced in Australia today.

At Annandale Galleries, East+West brought together bark paintings and painted sculptures by artists from the lands to either side of the Maningrida settlement in Arnhemland. As the heirs of a visual tradition that is specific to their country, the Maningrida artists sidestep many of the options and problems that face western artists. Simplification and abstraction seem to have been achieved with less regard for art than for communication itself. This exhibition featured some celebrated figures from the region - John Mawurndjul and John Bulunbulun both contributed major paintings - but theirs were not the only remarkable works. In James Iyuna's paintings of spirits, linear skeletons are augmented by incomparably fine cross-hatching, structures of great purity unfolding before the viewer. The same artist's wooden sculptures of Mimih spirits lean against the wall like broomsticks, dividing into two 'legs' a third of the way up from the floor. Painted with hatching and endowed with circular eyes, Iyuna transforms these pieces of dead wood into lively, even mischievous presences. The larger Yawk Yawk spirit sculptures by Owen Yalandja were another highlight of the exhibition. Weighty and quirkily unbalanced, they stand at or above human height with a more serious demeanour.

The vitality of the works in East+West, not to mention their great beauty, made the exhibition powerful in its own right and a welcome antidote to mainstream contemporary art. Terry Ngamandara Wilson's Waterholes at Balpanara reminded one of how a great painting can hold seemingly incompatible qualities in balance. A work of striking abstractness, it possessed an iconic simplicity of composition, dynamism in the diagonal orientations of its gridded hatching and hypnotic, close-range detail.

Roy Jackson aspires to something similar to the Maningrida artists: to perceive the landscape through memory and bodily experience as much as through vision or intellect. Not endowed with their familial lineage of creativity, Jackson's work has grown in the space between artistic precedents of his own choosing. Among them there are undoubtedly some indigenous artists (Emily Kane Kngwarrye above all); also Brits and Americans, for the scale and craft of his paintings places them squarely in the line of twentieth century abstraction. Barely alluding to identifiable objects, the works in Stone Country Paintings use colour, mark and shape to articulate landscape sensations: clouds becoming rain, angular growth rhythms, or the finding of a path through dense scrub. With their arrangement of a great deal of visual information into an instantly comprehensible image, they raise the question of whether truly satisfying simplicity comes about through the resolution of complexity.

Jackson's work evinces a faith that painting can be a source of 'new' images, presenting fresh relations of form to subject. His repertoire of forms is broad and suggests a mind inquiring enough to avoid self-repetition. But there is in his work an air of containment, of the artist working within his capabilities to ends that he understands well. With so many abstract lyricists having painted the landscape in recent memory, one would like to see Jackson distinguish himself more markedly; to throw a spanner in the works and attain a vitality that he can surely achieve, but this exhibition only hints at.

Far from Jackson's abstractions, Michelle Hiscock's approach to landscape relates pictorial convention to the observation of actual places. Using a limited palette on a very small scale, her twenty-eight delicate oil paintings bear more than a passing resemblance to the plein-air studies made by nineteenth-century French painters on their tours of Italy. Through them Hiscock seems to be explaining the mechanics (or poetics) of nineteenth century vision, and applying its devices to local subjects. From painting to painting one witnesses a shift in the quality of forms: from a certain inflexibility in the views of idealised Classical scenes to a more open spatiality in the treatment of recogniseable locations (Centennial Park, Rushcutters Bay, the Shoalhaven). The exhibition demonstrates beyond doubt that art begins when the artist stops worshipping tradition and adapts its conventions to their own ends.

It comes as a surprise that Hiscock wants to spell this out. It is hardly the case that she needs to 'shape up' through contact with her roots. Several years ago she was painting with equal aesthetic sophistication to this and greater ambition. Her drawings and paintings of that period depicted overtly contemporary subjects - cars in traffic, urban and industrial scenes - and successfully managed the difficult interplay of reportage and sentiment. The current works are as surely handled, but withdraw into a field of non-problems that neither seem to need or permit exploration.

A genuine problem for contemporary landscapists is how to reclaim the genre's capacity for showing a great range of the world's phenomena and situations in a single picture. This is one of landscape painting's traditional strengths (think of Lorenzetti or Breughel) and it seems to answer an enduring human desire to see the world represented in all its variety. What sort of picture could, in the contemporary world, hold all the pieces together? James Morrison's Port Davey, Tasmania proposed an answer. Using disjunctions of subject and scale Morrison zooms in or pans away from the objects of his interest, overcoming the limitations of a fixed, one-eye-closed vantage-point. The resulting scenes and situations can be highly improbable. In The Island a family of 'primitives' is dwarfed by enormous flowers, blooming against a streaky sky of hot pink and orange. The floral forms are the picture's protagonists; the human figures are present to round out a quirky impression of pre-historic life that may be joking in the details, but has to be taken seriously for sheer imaginal dynamism.

While the setting of contrasting elements against each other is the main idea in Morrison's paintings, he sometimes works towards a more traditional wholeness. Small Brown Trout is such a work. In this elegantly composed picture the flights of fancy are not spatial but narrative. Platypus, rodents, birds and fish go about the business of being alive and visible in a pictorial harmony that might be cloying if it were not painted so exquisitely. It is when working in this more naturalistic, less bizarre manner that Morrison's paintings seem most heartfelt. This is not to dismiss the artist's bent for the fantastic, which permits him broach subjects and concerns that might be difficult to combine in any other way (sea creatures, tribal societies, aeroplane accidents). But when his super-impositions fail, as with the female head transposed over unrelated forms in Lucy, the pictures can tend towards the ridiculous.

Showing a total aversion to the fantastic were Max Watters's New Paintings (Broomfield and Stewarts Brook). Watters was born and has always lived in Muswellbrook. He paints its buildings and the landscapes that envelop or are glimpsed behind them. An untrained artist, he draws on convention when it serves his purposes, but maintains a conception of form that is inward looking and impervious to stylistic trends. His application of linear perspective is guided by a personal logic, as though he worked it out alone and over time. His colours and textural effects have become so attuned to the subjects he paints that form and subject, conception and execution are inextricably one. Watters's work is formulaic, but repetition has not deadened his sensibility. If anything, his paintings are getting better.

The greatest pleasure of this exhibition was a quartet of paintings depicting a shearing shed and ramshackle yard. Each painting places the viewer opposite a different wall, so that the series functions as a circumnavigation, leaving no doubt as to the artist's attentiveness to the motif (the details in each work are verifiable through reference to the other three, and they add up). Watters's creation of four such differently satisfying images - equally strong and well-realised ideas - from a restricted set of elements attests to his resourcefulness as a picture-maker. Like all of his work, this series convinces one of the preciousness of perception; showing how, through concentration and the sustained effort of making, the painter can transform an unremarkable piece of reality into an image that embodies what it is to be alive and sensitive to life's possibilities.

-Ernest Foster