Hobie Porter Catalogue Final 2016.Pdf

he Warrnambool Art Gallery (WAG) celebrates its 130th anniversary in 2016 and we are truly delighted to mark this occasion through the exhibition of exquisite paintings by Hobie Porter and the acquisition of his meticulously crafted Tower HillT landscape to the WAG collection. The latter is with support from the Robert Salzer Foundation. WAG holds a major collection of artworks featuring the South-West Victoria region and a significant collection of artworks made over time at the Tower Hill site, the State’s first national park and most remarkable geological formation, near Warrnambool. ower Hill is an enormous Porter’s paintings are similarly centre is managed by the Worn volcanic crater edged with beds precision-crafted to achieve a high Gundidj Aboriginal Cooperative. ofT volcanic ash. The swampy floor of degree of verisimilitude. While his the crater is marked by cone-shaped canvasses are recognisable and carefully We extend our warm thanks to hills which after rain, become islands delineated towards an accurate Hobie who has been both generous surrounded by a shallow lake. Its account, the Tower Hill Project is a and enthusiastic in presenting formation is known as a ‘nested maar’ construction; based on photographic this exhibition, along with his and it is the largest example of its references of a place, which is itself representative gallery, Arthouse type in Victoria. In the early years of a recreated landscape, based on a Gallery, private lenders and Ruth European settlement much of Tower painting. Porter introduces a second Pullin who has contributed a scholarly Hill’s natural vegetation was cleared visual plane; superimposing images of essay. WAG exhibitions are a team and the land was used for farming and flora, feathers and artefacts collected effort: The professional curatorial team quarrying. Destructive uses continued on-site. Intriguingly, while deliberately of Murray Bowes and Gareth Colliton, until the 1960s when a major re- placed in surreal formations, these focussed education program by vegetation program began. overlayed remnants are the ‘natural’ Agostina Hawkins and front of house aspect. This process acknowledges the administrators, Oksana Khaidurova This program was largely guided by a more complex relationship between and Mirjam van Berge are vital to our majestic vista of Tower Hill created by us and our natural environment success. We are appreciative of the Eugene von Guérard in 1855 which is and also modes of representation assistance from volunteers: Valerie held at the Warrnambool Art Gallery*. and understanding that have been Cameron, Jessica Meggs, Megan Von Guérard’s painting was executed transformed since von Guérard’s Punch, and Phillip Ward. As always in fastidious detail and its scientific time. The passing of time allows us to we are grateful for ongoing support accuracy enabled botanists to identify speculate on accretions of meaning specific plants: grass and ferns on from the WAG Foundation, donors, the island, wattles, sheoaks, banksias and histories both at Tower Hill benefactors and Warrnambool City on the cones and reeds and tussocks and in these two connected works. Council which enables the Gallery in the marshes (Brady, A. 1992:6). Particularly the complexities and and the passionate arts culture of Today its ecosystem has been largely changing perspectives and the coming Warrnambool to thrive. re-established. Porter attributes much of the European gaze onto a rich of his influence to von Guérard. In terrain with its own encoding through Vanessa Gerrans - Director particular, the Tower Hill painting has its first inhabitants. Traditional owners played a major role in his thinking and continue to have a close relationship is the basis for his Tower Hill Project with the land and the beautiful 1962 and subsequent exhibition. Robin Boyd-designed interpretive References: Parks Victoria Park Notes, ‘Tower Hill Reserve’; Brady, A. A Centenary History of Tower Hill, Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, 1992. Ducks Down *Von Guérard was commissioned in 1855 by James Dawson, owner of a pastoral property near Mount Eccles to the west, to create a large-scale oil painting that would capture the vegetation before 2015 the intervention of European settlers. In 1966, Mrs E. Thornton, the granddaughter of James Dawson, presented the painting to the Victorian Fisheries and Wildlife Division (now known as the Oil on polyester canvas Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning) and since 1978 it has been on loan to the Warrnambool Art Gallery. 100 x 120cm rt and nature have interacted in the story of Tower Hill in a way rarely, if ever, replicated anywhere in the world. The representation of the spectacular nested caldera – a cluster of scoria cones surrounded by a shallow lake and nestled within theA crater of a larger extinct volcano – began, post European settlement, with Eugene von Guérard’s Tower Hill 1855. on Guérard’s defining image of detail and as elements in an integrated natural order of an ecosystem could the subject played a seminal role whole. His work is a celebration of the be catastrophic: such was the case at Vin the physical restoration of the site miraculous diversity of vegetation and Tower Hill. in the 1960s and it has informed the birdlife that flourished in this fertile responses of succeeding generations volcanic and coastal ecosystem. The Von Guérard’s painting was of Tower Hill artists in a multitude of interconnectedness of all phenomena commissioned in 1855 by James ways. Artists, along with the thousands at the site is expressed compositionally Dawson, an informed and of visitors who have stood at ‘Von in the unifying, circular movement environmentally sensitive pastoralist, as Guérard Lookout’, have seen this established by the rain clouds moving a record of ‘one of the most beautiful landscape as through a ‘von Guérard in from the coast over the island of and interesting specimens of an extinct glass’. Hobie Porter, in his Tower volcanic cones, across the shallow volcano in all Victoria.’ Thirty-six Hill series, has engaged with the lake and on to the clear blue skies years later, in 1891, Dawson wrote environmental and aesthetic legacy of on the left. to the Camperdown Chronicle of his von Guérard’s painting to create works dismay at the devastation of Tower that once again reveal the power of art In his ability to see the environmental Hill, the result of the combined to focus attention on the critical issues interconnectedness of phenomena effects of fire, clearing, grazing and that confront this rare and fragile at Tower Hill von Guérard reflected quarrying for scoria, introduced species ecosystem. the influence of one of the greatest – boxweed, thistle and rabbits – the thinkers of the nineteenth century, damming of the lake and its use as an On August 6, 1855, when von Guérard the natural scientist, Alexander von outlet for urban waste. Prophetically stood on the north-eastern side of Humboldt 1769-1859. Although he foresaw the value of von Guérard’s Tower Hill, the site had suffered eclipsed by Darwin in the English- ‘beautifully and faithfully’ executed none of the interventions that would speaking world Humboldt’s painting for ‘future generations’. devastate it over the subsequent influence on his generation cannot century. In his topographically and be overestimated. His vision of the In the 1960s, in a project led by Max geologically accurate oil painting, interconnectedness of every aspect Downes, von Guérard’s Tower Hill, completed in his Melbourne studio just of the natural world, a commonplace supplemented by James Bonwick’s over seven weeks later, von Guérard today, was groundbreaking in his day. 1857 descriptive account of its depicted everything he saw on that day, As early as the 1830s Humboldt saw southwestern slopes, became the model Eugene von Guérard both individually and in microscopic that disruptions or interventions to the for the environmental restoration of Tower Hill 1855 oil on canvas 68.1 x 122 cm On loan from the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning. Presented by Miss Effie Thornton, 1966 09/027 Tower Hill. It was an unprecedented burning off to encourage young grass Tower Hill Lament, Not all Boomerangs and shards of glass – over the surface and unparalleled attempt to restore a and to attract game. Come Back and White Fella Midden of the landscapes, elements that bring landscape on the basis of a painting. draw on the language of the Romantic the environmental challenges faced Von Guérard’s painting became an Observation in the field, the Sublime. In Bleeding Manna Pattern, by Tower Hill into sharp focus. The authoritative document in a way in foundation of both Humboldtian Tower Hill the accelerated movement perspectival illusionism established which the artist could never have science and of von Guérard’s artistic into distance, the result of effects in each landscape is contradicted by envisaged. The detail and accuracy of practice, is also the starting point for similar to those seen in time-lapse the emphatic assertion of the flatness his observations provided invaluable Hobie Porter. His series of Tower Hill photography, dramatically intensifies of the picture plane. And while the information but von Guérard was not paintings is the result of successive the sense of vast space. Compositions, fall of light on passages of water, the a botanical artist: concerns expressed, visits and unhurried time spent at in keeping with traditional practice, flurries of water birds and areas

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