Edith Cowan University Copyright Warning
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Edith Cowan University Copyright Warning You may print or download ONE copy of this document for the purpose of your own research or study. The University does not authorize you to copy, communicate or otherwise make available electronically to any other person any copyright material contained on this site. You are reminded of the following: Copyright owners are entitled to take legal action against persons who infringe their copyright. A reproduction of material that is protected by copyright may be a copyright infringement. A court may impose penalties and award damages in relation to offences and infringements relating to copyright material. Higher penalties may apply, and higher damages may be awarded, for offences and infringements involving the conversion of material into digital or electronic form. Al lan W. Baker, Notes from Wittenoom II (1964) Allan W. Baker, Blue Asbestos Min ers (1964) Allan W. Baker, Th e Driller Wittenoom (1965) to the notion of realism, even perhaps socialist realism, a term that has been unjustly derided over the years. His working method began with almost academic studies, often in brown tones reminiscent of the great nineteenth century realists, such as Courbet-the first artists to search for a poetics of contemporary labour. He then transposed these into the vocabulary and rhetoric of modernity best represented at that time by the post-war work of Picasso. Baker was a great traveller and may well have see n some of this at first hand. His Fisherman (1965), was originally bought for the Graylands collection from the artist. In 2001 he commented: My interest in painting has been about people in their environment, and Fisherman was inspired by the fishermen mending their nets in Fremantle. Thi s more abstracted version followed the more realist image.6 The figure of the fisherman is posed so as to emphasise his labour. His legs are spread out across the lower half of the canvas. Baker makes compelling use of the curves of the net as it hangs between the fisherman's upturned feet. The rapidly foreshortened perspective of the figure focusses on the relatively tiny gesture of his hands as he mends a small break in the net, his face tilted downward in concentration. Fisherman is a perfect summary of the monumental humanity of labour; endless small, often precise acts add up to the great achievements of civilisation. The forms of Fisherman have much in common with those to be found in Picasso's Night Fishing at Antibes (1939), and related paintings which were widely exhibited and publicised in the post-war period. The University Collection also holds a number of studies of asbestos miners also made by Baker in the mid-1960s. They mark the beginning of his long fascination with the subject. He was still making paintings of miners in the mid- 1990s. In Blue Asbestos Miners (1964), Baker makes full use of the unusual medium of oil on paper. This allows him an extremely responsive luminous technique that simultaneously retains the hard edges and sharp perspectives of the machine-carved landscape in which he sets hi s heroic drillers. The Driller Wittenoom (1965), shows a very different approach to figure drawing. The blocky charcoal outlines of the sq uatting figure are reminiscent of some work by Henry Moore. It is a real scu lptor's drawing, remarkably so for a painter. The pages of a journal that Baker kept at Wittenoom are even more like Moore's drawings of miners and of some of his less surreal war-time studies of the London Underground. The volume of the figure in action in an enclosed space has always been a challenge of both observation and expression for the artist, one that Baker's notes indicate that he was eager to take up. Bryant McDiven was neither a modernist nor a socialist in the manner of Allan Baker, yet he too was touched by the ) all-pervasive sense of the modern as it slowly appeared all around him. One of the earliest works by him in the University Collection is a watercolour, Quarry Dust (1953). H e._g:~ the Gr<!Jilands collection in 1955 while he was lecturing J at Claremont. His earliest works are small tree and pool watercolour studies very much in the manner of Linton or Webb. L Quarry Dust, however, is different. It shows a downward view on a series of open wood-framed buildings. They are to the right of a road that descends to the rocky rift of the quarry. The entire painting is an exercise in warm and cold greys an d hard edges, straight or rounded. The open volumes framed in timbers across the centre of the picture plane draw one's gaze ever deeper into the stony valley. The jagged lines of human occupation seem to have blasted all the sweetness from nature. McDiven remained highly aware of this tension between the comfort of the natural world and the harsh abrasive necessities of human existence throughout his artistic career. His best known painting, Narrows Bridge (1959), is also in the University Collection. He origipally d_onate_d_jLto the Graylands collec;tion the year that it was painted. In 2001 McDiven remarked that although the construction of the Narrows Bridge was a thrilling technical accomplishment, it was accompanied by the loss of some natural beauty. This painting was a celebration of an event unique to Western Au stralia. It was an event which heralded a major change to the way that the public of Western Australia perceived and used its capital city. It was a time of great unhappiness for many people because , although it united two major sections of the metropolitan area, the Narrows Bridge project involved the loss of a beautiful section of the Swan River. Th e Narrows Bridge was a man-made object of great beauty and represented a significant technological achievement in the use of stresse d co ncrete construction-an innovation for Western Australia. The whole project, whether we liked it or not, brought profound changes to Perth and rocketed Western Australia into the second half of the twentieth ce ntury.7 He thought that the modernistic nature of his subject, at least for Perth, formed a stepping stone to his subsequent painting, of which the University Collection holds some good examples . It is difficult, however, to follow the relationship between the Narrows Bridge and a painting such as Before Then (1969). Its bleak hillsides bearing fragile classical ruins with little structural logic are more closely aligned to the surrealism of James Gleeson. Bryant McDiven, Quarry Dust (1953) Narrows Bridge itself appears to have a completely different source, the views of the Seine at Argenteuil, and sites close by, painted by the impression ist Claude Monet in the 1870s. A number of these show a yacht in full sail close under the arches of a newly built bridge, in this case a railway bridge . McDiven's choice of viewpoint and motif in Narrows Bridge is an unusual one. He appears to have se lected the view from the South Perth bank of the river so as to include references to King's Park and the city beyond. This low, relatively intimate standpoint is characteristic of Monet's views of Argenteuil, as is the position of the yacht. It is not, however, typical of the available images of the Narrows wh ich are nearly all viewed from above, beginning with the well known future fantasy image, Perth in the Year 2029, which was published in the centenary issue of the Western Moil in 1929. Like McDiven, Monet was also responding to the rapid modernisation of hi s city, Pari s. McDiven probably responded at an intuitive level to the French master's motifs. He had no opportunity, however, to appreciate the technique which accompanied them. Instead he used a great deal of heavy impasto to symbolise, rather than to represent, light falling across massive slabs of concrete. The very clouds seem hard and heavy. McDiven's greatest significance for the University Collection lies in his enthusiastic support for the acquisition of works of art by the institutions in which he worked as a teacher, first between 1951 ao_d 1958_ft_s a lecturer_aLClar~moDt College, then from 1959 to 1969, as Head of Art and Craft at Graylands College. At that time all educational fund s we re supplied through requisitions which left no opportunity to create resources for the acquisition of artworks. As he said in 1992, however, McDiven was able: to work all kinds of rackets di sgui sin g art purchases as official requisitions. At different times I acquired some reproductions, limited edition prints, ceramic and glass objects and various woven and hand printed fabrics as part of the annual requisition. Th ese first art works were identified as teaching aids. I often bought works with my personal funds and worried about a refund later wh ich I usually got but not always. 8 Over time Graylands College got used to the idea that purchases of artworks were of great value to its students. Perhaps it was McDive.n's success in persuading hi s fellow artists to donate or lend their work to the Art Department on a se mi-permanent basis that helped to impress the authorities. Among others, Cyril Lander, Alton Cook, Allan Baker, Ernest Philpot and Portia Bennett supplied work. Whilst at Graylands, McDiven was president of the Perth Society of Artists, the same organisation partly founded by John Brackenreg and hi s colleagues. He was able to make of use hi s position to encourage his colleagues' ge nerosity to the Graylands collection and other institutions.