PETER CAMERON
PAINTINGS FROM MILLAMOLONG STATION AND HILL END
Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.
- Simonides
There are few art practices so intensely personal for painters than to abandon themselves to a subjective interpretation of the landscape, revealing through their imagery a reality of their own invention and unveiling a vision that custom conceals from common view.
As a plein air painter, it is this transformative vision of the Australian landscape that characterises Peter Cameron’s current series of paintings, which were executed in situ at Millamolong Station, a 10,000-acre property located between Cowra and Orange, and at the historic hamlet of Hill End, 84 kilometres North West of Bathurst in New South Wales.
A prevailing theme in this series of Millamolong and Hill End paintings is the interactive relationship between man and the natural environment. Yet, they are equally about the persistence of memory – the vital record of local life retained in the organic fabric of the land itself as a geomorphic history. It is this paradoxically enduring sense of transience that pervades Cameron’s landscape imagery.
Upon arriving at Millamolong Station in summer, it was the wide skies, undulating hills, parched plains scarred by the accumulative effects of drought and expansive perspectives from the vantage point of Hampton Hill, at an elevation of 667 metres, which initially impressed Cameron. The sights, smells and activity of this working farm set him on a Proustian quest to recover in his imagery something of Millamolong Station’s 150-year history and Australia’s vanished past.
The Hill End images are the culmination of Cameron’s one-month tenure as artist-in-residence in the cottage formerly owned by artist Jean Bellette and her husband, art critic Paul Haefliger, during the 1940s. Like successive generations of artists before him (such as Russell Drysdale, Donald Friend, Jeffrey Smart, Margaret Olley and Brett Whiteley), Cameron discovered amid the deserted mine shafts, derelict buildings, and decaying civilisation of Hill End an even richer resource than the precious yellow metal that lured hordes of prospectors there during the 1850s gold rush – the landscape itself. Its abundant colour and variety yielded a wealth of painting subjects for Cameron, which were produced at Kissing Point lookout, at an altitude of 950 metres, with its panoramic vistas overlooking the Turon and Macquarie River valleys. Here, the artist’s predominantly subdued pastel palette has expanded to reflect the red, fine clay soil and tawny rock crags which, like the mining gullies and underground grids of heavily fossicked earth, form part of the physical character of the local landscape.
Collectively, these works have a resonance with those of the Australian impressionists who sought to express in an iconographic vernacular the epic beauty of the native landscape. Moreover, in his approach to painting, Cameron shares the same ideal -- to remain faithful to the truth of his perceptions of a fleeting moment and to render that moment timeless. Working alla prima (from the Italian meaning ‘at the first’ or ‘at once’) to record the transitory effects of light and fugitive aspects of the landscape, Cameron imparts an immediacy, spontaneity and vigour to his canvases that differentiate them from studio paintings.
The artist’s dialogue with his landscape subjects is not based purely on visual perception. His focus is on the metaphysical as much as physical features of the landscape expressed through the elemental forces of water, wind and fire as well as the atmospheric effects of diffused and refracted light. Spontaneously creating his compositions from the forms that progressively emerge, Cameron allows his unconscious to play an active part in the production of the painting. Thus, images ebb and flow from the reservoir of his sensory, emotional and imaginative experience of the landscape. It is the pervasive spirit of place, or genius loci, rather than explicit topography that the artist seeks to capture on canvas. His abstracted vistas, amorphous roseate clouds of colour and scumblings of pigment create a sense of the ethereal, as though the viewer is virtually floating over the landscape.
There is in these Millamolong Station and Hill End works a felicitous fusion of opposites that engages the viewer – freedom and control, introspection and exhilaration, reality and fantasy, fluidity and precise mathematical structuring, geographic form and poetic content. Their lyricism, rhythmic relationship of forms, and staccato cadences of colour underscore the musicality of his paintings, the contrapuntal vertical striations (a metaphor for time) creating a tempo in the reading of the images. They are, to paraphrase Juan Miro, like poems translated into music by a painter.
- Linda van Nunen
Artist Statement for Hampton Hill Series
The movement of paint and elements
These paintings are essentially constructed 'en plein air' as I enjoy working with the vitality of the immediate environment.
Although I use a range of constantly developing application methods, I will often begin work on the painting while it is flat. This gives me a good aspect and connection with the subject. Many layers of paint may be applied to build the nuance and the integrity of form and colour. Environmental movements of the Sun, rain, wind and organic life will sometimes thoroughly rearrange the plans for and maybe also the technical methods of painting. It is important to me to pay attention to process, both in the painting and to the way the land has developed and changed over time. Sometimes I adopt painting techniques derived from the way the land itself has been manipulated by man and nature, perhaps by considering the impacts of a plough, mining, various accretions or the longer erosions of wind and rain. Influences may arise from a particular scent, birds calling, the odd travelling of a willy willy, a miniature fragment, intuition, memory or reverie. One of the lasting impressions will be the particular hues of the changing atmospheric lights. The highly transitional times of dawn and dusk will never cease to captivate even the stillest heart.
It's at times a delicate balance between being led by what the painting material is doing, following an inner comprehension of the place and being open to reciprocal movements that can clarify an underlying focus or perspective.
The work explores formal perceptions through the imagination. Painting may begin to materialize an unexpected relative or metaphorical space and locate a feeling for the being of the land where an approach can be made into larger truths like geological time. The paint then becomes not only the medium but also the mediator, interpreting between the various senses around us and between ourselves and the land. These inform me that land itself is sentient, carrying within itself a host of complexly conscious communities moving in a web of seasonal dialogues and that we are fortunate to be living in these lands.
I am interested to explore concepts and structures of landscape through a range of reflective and expressive processes, looking to depict some of the essential, enduring qualities of that area more than the specifics. This series is being constructed at Millamolong Station, a 10,000 acre property famous for it's polo horses, sheep, cattle and many histories. The paintings are named 'Hampton Hill' after the lookout there which offers extensive views over the rolling hills.
Peter Cameron, 2008
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Artist Statement for Guthega Paintings
"The eye sees not itself But by reflection, by some other things." Shakespear.
Julius Caesar.
Now more familiar with the country called Guthega, I find myself entering into a more reflective phase, sieving, distilling the earlier perceptions, playing with these.
Reflecting upon your own senses as you paint in the environment of this land; seeing some of your own processes (reflection; to bend or fold back). Through studying the environment and through the physical operations of painting it, coming to some awareness of being in place, that place, on it's terms and conditions.
Sometimes, (while not able to be there) painting about Guthega while reflecting it's image in your mind's sense, because you are physically absent from that land but spiritually present; thus you become close to the landscape through the act of painting. It becomes an act of realizing. This is not nostalgia but a conscious, remote sensing action and, I find, a useful tool.
Reflecting on the movements of the elements but particularly water, about the nature of water and what lies beneath it, how it continually transforms itself, works with and through all the other elements (showing as rock or mist etc.) and living organisms, as ourselves. Examples: water reflecting upon itself like a cloud over a lake (Guthega Dam). How snow is so powerful as a glacier, carving through land masses as if it were butter, ruthless in a blizzard, and occurs in a multitude of forms, textures. As water is life, so snow stores life, as the abundance of Spring shoots and flowers give us to witness.
Building up layers of paint in order to reveal and obfuscate at the same time; much the same way as snow hides the land surface when it falls, then reveal it again as it slowly melts away. Painting in the early stages for me is an immediate, intuitive and emotional response to a situation, environ and sense; looking at the colours, forms and textures of the surrounding physical manifestations. Later, a reflective process, in the paint, begins to discern some general characteristics, develops a dialogue between the various manifestations. Sometimes it's a pulling apart, forming a void, sometimes compression; remembering examples of countless actions in Nature's rhythms.
I have also come back to working with the earlier series at Lake George, N.S.W. Here this large flat plain of mineral muds collaborates with the Sun, air and water, to often produce unusual atmospheric conditions. My early responses were surrealistic with images, textures arriving automatically. What fascinates me now in this vague and often undifferentiated landscape is the sense of atmosphere itself, experienced variously, with emptiness or in brilliance, when there is water lying there, or not, etc.
Peter Cameron, 2006 |
