Learned behaviour

STUDENTS of art are almost always preoccupied with finding a distinctive style and subject in time for their graduating exhibition.

STUDENTS at art school, and even secondary school pupils, are almost always preoccupied with finding a distinctive style and subject in time for their graduating exhibition.

They scour books and magazines and look around galleries in search of what is now and happening, without realising that art trends are no more substantial than any other fashion, and that they will end up with a product more circumscribed than any academic exercise could ever be.

It is one of the almost unspoken scandals of art schools that hardly any of their graduates end up as artists. The contrast with music, theatre and film graduates is partly explained by the far higher admission standards in these cases (how many art schools are there to the one National Institute of Dramatic Art or Australian Film, Television and Radio School?), but it is also because the implicit approach to teaching is back to front. You don't become an artist by aping a cool style or even by finding your own distinctive look; you grow into being an artist, if at all, by acquiring a deep understanding of the craft you practise, looking at the world around you and eventually finding something that you really need to say and that cannot be said in any other way.

This is one of the problems with the proposed national curriculum for the arts, which has been much criticised by arts teachers, and defended, understandably, by those who stand to gain from the re-allocation of time. There is no doubt that some of the criticisms are self-serving, and the NSW curriculum, touted as a model of excellence, is in reality intellectually incoherent and riddled with shop-worn postmodern jargon and politically correct ideology.

But as Hilaire Belloc warned, always keep a-hold of nurse, for fear of finding something worse. The new curriculum, as outlined in the recent shape paper, is intellectually undistinguished to say the least and, while constantly rehearsing empty cliches about creativity, it runs the risk of trivialising all of the disciplines it recommends by reducing the time available for any of them.

Not surprisingly, since it fragments the time available for learning, the proposed curriculum fails to stress the importance of the practice of each art. What is music without learning to play an instrument, and play it well? What is dance without discipline and mastery? What is art without learning the practice of drawing? The answer, in each case, is the same: playtime between more serious disciplines.

Euan Macleod, whose career is surveyed at the S. H. Ervin Gallery in an exhibition that will tour regional galleries throughout 2011, is a good example of the way an artist evolves a coherent vision and form: not as a contrived product but as the result of dedicated work, responsiveness to nature, and a certain inner compulsion that imbues the pictures, at their best, with a sense of significance and necessity. The exhibition is accompanied by a concise catalogue, but Piper Press also has taken the opportunity to produce a handsome monograph by Gregory O'Brien, Euan Macleod: The Painter in the Painting.

Macleod, born in New Zealand in 1956, found his subject in his early 30s -- not, of course, in third year at art school -- when he began to exhibit a mysterious and oddly compelling series of paintings of the figure in a landscape. But there was nothing idyllic or even comfortable about these landscapes: they were dark forests, the dominant shadow evoked by dappling streaks of sunlight on the ground through which strode a roughly suggested, apparently naked figure.

Macleod's forests could be the Australian bush but do not look particularly typical of the flora of this continent, and both the imagery and the sensibility are generally more reminiscent of the romantic artists of northern Europe. It is once again a reminder of the gothic sensibility that is said to distinguish NZ culture from Australian. At the same time the pictures work because the artist maintains a fundamental ambiguity. The forest is not overtly hostile, simply alien; inspired by the abandoned mine-shafts on a friend's property, Macleod has included the dark openings of caves in some of the pictures, primal sexual motifs that recall the grottos and springs of Courbet's landscapes.

The figures, too, resist any reductive reading. They are not overtly tragic or anguished and seem strangely at once lost and purposeful. If anything they recall the insistent and futile movement of Beckett's characters, but with a less explicit sense of absurdity. The effect is rather of figures moving in a semi-conscious or dreamlike way.

No doubt this last observation is inspired by knowing the story behind the pictures, as it is explained in the catalogue, and in wall panels and a short video within the exhibition. At the time these early paintings were being made, the artist endured the slow collapse of his father's physical and mental health from Alzheimer's disease. Roy Macleod passed away in 1993, but this was only the beginning of an imaginary afterlife in his son's work that continues to the present.

Parents are crucial figures in the formation of our sense of self, and so the reflection on his father's experience, the quest to understand the incomprehensible process of mental disintegration, gradually merged with a search for self-knowledge and became a unique pathway through which Macleod could approach the world.

The images of the perpetual wanderer in the forest are his early response to the still living but physically and mentally wandering father. Later, Macleod began to explore the places his father had lived, like Lyttelton Bay in NZ's South Island, where he had loved to sail. His father, indeed, was a rather eccentric man who spent years building a sailing boat in the family living room before finally dismantling the bay window to take it out when it was ready to launch.

Boating and boats accordingly become a regular motif in the work, even recurring in more recent paintings of arid outback landscapes. In the parched red desert and in front of rocky cliffs, boats appear half-buried in the sand while a shadowy, ghost-like figure stands above them, an oar over his shoulder, recalling the prophecy to Odysseus that he should take his oar and walk inland until he reached a land that had no experience of seafaring, and where a native should ask him whether he was carrying a winnowing-fan.

The connection with Odysseus is probably fortuitous, but the shadowy figure is the father once again, although the image is more effective in the watery environment to which he properly belongs. There is a striking double picture in which almost the same scene is represented twice, one above the other. The difference is that in the top panel, a naked figure stands in the centre of the composition, while the lower one is empty.

The composition is slightly different in each case, as though to avoid too literal a contrast. The main difference, apart from the absence of the figure, is in the treatment of light: in the upper panel, what may be presumed to be morning light strikes the shoulders of the figure and illuminates the surface of the water and makes it silvery. In the lower, empty panel, the water is dark because the sun is setting beyond the mountains in the background.

Among all the pictures that evoke the theme of the father, there is a particularly impressive suite that occupies the far wall of the central space and that is like an anthology or compendium of the relevant motifs: the boat, the house with pictures on the wall and a curtained window, the boat in the house, the shadowy figure and so on.

With so personal and even obsessive a subject, there is a danger for any artist of disappearing into a solipsistic world of personal references. What saves Macleod is his interest in the natural world around him. As we can see from some smaller plein-air sketches, he has a spontaneous sense of attunement to his environment: trees, clouds, times of day are all captured with an almost physical directness.

Even from a distance, one can appreciate Macleod's feeling for the colours and textures of things; the sensibility of the paintings is not a particularly refined one but it is true to the nature and substance of what he is painting. His water feels like water in a way that can come only from an intimacy with the sea, and the movement and swell of the water are translated into paint with striking immediacy. He understands fire, too; there is a fine quartet of small compositions devoted to a burning-off fire in the bush. We see it flaring up, dying down and finally, in an almost entirely black nocturne, the few remaining embers glowing in the dark of night.

It is this sense of the material qualities of the natural world, and even of the elemental forces underlying it, like fire, earth and water, that anchors Macleod's imagery and gives it weight. The ghost-like figures are far more vivid for being set in such an environment. But this synthesis is not achieved without an effort, nor without cost.

Not all the compositions are successful. Some of the large figures seated in pools of water are too ungainly, and the pictures in which figures carry large paintings of other things are a clumsy conceit, one of those moments when the personal symbolism and introspection topple into bathos. These quasi-conceptual games are ill-suited to Macleod's sensibility and artistic character.

The surface of the paintings is sometimes unattractive or overemphatic in its use of impasto and heavy textures. The cover of the catalogue, instead of using one of the painter's evocative images, has a close-up of a picture painted with a heavy palette knife or scraper, one of the ugliest instruments of painting imaginable. Unfortunately, this choice reflects a widespread (perhaps especially in art schools) fetishisation of the bold and the crude in painting, in preference to the fine and the articulate.

The coarse is never inherently preferable to the subtle; it just sometimes happens to be the only way the artist can achieve his ends. In Macleod's case, the surfaces are not something to dwell on with aesthetic delight, but neither are they gratuitous. He is not an intellectual painter but an intuitive one, balancing the compulsion to pursue an inward quest with a powerful apprehension of the natural world around him.

The process of painting is a constant effort to bring these inherently distinct aims into alignment; Macleod has to work fast and sometimes roughly to bring his pictures to life and to turn private memory and grief into a more universal metaphor of human experience.