Coast: the artists’ retreat at Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery

Many artists have worked around Port Philip and Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery has devoted exhibitions to them.

Albert Tucker’s Back beach rock pool (c.1980s)

Sydney is built around a great natural harbour but also extends along the ocean coast between Port Jackson and two other harbours — Broken Bay in the north and Botany Bay in the south. Melbourne, in contrast, is entirely enclosed by the massive bay of Port Philip, with the city itself in the north and suburbs and beach resorts dotted around its fringes.

Many artists have worked in the Port Philip area, and Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery has devoted substantial exhibitions to documenting them. But Melbourne also has an external coast, outside Port Philip to the south and east, and this is the very different environment that is the focus of the present exhibition.

Here the water is not enclosed but open, free and wild with the boundless life of the ocean. The environment is more dangerous and many ships have been wrecked along the coast. Crashing waves break over rocks in the eternal dialectic of yin and yang evoked in Chinese landscape painting: the female element of water endlessly breaking and dissolving over the male element of rock, and yet slowly, over countless millennia, wearing down the rock and eroding it into endlessly varied forms.

Eugene Vom Guerard's Tea Trees Near Cape Schanck, Victoria, 1865

These were the characteristic and picturesque shapes and formations that struck the colonial population of Melbourne as the new city rapidly expanded from the middle of the 19th century. The settlers gave these sites new names, sometimes merely descriptive such as Tunnel Rock, sometimes more evocative, like Pulpit Rock. A large and impressive rock formation was called London Bridge, a choice that can only feel poignant and also a little bathetic. To name a great natural feature after a structure built by humans is implicitly to cancel or at least qualify the sense of its strangeness, its grandeur or simply its belonging to an order of geological time that dwarfs all human presence.

Naming is a process that simplifies the world and draws phenomena into systems of human meaning. But whenever we truly pay attention to anything in nature or in human life we realise how much more complex reality is than these convenient labels suggest; and that is part of what art seeks to reveal to us: the irreducible being of things that lies behind their names.

The earliest view of the coast is by Eugene von Guerard and belongs to the first years of Melbourne as a city. For the painter who more than any other evoked the sublime of Australia’s landscape, this picture is more meditative than dramatic. He does not get close to the rocky features that dominate the familiar images of the coast but focuses on the steep drop down the hill to the rocks and the sea far below.

The foreground is filled with gnarled and twisted tea trees, contrasted with the serenity of the early sunset light beyond and on the rocks of Cape Schanck below. There is no human presence in the scene, but an eagle is circling in the upper left corner, and among the trees we can make out the shape of a fox, an imported predator. The land appears untouched by human hand, let alone by a colonial presence, and yet the ­effect of the new arrivals is already implicitly pervasive. Thus von Guerard’s art, at first sight characterised by a combination of romantic feeling for the life of nature and accuracy of observation, is once again also notable for the subtlety of its thematic undertones.

Two outstanding smaller works by his friend Nicholas Chevalier are less complicated because they are essentially plein-air studies rather than full-scale studio pictures painted for exhibition. Although Chevalier was enormous­ly talented, his exhibition paintings can be somewhat overcooked; in these studies painted straight from the motif we can fully appreciate his skill in handling his materials and his capacity to see and respond to the life of nature.

Andrew Sayers' We Stood Beneath the Beam of Light as it Swept Over the Dark Ocean, 2014

It can be something of a cliche to prefer studies to finished pictures, especially if this is just because the studies look more spontaneous and for that reason superficially modern to our eyes than the final work. The real reason plein-air studies are sometimes more satisfying, especially in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, is that they are filled with the energy that comes from the direct encounter with nature, while the finished works of lesser masters such as Chevalier can sometimes be vitiated by a quest for effect. Whenever art tries to manipulate emotions, it is compromised; good art does the opposite: it is self-contained but draws the viewer to it by the force of its authenticity.

These reflections are relevant not only to Chevalier but to several other works in the exhibition, notably the two landscapes by John Perceval. Superficially they are decorative, engaging and full of boisterous energy. But on closer examination they turn out to be rather vacuous, betraying not only the artist’s very limited abilities as a painter but a kind of sterile egoism that prevents him from seeing the world that exists beyond his own feelings. There is thus little real engagement with the natural site: of course we cannot expect von Guerard’s astonishingly lucid and patient study of geological forms, but nor is there anything of Chevalier’s powerful apprehension of the elemental forces of rocks and water, where he manages to convey the depth and darkness of the water as well as the energy of crashing waves. In comparison, Perceval’s rocks are shapeless and without substance, and his waves are lazy scribbles like a tangle of wool.

Much more satisfying are the works of Euan Macleod, one of several contemporary artists invited to spend a period in residency at Port­sea. Such residencies are an excellent idea for any regional gallery, because the leisure to work without interruption, especially in a beautiful spot, is a luxury for most artists, and the gallery can encourage suitable artists to build an enduring relationship with the region.

Macleod for a long time painted a haunting figure striding through forests and other settings, an obsessive image that was, he eventually revealed, inspired by his father. More recently he has varied the original figure type; here we find a parent, presumably a father, leading a child by the hand. In the most ambitious of his paintings in this exhibition, Macleod has a number of figures walking along a clifftop under a lowering cloudy sky.

Once again, the plein-air studies are even more striking than the finished studio pictures. There is an outstanding study of the so-called London Bridge formation that shows exactly the kind of attention and sympathetic engagement of which Perceval was incapable, as well as a bold and yet accurate technique capable of rendering the form and substance of the rocks.

But perhaps even more surprising are the studies of waves breaking on the beach. Water is not easy to paint, and many have failed to render the hypnotic, elusive and constantly changing form of waves. But Macleod seems to have attuned himself to their mysterious life and these are some of the most living renderings of waves that I have seen.

Another resident artist who worked in a very different vein is GW Bot, who produced sets of biomorphic forms that she calls glyphs. Here there is a large water­colour version of these motifs, evoking wateriness both in medium and in the colours employed, but the most striking work is a sculptural assemblage.

Euan Macleod’s From Above (Mornington Peninsula) (2017)

A large wall is covered with forms cut out of steel and rusted to a deep and variegated golden brown. One large form on the left evokes the rocky formations characteristic of the landscape, while the other, smaller forms seem to represent an imaginary vision of submarine life. The figures are lively and poetic and the most intriguing thing about them is the way that, although none is literally recognisable as a particular shape, they alternate and even combine morphologies evocative of the human body, sea creatures and underwater plants.

There are several other resident artists’ works, including a meditative series of films of the coastal landscape by Kerrie Poliness: the waves wash in and out, gulls strut by, but the camera remains impassive. There is a conceptual work by Raafat Ishak that reminds us of the way in which art theory as practised in art schools tends to be simultaneously obscure and obvious. And while I was in the gallery a replica of a midden of oyster shells was being assembled to remind viewers that Aboriginal people lived on the coast for thousands of years before the arrival of our ancestors.

The most moving part of the exhibition, however, is a case containing three remarkable gouaches by Andrew Sayers, the founding director of the National Portrait Gallery of Australia. Sayers was a gifted painter as well as a brilliant scholar, but felt it was not right to show his own work while he was also a senior figure in the world of galleries and museums.

He retired quite young, intending to spend more time painting, but sadly was almost at once diagnosed with a fatal cancer, although he continued to work with great energy and cheerfulness for the last 1½ years of his life. These pictures are from a time not long after his diagnosis and they show how he found solace in meditating on the life of nature, the immeasurable length of geological time, and, in two striking studies of a lighthouse’s beam losing itself in the starry heavens, the infinite scale and extent of the universe that surrounds our brief existences.

Coast: the artists’ retreat is at Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery. Until February 18.