John Wolseley and Andrew Sayers: brushes with nature

John Wolseley re-enchants our connection with nature and shows the absurdities of contemporary consumer culture.

Detail from John Wolseley’s Natural History of Swamps III, Heron in Swamp – Loy Yang Power Station (2009–10).

The feeling for nature — as a conscious aesthetic, even spiritual experience — is something that develops in city dwellers. Peasants who worked the land, and before them hunters and gatherers, lived their lives entirely within the world of nature. They were almost inseparable from it: as late as the 1885, van Gogh could imagine his potato eaters as almost made from the earth which they worked every day.

The peasant is in nature, overwhelmed by the unrelenting labour it imposes, incapable of seeing it with a disinterested eye and without even an external vantage point from which it might be seen in such a way. It was in Greece and then Rome and China that urban poets and artists discovered the beauty of nature. After the Middle Ages, it was again in the urban centres of Florence, Venice and Rome that the modern landscape matured. Later still, impressionism developed in the huge modern city of Paris.

Thus the appreciation of nature entails a certain alienation from the reality of living in a natural environment; even when a poet or painter chooses to live in a bush retreat, they are seldom exposed to the harsh reality of finding or growing their own food. Horace had plenty of help on the Sabine farm.

The paradox of separation or alienation as a condition of consciousness is not unique to the case of nature. Many people have discovered that it is only when they find themselves, intentionally or not, in a different milieu that they come to understand their own culture, national character or class. For example, an understanding of other times and places can help us see the absurdities of contemporary consumer culture, which the mass media work so hard to make us accept without question.

Today, however, the alienation from nature has become more extreme, in whatever way we look at it. Most people drive to work, sit at desks, drive home, eat processed food and then watch processed entertainment. Even the news is processed: consider the way that bits of real news are chopped up and mixed with opinion.

It is in the context of a radical alienation from nature that we can understand the art of John Wolseley, which is an attempt, as he puts it, to re-enchant our connection with the natural world. And this is why, in the short video that accompanies the exhibition, we encounter him swimming in a waterhole, and half-emerging like a tentative amphibious creature to smear mud all over a sheet of paper stretched on the bank.

This literal immersion in the environment is half-comical and half-touching, but it is not accidental. Far greater landscape painters in the past did not have to get their clothes off and get into a lake to feel the beauty and majesty of nature, and yet this is not mere gimmickry or marketing on Wolseley’s part. It reflects a desperate level of estrangement from the natural world, even among many of those who espouse green politics but would never take the time to sit ­quietly and draw a tree or a flower.

Wolseley then picks up the desiccated carcass of a pelican and, wetting it too with muddy water, presses it into the paper and brushes water­colour around it like a kind of stencil. He is concerned to record the life of a formerly endangered wetland which has been saved from redevelopment as a cotton farm; in the finished work, which hangs on the other side of the wall, the patchwork of surrounding cotton farms, scratched on to the paper with lead and re­inforced in watercolour, is overwhelmed by the exuberance of the natural forms.

Wolseley’s concern to let the natural world speak directly and for itself leads him not only to embrace the random and adventitious at the margins of significance, but even to carry out experiments that venture largely beyond the boundaries of art and are drawn back into the field of meaning only by their installation in the context of the exhibition.

Thus he has released sheets of paper into the environment for days or even months at a time, collecting them afterwards when they have been soaked by the rain, baked in the sun and marked by mud, natural ochres and the scratchings of charred tree-stumps.

Such sheets are hung on the walls around the exhibition, but, as already suggested, they only become artistically significant by their juxtaposition with works that are made by the hand and skill of the artist. For Wolseley, in spite of all his love of the random, is in fact a highly skilled artist, with great facility for drawing both landscape and natural history subjects.

What is characteristic of all his work is a simultaneously close and distant perspective, reflecting a sense of topography as well as an almost obsessive love of the textures, colours and living movement of the botanical life that occupies the land. Maps, contour lines and other geographical data may be overlaid with direct impressions from sphagnum moss impregnated with watercolour, and with botanically accurate delineations of plants that proliferate across the page.

It is in this that his work is most different from what we usually think of as a landscape, not only because most landscapes are based on a perspectival view of the world, but more subtly because landscape tends to presuppose an external viewpoint and, perhaps most important of all, because it seeks to create space.

Space is the mysterious dimension of contemplation, but there is, at least at first sight, little space in Wolseley’s work because he is so intent on evoking proximity, on making us pay attention to the details and texture of a natural world to which we have become desensitised. It is hard to find the space for contemplation when you are, like the artist on the bank of the wetland, face down and only centimetres away from the motif.

Wolseley says he doesn’t believe in what he calls the magisterial gaze. But it would not be accurate to say that space is entirely lacking from his work, for he is quite capable of drawing panoramic vistas in the background of his compositions. In the largest work in the exhibition, From the Edge of the Great Flood Plains of Garrangari and Garrangali, NT, the artist borrows from the tradition of the Chinese scroll to find an alternative form of space: too long to be comprehended in a single view, the composition has to be read sequentially from one end to the other and, as in Chinese scrolls, we follow from one clump of visual incident to another, with rests or pauses of white paper in the intervals.

Thus space is produced from a temporal dimension that is characteristic of ink-painting, of scroll compositions that unfold, as it were, as they unroll. And the movement and fluidity implied in the compositional form are also properties of the artist’s most characteristic medium, watercolour: a mobile, transparent and liquid form of paint that seems ideally suited to Wolseley’s aim of “getting back into the flow of nature”.

If watercolour is transparent, gouache, with the addition of chalk, becomes opaque, a medium that is still fluid and mobile, ideal for capturing effects of nature en plein air, but with more body and solidity and thus more naturally suited to a painter such as Andrew Sayers, who also works in oils.

Sayers is best known as a scholar, art historian and one of Australia’s most distinguished museum curators, who was among other things curator of Australian drawings at the National Gallery of Australia and then deputy director before becoming the founding director of the National Portrait Gallery and commissioning its new building next to the NGA. He was then director of the National Museum and many expected him to be the next head of the NGA. Instead, he chose to retire and devote his time to painting: a practice he had until then kept strictly private.

This exhibition reveals for the first time some of his early work as well as a very fine self-portrait and a remarkable body of landscapes and nature studies. From the beginning — with a still life series of books evoking Australian paintings — to some of the recent oils that allude to compositions by Poussin, Sayers’s work is subtly informed by his sense of history. The exhibition’s title, indeed, is borrowed from William Hazlitt’s characterisation of Poussin’s painting as images of “nature through the glass of time”.

The allusions to Poussin are mostly through the echoes of his cloud formations rather than his figure compositions, a fact whose significance we appreciate when we look at the many vivid and boldly economical gouache studies of clouds. In turn, the natural phenomena to which Sayers responds so intuitively in the gouaches are transformed, through the glass of Poussin, into the more symbolic oil paintings such as the large work that also bears the title of the exhibition.

But clouds are not Sayers’s only motif. He is also fascinated by rocks, and in fact the whole opening room of the exhibition is dominated by a series of strong but laconic oils of different kinds of stone, all accompanying the self-portrait as though special objects of the artist’s meditation.

Inside, the most typical gouaches comprise rocky headlands with cloud formations above. Rocks and clouds: two elemental manifestations of nature, one evoking the unimaginably long duration of geological time, the other the ever-changing temporality of meteorological phenomena. Two kinds of natural phenomena, but neither of them living, neither of them remotely like Wolseley’s luxuriant flora.

This is rather a vision of nature before and after life, of Heraclitean flux in which the processes of time and change, alternately instantaneous in their rapidity and imperceptible in their slowness, undermine the very possibility of stable identity; unless perhaps, as the pre-­Socratic philosopher also seems to suggest, ­linear time itself is an illusion, and the way up and the way down, in his famous aphorism, are indeed one and the same.

John Wolseley: Heartlands and Headwaters

The Ian Potter Centre, NGV Australia, Melbourne, until September 20

Andrew Sayers: Nature Through the Glass of Time

Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne,
until June 27