The very best of Australian art on show in regional Bendigo

The work and influence of tonal master Max Meldrum and his contemporaries, such as Clarice Beckett, are explored in this exhibition of his work and that of his followers

Clarice Beckett The beach circa 1930 oil on board Maud Rowe Bequest, 1937; Frame conserved with funds from the U3A History of the Art Gallery class, 2017 Collection of the Art Gallery of Ballarat [Out of copyright]

Some peoples have a culture of food, shared by all, regardless of wealth or class. It is possible to eat badly in Italy, but only in the restaurants that cater for tourists, the kind an Italian would not think of entering. Otherwise even the simplest places can be full of delights, like a service station diner on the back roads of Sicily, where a memorable lunch some years ago cost my family nearly nothing.

The English-speaking peoples, on the whole, lack this culture. This doesn’t mean that you can’t eat well in Sydney or London, but it does mean that it will be very expensive, because good cooking is not traditionally rooted in popular life and habits. Any good food that is not expensive will be found in places run by people with their own long food culture. Otherwise good food is for the rich while the masses consume processed junk and takeaway, with predictable effects on their health.

The same thing happens with the arts; some peoples, some periods and places are overflowing with vitality in one art form or another: think of music in Vienna 200 years ago, or New Orleans in the Jazz age. And think of the difference between a culture where everyone shares an intimate experience of music, of instruments, of performance, and the situation today where popular music is a commercial product, a superficially stimulating yet ultimately numbing drone pumped directly into the ears of commuters as they make their way to work.

No modern culture in the West has had a more intimate connection to painting than Italy, followed by the Netherlands. These are the fountainheads for all the other schools of European painting.

The British people, on the other hand, have been far more a culture of the word. When we think of the greatest artists of the early modern period in Italy, it is painters and indeed sculptors too; in England, writers. Marlowe, Shakespeare and John Donne have the same instinctive genius for language that Giotto, Masaccio, Piero, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael or Titian have for painting.

Painting in Britain was relatively marginal in its significance and was then cut off by the Reformation; the tradition did not regrow until Hogarth and then the Romantics, but it never really reached the masses, whose understanding of visual images remained in the Victorian period and even in the 20th century at the most primitive level, responding to the ostensible subject of the image – usually sentimental kitsch – without understanding the language of the art in any way.

We still suffer from this low level of visual literacy in the English-speaking world, where audiences even now overwhelmingly respond to what an image claims it is saying, rather than to what it is really saying.

The response of audiences in art galleries is hardly more sophisticated in this respect than that of the least educated levels of society, who will assume that a kitsch picture of a sunset must be beautiful because sunsets are beautiful. It is the same as thinking a kitsch poem is beautiful because the trite sentiments it expresses are “beautiful”.

This is also why contemporary audiences have a weakness for ugliness, because the more sophisticated want to distinguish themselves from the vulgar taste of the masses, and ugliness, which is visible even to the most obtuse, must surely be a sign of originality and transgression. It’s also why they are drawn to demonstrations of political right-thinking; they can’t understand painting, but anyone can understand flag-waving.

Misunderstandings about painting start with fallacies about the nature of representation. You still hear people assume that a picture can somehow be a copy of appearances, usually implicitly asserted in the course of denying that this is the aim of art, or affirming that copying is no longer the aim of art since the invention of photography.

One only needs to stop and think about the various artists we associate with naturalistic representation of the visible world – whether Caravaggio, Velazquez, Vermeer, Courbet, Manet or indeed 20th century realists and hyper-realists – to realise at once that “naturalism” can mean very different things. And if we reflect for a moment on the science of perception, let alone the philosophical dimensions of cognition, we will see that painting can only ever be an entirely artificial account, in essentially heterogeneous form, of an inherently intangible visual and affective experience of the world.

The ideal of representing the visual world accurately and rationally – not quite the same things – was nonetheless a powerful motivation in the development of modern art. It was part of the emergence of a new way of conceiving the world and our relation to it that is in fact the cognitive infrastructure of modern science; but at the same time the pursuit of naturalism could lead to new ways of thinking about human life and even religion.

The effect of the invention of photography is complex. One response, adopted by the academic realists, was to demonstrate how painting, with its potentially vast scale and brilliant range of colour, could spectacularly surpass what were then still small images in black and white. Another, developed by the Impressionists, was a kind of optical naturalism that also concentrated on colour but emphasised subjective and transient sensations.

Max Meldrum, the Scottish-Australian painter and teacher whose work and influence are surveyed in this exhibition at Ballarat, can be understood in this context. He also pursued an optical naturalism, but he despised the Impressionists’ focus on colour and concentrated instead on tone. And like so many in the late 19th and early 20th century, he insisted that his method was “scientific”.

One of the fundamental principles of his method was to paint things from a distance at which incidental details would give way to the impression of the whole.

Arnold Shore, who was a pupil for a time, is quoted in the exhibition as recalling (1916), “Up as close as possible to the subject went our easels. Back twenty feet or more we were led. Half close your eyes. Compare the effect of the subject with your canvas. What do you see? … We were forbidden to look at the subject when close to it, all our observations must be made from the viewing point twenty feet away.”

The distance may seem extreme, but a fuller explanation can be found in Meldrum’s own book, The Science of Appearances (1950), and I have also been fortunate enough to watch the method in practice.

You start by setting the canvas up beside the motif – whether portrait subject or still life – then step back far enough for the motif be reduced to a very simple tonal pattern, even as far as 90 feet (p.63). Then you come forward without looking at the motif from closer quarters – as Shore emphasises – and place a mark equivalent to part of that impression on the canvas; then you step back again and check that the mark matches what you see.

You continue this until the pattern on your canvas matches the pattern of the motif from the initial distance. But this is not the end; then you come forward to a second viewing distance, at a point where the two no longer match, and you begin to perceive further and subtler discriminations. Here you repeat the process until image and motif match again.

But you do not keep approaching indefinitely. Meldrum cites Leonardo (p.43) as pointing out that the minimum distance from which any motif can be comprehended is three times its height or width, whichever is the greater. Thus a motif 1m in height needs to be seen from at least 3m; as a painter, you may start by looking at it from further away, but your final marks will be based on what can be seen from this distance.

The result is demonstrated, in this exhibition, in Meldrum’s own portrait of Alfred Mica Smith, who was Professor of Chemistry and Metallurgy at the Ballarat School of Mines. It is clear that this portrait is designed to be seen from a viewing point of about 2m; at 1m it breaks up into patches that no longer cohere. The portrait was commissioned for Professor Smith’s retirement, but rejected by the School, although it was subsequently purchased by subscription for the Gallery.

Colin Colahan’s Self-portrait seems slightly puzzling at first sight, because the canvas (attached to a board) is visible in the picture, which is to say in the mirror in which he is looking at himself.

Strictly speaking, if the canvas and the mirror were side-by-side, this would be impossible. It may be, however, that he has taken a slight liberty to dramatise the process (as often in pictures of the Meldrum school, there are also other pictures in the background, again a self-referential element).

Colahan also appears to be quite close to the canvas and the mirror, but this is clearly because he is now at the last stage of refining the image and thus now painting from a viewpoint perhaps a couple of metres or somewhat less from the canvas.

Still life, interiors and landscapes all demand some modification of the process, since, even more obviously than in portrait, the whole motif cannot be exactly on one plane. What this means, though, is that the painting will represent the appearance of whatever the motif is at a given intersection of the visual field, to use a term familiar to Renaissance perspective theory.

In other words, it is as though you set up a pane of glass next to your canvas and painted whatever was visible through that pane from the given distance.

The Renaissance developed frame and grid devices to assist in this, and we know from surviving photos of his studio that Meldrum would do something very similar: one set of photos shows his process in painting a complex still life motif. The canvas is, unusually, already in a frame to emphasise its boundaries, and next to it is an identical frame through which the artist sees the view he is painting, so that it is clearly bounded, and the place of each element within the composition is always clear.

Painters of landscapes, like Clarice Beckett, would of necessity have used a somewhat more informal version of the method, but it must still have meant standing well back from the canvas initially and painting even the final steps with a viewpoint of around 2m back, so that the simplified forms on the canvas match the visual whole of the view; and in this case the image of a visual world that is just coming together into coherence matches Beckett’s almost spiritual vision of the world awakening at dawn, as darkness gives way to the return of light and colour.

Light and shade

Ballarat Art Gallery to October 15