Provenance
Gillian Borrack Collection, City of Whittlesea Federation Bequest

Watercolour has both a multitude and diversity of characteristics. Transparency, its most inherent quality, can be exploited to almost minimal degrees of delicacy.

This large painting is executed on dry white paper which enhances the key to the heightened degree of brightness. Like the singing of Leider, where the piano itself becomes deliberately integrated with the words and melody, to add a new dimension to the work, the white paper is crucial to the realization of this painting with its open planes of spectrum colour directly imposed on the surface. The white paper itself becomes synonymous with vast space, and the eye is left to interpret the unstated areas. Such a subject as this panorama with its focal point of background ranges, is an integration of the entire landscape including the sky, into a unified whole. One realizes this when one looks at nature in an analytical way. Overlapping dabs and planes of pure colour retain their individual hues and yet by their transparent nature, pulsate and coalesce into a prismatic weft of semi defined forms that contribute to the mysterious understatement. A blue placed across a yellow, results in a green, a red over a blue, a purple and so on. Such colour scales were pioneered early by Turner in his delicate watercolours that employ stippling. Cézanne, who perfected this method, exploited the more open use of the colour planes that place a greater emphasis on unity, structure, form and a more ambiguous spatial control in painting. By the use of shadow paths (usually the darker or cooler planes) a series of nodal points punctuate the all over design, leading the eye through foreground trees, middle distance, to beyond and back to the foreground. Tones of colour define the form. This method can be contrasted with the same subject as Storm Day, Mernda (Cat. no. 13) painted in the wet in wet style of watercolour in which atmosphere was the dominant feature. The concept that such a work is incomplete is erroneous. If an artist is working correctly, a plastic entity should ensue at all stages of the development and whenever he leaves off, the work should reflect that plastic “completeness”. To add more to this picture would be to overstate and lose all pictorial relationships that have been achieved, to say nothing of the loss of sensation the subject matter first aroused on a favoured and particular location in Hunters Lane, Mernda. For me such paintings have a musical connection with their organization of pellucid colour scales.

20. Towards Woodstock
1984 Mernda Hills
Watercolour on Modigliani Paper on board
30 x 108 cm
inscribed l.r.: John Borrack’84
Nth West of Mernda Hills to Woodstock

Provenance
Gillian Borrack Collection, City of Whittlesea Federation Bequest

As a painting ground for landscape painters the Mernda Wollert hills area offer unsurpassed vistas in a 360 degree radius. One of Melbourne’s best kept secrets, I first discovered their possibilities in the early 1950’s, and have since then enjoyed uninhibited access to the whole area where I have subsequently painted an extraordinary number of studies and completed works. As my studio adjoins these hills, I have the considerable advantage of being able to explore and observe them whenever weather and light conditions appeal to me. I believe one of the great necessities for a landscape painter is to live in an area conducive to his work. Along with early impressions from the hills around Heidelberg, the Mernda hills have, more than any other area I have ever painted, had the most compelling and formative effect on my work. It was here that I discovered the magic and space of Australian distance — the effect of light, atmosphere and structural form in panoramic landscape, a theme I have unswervingly followed to the present day.

The volcanic rises and rolling topography over Melrose Farm contained in this picture made on site as a study for larger studio works, evokes the character of the district under summer conditions. It owes something of its subject matter to von Guerard and Streeton. However, the vision and the method are entirely personal. The broad horizontality of the panel is conducive to such images.

Provenance
Gillian Borrack Collection, City of Whittlesea Federation Bequest

Basically dependent on an intensity of opaque colour tones (gouache) with a balance of thinner transparent washes in detail — the effect is typical of a late afternoon with the sunlight full onto the subject matter. I see this constantly from my studio window from about four or five o’clock onwards. It is always enhanced by the pearly greys and blues of sky and background which are a foil to the bronze foliage of the indigenous trees. Again the simplification of foreground allows the eye to move to concentrated space which is suggested by diminishing vertical bands of colour and cooler tones.

An element of ambiguity exists through the exaggeration of some punctuated distant forms against sky and ranges. These serve to heighten the interest of the composition. Sometimes under certain lights, distant forms such as tree masses advance by tonal strength and thrust themselves disparately into strange sequences in the landscape when it is viewed from rising ground. It is quite impossible to fully articulate in words, the sensations that pass through the mind when an artist views and paints a motif. Suffice to say that in this small painting the instantaneous rapport with an effect seen many times in nature, prompted me to simply make a statement about space, colour tones and light that are uniquely Australian in character.

Provenance
John Borrack Collection, City of Whittlesea Federation Bequest

Exhibited
Gallery Huntly, Canberra 1995.

The expression of the spirit of a place which in landscape painting is aesthetically more important than a literal topographical recording, can really only be achieved after a lifetime’s experience of an area one has constantly observed, painted and loved for its innate characteristics. I gaze across the red gum plains of the Mernda landscape from my studio and witness them in all seasons and moods.

Such a painting as this, free of all inhibitions of literal transcription are done relying purely on memory impressions. These are often inspired by a particular season or day, but the content of the work is a total of past experience and observations that lie in one’s mind.

The staccato quality of tree forms against vast horizontal spaces, the open colour planes and marks that define forms, the calligraphy and tonal resonance of the work, all find their origins in direct observations of nature that remain with me. Experience has taught me that the more direct and less complicated one can express an idea in watercolour and gouache, the more significant and vital the work will be. Occasionally one succeeds and manages a complete statement without recourse to reworking or additions. This painting typifies the direction in which my major work started to move in the late 1980’s.

Provenance
John Borrack Collection, City of Whittlesea Federation Bequest

Exhibited
Gallery Huntly, Canberra 1995.

Viewing a landscape and painting without a horizon line introduces a multitude of devices that may be exploited in an innovatory manner. These include a need to concentrate on the articulation of a rhythmic two dimensional surface pattern in which the eye is directed from one form or part of the picture to another. A sense of decoration can be heightened in such a concept which is not always easy to exploit in a more naturalistic landscape with the traditional zones of sky, background, middle distance and foreground. The Japanese and Chinese artists were adept at such an approach, a legacy which has been passed on to much Contemporary European or Western painting some of which is unequivocally flat. The tendency to be constantly experimenting or expressing new methods of space have always been present in all periods of art. Certainly Cubism in which objects in the same painting are viewed from different angles and assimilated into a unified whole, was a breath of fresh air in the history of 20th Century Western art and helped release painting from a staightjacket regarding organization of space and architecture in a picture.

By a careful selection of semi abstracted forms painted as directly as possible with some later superimposed additions of detail, the eye moves around and up to the picture plane instead of into deep space. However, tonal control, the diminishing of forms and a use of warm and cooler tones of colour are still capable of imparting a feeling of shallow depth.