Provenance
Gillian Borrack Collection, City of Whittlesea Federation Bequest

A combination of the fluency and wetness of broad washes on wet paper with deliberate accents of body colour or gouache imposed.

Several series of larger paintings inspired by flying around Alice Springs and Mt Isa at this time lead to a more minimal approach to vast vistas, but as such, I have never been a “minimalist”, a label given to another school of painting. The subject matter determined the direction and content of all of these works.

This work was a response to a hot dry afternoon when distant forms and paddocks pulsated in a summer haze. Such effects in nature lend themselves unequivocally to their expression in watercolour as they can be achieved directly and without overworking as is the danger in oil painting. The more cluttered such a landscape becomes, the more the feeling of vastness and space is lost, so considerable restraint is required of the practitioner if he wishes to convey that feeling. Careful consideration is given to the placing and shapes of imposed marks which are merely graphic equivalents for trees or other landscape forms.

Provenance
John Borrack Collection, City of Whittlesea Federation Bequest

Exhibited
John Borrack, Australian Galleries, 1990.

Like Purple Plain, Mernda (Cat. no. 39) and Mernda Heat Haze (Cat. no. 37) this painting was a further development from aspects of the Basalt Plains series of the 1990’s as seen in Mernda Plains Landscape (Cat. no. 31).

This picture has a greater minimalist quality about it, having been painted in the studio during a particularly wet spring when some of the surrounding flats were indented by channels of water. Greens are not a colour harmony I work with often, but here help convey the essence of the seasonal landscape.

A much more formal structure has been emphasized in this picture in which atmospheric space has been almost negated in favour of a much shallower field of colour and two dimensional surface rhythm, an actual effect one can sometimes see under certain conditions of nature, particularly in flat country. I have always had some respect for one or two of the better colour field painters of America in the 1950’s and 1960’s who actually utilized expressive broad bands of colour harmonies in their work, but didn’t classify them as landscape paintings. My own feelings on the subject are to avoid the clinical precision that such an approach can bring, and thus indicate some actual reference to landscape in a work, a horizon, however subtle, or marks indicating actual forms that give some scale to the work. I suppose the idea first occurred to me when I saw J. M. W. Turner’s wonderful painting, Evening Star in the National Gallery in London many years ago. In this work a few bands of mysterious colour and exquisite harmonies with one or two references to figure, sand, sea and sky, transmogrify everything into a magical unity. It serves as a revelatory example of how all art is dependent on abstract qualities and how great artists like Turner are able to conceal those qualities without lapsing into a forced mannerism.

Provenance
John Borrack Collection, City of Whittlesea Federation Bequest

Exhibited
Australian Galleries, Melbourne. 1990.

Probably the most abstractly saturated field of colour of the three paintings of this period in this collection. More obvious formalist devices than are seen in Basalt Flood Plain, Mernda (Cat. no. 38) and Mernda Heat Haze (Cat. no. 37) are incorporated into the painting to give it a more ambiguous spacial quality. However, despite the extensive field of violet blue and its subtle gradations all painted very directly in thickish gouache on wet paper, the landscape structure remains intact with sky and land on which have been imposed tree forms. The slash of red at the base of the painting stabilizes the composition and in its intensity of chroma heightens the mysterious quality of the purple field.

Despite the deliberate use of the flatish space in the picture’s structure, depth can still be read into the landscape as the eye moves upwards to the horizon line.

Such paintings have provided me with an extensive knowledge of specific colour chords and harmonies but have, as in this series, been now abandoned as I could take the approach no further. However, much of their legacy still remains in the larger current works from 2000.

Provenance
Gillian Borrack Collection, City of Whittlesea Federation Bequest

Among the significant and vast variety of characteristics the colour blue offers is its capability of being able to be used to evoke both daylight or night light. Its employment in landscape painting to express atmosphere, shadow, distance, sunny sky or sea are universal, while from a psychological and symbolical point of view such as its use by Van Gogh or Picasso, the range of emotions it can evoke can be diversely compelling.

This landscape which belongs to the later period of my work in which the format is treated as a large colour field, breaks with the natural colour of a landscape at late evening and is replaced by a deliberate exploration of blue violet and the grey tones all closely related and lying in the lower region of the colour scale.

The overall concentration of these closely related tones of colour dispense the feeling of a vast landscape in which the more melancholy transitions of a winter’s evening are suggested. As a perceptual painter whose work depends on a response I receive from sensations observed in the natural world, I would consider this painting a solution to a very strong feeling I experience about the Plenty Valley landscape at that mysterious hour between daylight and nightfall.

Use of gouache and the more transparent additions of watercolour accents in the smaller forms impart a low keyed resonance to the work.