Provenance
Gillian Borrack Collection, City of Whittlesea Federation Bequest

Exhibited
John Borrack Retrospective, Benalla Art Gallery, 1987.

I had completed a rather straightforward painting of these old gums off Hunters Lane but was entirely dissatisfied with just another painting of red gum trees. Feeling quite desperate, a certain impulsiveness took hold as sometimes happens when confronted with a failure. Sometimes sensation is not enough for the perceptual painter and a combination of impulsiveness and improvisation, can take over and suprise one with a new set of directions in ones work. Painters should be always prepared to explore and risk new attitudes if their work is to develop in any way.

Taking the biggest brush possible, I scrubbed the whole board down with clean water leaving a honey coloured hue across the paper. In a heightened emotional state and turning my back on the motif but with the original sensation in my mind, I began to work broadly and boldly with a large round brush loaded with full bodied primary hues of gouache.

I based the painting on the triad of red, yellow and blue with related transitions. By working quickly and directly with an intuitive knowledge of colour chords, planes and shapes, the painting became an essay in colour relationships first and a landscape afterwards, an approach to painting extolled by the Synthetists but really a philosophy basic to all painting.

The honey coloured patches permeating the scattered areas of the work, are the colour of the new surface of the ground and are deliberately untouched (as one would do with areas of white paper). They give an added unity to the painting which is both expressionistic and colourful in its result.

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.