Geoff Wilson: Interrogated Landscape

The physicist Paul Davies said “we can never, not even in principle, observe things, only the interaction between things”. How appropriate when considering the art of Geoff Wilson. This remarkable and enduring artist has spent his entire working life, from the 1940s to the present day, looking at things, and more particularly the relationship between objects and elements within landscapes. And not any landscapes but the quintessentially South Australian landscapes – the sun-bleached paddocks, blue skies and slightly askew lineup of sheds, farmhouses, fences and farm equipment. These are the panoramas taken for granted until travelling elsewhere when the memory of the sights and smells of a South Australian summer can make the heart ache for home. Art historian Jane Hylton, who curated Wilson’s first survey exhibition (the 2000 Fleurieu Biennale Heritage Exhibition Orchestrated Vision: The Art of Geoff Wilson) says of this aspect of the artist’s work: “There are distinctive qualities to the South Australian landscape. Many farms across it often have this ‘tried and not quite made it’ feel … I don’t want to say ‘tried and failed’. It’s more a case of ‘we’ll just leave it and build another one’. I think that’s what Geoff does with the South Australian landscape – he homes in on a sense of how South Australian rural life works or has worked over a period of time.” Geoff Wilson is now the subject of a significant survey exhibition Geoff Wilson: Interrogated Landscape. It is accompanied by a richly illustrated Samstag Art Museum publication which includes a major essay by the exhibition curator Barry Pearce. For the first time, the full Geoff Wilson story is told, particularly for local audiences who may consider they all own a bit of this story through their connection with Wilson as a teacher, a friend – or simply the local artist whose work everyone knows and appreciates. But this project has the credentials to generate a wider, national appreciation of Wilson as a distinctive regional artist whose practice contributes to Australia’s art historical narrative concerning the ongoing dialogue between British/European sensibilities and the Australian landscape. Above all, it presents Wilson as an artist who continues to create aesthetically complex but seductive images which express both a sense of collective identity and an individual sense of ‘being there’ where, beyond the angle of that fence post, the windmill just past the header, the way the green of the winter grass paddock intensifies the warmth of that shed’s purple shadows – nothing else matters. If Wilson’s intention had remained simply to capture the joyful plein air experience then his work may never have escaped its romantic origins. But around the 1970s there was a retreat from soft edges towards the more architectonic and incisive style by which his work is known today. Why this didn’t result in a formulaic style, devoid of personality can be partly explained by the artist’s own laconic, self-effacing humour which inflects his landscapes with an implied sense of human dramas being acted out by an unlikely cast of characters – slovenly sheds, morally righteous windmills, furtive fence-lines and Rabelaisian farm dumps spilling their secrets to anyone who cares to stop and look. But great credit must also be given to a lifetime of educating the eye. It began in youth hood when Wilson looked at Heysens, the Lindsays and other artists at the Art Gallery of South Australia and it gathered pace when he began a lifelong pattern of going to London and Europe (from the early 1950s) to look at modernist art at first hand. Within this process, an appreciation of British post war artists, including Paul Nash, Victor Pasmore and Ben Nicholson, was engendered. If you want to get into the engine room of Wilson’s interrogative eye and imaginative soul – look here. It may explain a tendency to apply a visual tourniquet to any possible emotional bleed through stiff upper juxtapositioning and the like. It also gives context to the artist’s privileging of the cast offs and places of human habitation left behind by or staring down progress. Wilson might claim (in the manner of Jeffrey Smart explaining the aesthetic role of certain of his supposed ‘alienated society’ figures) that things are included and ‘work’ within his own images according to pictorial priorities. But that can’t stop viewers responding to a perceived anthropomorphising of the landscape. Pearce has his own perspective on this. “There is no doubt, for all their architectonic caution, and the self-effacement with which Wilson plays them down, his paintings have a faint aura of yearning for the harmonious presence of people outside the picture plane. They present, in other words, a telling in absentia portrait of himself.” There is a German word, sehnsucht, a ‘longing for something’. Does this, in the final analysis, encapsulate an emotional tug underlying Wilson’s paint/composition craft – to identify in some way with unnoticed, uneventful or commonplace things? Your guess? Geoff Wilson: Interrogated Landscape Samstag Museum of Art Friday, July 17 to Friday, September 18 unisa.edu.au/samstagmuseum