Armleder & Fleury

Peter Hill

The Albury Wodonga Superfiction 1993

Collaboration Peter Hill and J.J. Voss (Photographer)

Jeffrey Makin

Peter Hill: You are a landscape painter. What is the landscape like in which you work?

Jeffrey Makin: Much of my recent painting comes from the Aroona Valley which is one of the central valleys in the Flinders Ranges, and is reached by way of the Brachina Gorge. This range of hills is so vast that they seem to be tunnelling down the horizon towards the South Pole. The continent is so big you can almost see the curve of the earth as it turns. Everything is red, a raw red oxide colour, and there is a marked absence of trees. In trying to cope with the physicality of the landscape I often bring back from the field specimens of rock samples, the colours of which become the fixed component in my re-invention of the landscape.

JM: I begin the work outside as a plein-air painter and then continue the work in my studio, which is outside Melbourne. There I develop the location studies and edit out the unnecessary elements.
Reasonably formal picture making principles are applied in the studio to what I have been trying to do outdoors - that is to capture what has been described as the heartbeat of the earth. A fairly romantic description, but I guess that's what most landscape painters are trying to do. Capturing the essence of location. It can be a harsh country, and I have to take a lot of equipment - paint, canvas, a tent - out into it.

JM: Some people find the subject matter of the painting intimidating, particularly down in England where you have the soft lushness of Ivon Hitchins, for example, or Constable. Most people there are unfamiliar with the strong tonal contrasts which combine with an absence of shadow. The sun radiates off the cliffs and causes a lot of illusory
movement through the heat of the atmosphere.
However, in my work the landscape itself is really just an armature, or clothes line, upon which the real, formal, issues of the painting is hung. But do people see that when they look at my work? I'm not sure. Do they see past the desert landscape?
What I suppose I am saying is that you wouldn't hold a Cézanne up against the 'real' Mnt. St. Victoire, and my work is not intended to be held up, ‘against’ the real Flinders Ranges.

PH: So, are you more concerned with the Australian landscape tradition, or with the Romantic tradition?

JM: I've always believed in what some people have described as ‘informed parochialism’, or ‘informed regionalism’, and I think that so much good painting around the world starts from this source. I am thinking of Marsden Hartley, and Edward Hopper, and I'm thinking of Auerbach, Bellany, and Kossoff. It is also interesting to note that the history of Australian art is peppered with Scottish artists - Frederick McCubbin, one of the great fathers of the Australian landscape school, and more recently Rod Carmichael who has made a very fine contribution to contemporary painting that has a connection to a particular place.
There has been an important interface between Australian and Scottish landscape painting, and I think our two countries are the two places in the world where there is a continuing involvement in landscape as a possible basis for extending the body of knowledge within our genre. Particularly in the Melbourne school where the unbroken tradition with the landscape has blossomed - the Heidelberg School, Arthur Streeton, Tom Robertson, and a little later Frederick McCubbin coming down more recently to Fred Williams who descended from a 19th century Welsh dynasty of Williams artists.

PH: Turning to Australia today. Will the Bicentennial be the year long barbie some predict, and bow will the Sydney biennale fit into it, or the Australian bicentennial Biennale as I believe it is to be called?

JM: Well, there has been some controversy over the way Australian culture has been misrepresented internationally. In a strange way Australians are not a great festival-making people. In South America they have great festivals, in Edinburgh you have the world's greatest, but in Australia they don't seem to get off the ground - it always seems strained.
The issues of the Bicentennial Biennale will come and go, as they always do. It is very connected with Sydney politics and Sydney art. I think it tends to follow rather than lead. It tends to happen in spite of Australia. Now, I don't believe in international art, I believe in regional art. I think all great artists have been regionalists. Monet and Cézanne I quote as two of many. What they support in Sydney tends to be some kind of Gucci art. Peter Fuller has written very well on this, what he calls B.I.C.C.A. art, that is, Biennale International Club Class Art. It's the sort of thing arts administrators put on, like little letters to each other, and really has little to do with Australian art or cultural issues.
It is a sixties attitude of a cargo culture that says you have to buy it in, and this is what they are doing. If it is Cuchi, or Palladino, or the trans-avantgarde they've got to have it because it comes with the blessing of Achille Bonito Oliva.

PH: There may be an exhibition of aboriginal art coming to Glasgow in 1990 . . .

JM: The aboriginal culture has had an enormous impact on most Australian artists, particularly painters like Ian Fairweather, who incidentally was born and trained in Scotland. He was one of our greatest artists, and was greatly influenced by Aboriginal and by Chinese art.
Prior to Fairweather there was Margaret Preston in the 20s and 30s who used to simply put aboriginal 'bits' in her paintings and also used the aboriginal convention of dotting and stroking. Fairweather looked deeper, and also looked to New Guinea, as did Kirschner. Aboriginal art is only one of many specific to our region.
As for myself, there is no way I can go to paint in the Flinders Ranges and not realise that the aborigines were there for a long, long time before. The very name of the valley, Aroona, is the name of the tribe. So when you enter the Australian landscape you have to do so with reverence and respect for the artists, the aboriginal people, who were there before you. And I am thrilled that there is an exhibition coming to Glasgow.

PH: Finishing where we began, with your own work and the Flinders Ranges, is the tactile quality as important as the experiments with colour?

JM: The history of landscape painting in the recent past, particularly the wonderful late Turners, and particularly in England rather than Scotland or Australia, is to do with the air and space between the retina and matter - it's to do with atmospherics.
My paintings are not to do with atmospherics but with the actual feel and touch and density of matter, so the thickness of the paint is in my own way a type of shorthand that goes further in trying to capture the essence of the landscape. The weight of the paint is a simulation of the weight of the landscape, and is not unconnected with the speed of the mark.