Can there be a “history” of landscape art? Is it a genre? A cultural artefact of a particular form of consciousness? A practice? A persistent delusion?  How specific is the landscape vision in different national spaces? How unique is Australian landscape art? As a side-effect of my efforts to develop my own art practice, I found myself lost in an array of tangled historical, philosophical and analytical issues.

By heading this page with a very famous Arthur Streeton painting, I have already made a statement. Streeton is probably the most recognisable of earlier Australian painters, much loved by the public, little discussed these days. Streeton’s work speaks to me in part because of the places he painted, many close to my heart (and life). But an earlier generation of landscape artists, especially William Chalres Piguenit and Conrad Martens also painted in these places, and it is fascinating to compare what they saw, some forty or fifty years apart.

I knew I  still wanted to write about this problem, even as I was trying to paint it. I looked at the history of what is regarded as landscape painting in the West, which led into predictable directions about power, representation, patronage, the use of images, conventional art history, unconventional art history. 

But when I came to thinking about Australia in particular, the impact of the land and its history, black and white, overtook the conventional considerations. I began to wonder if something very important and amazing had developed in Australia in the interface between existence, ethics and aesthetics. Were earlier artists aware of this process? And what were  contemporary landscape painters thinking about while they chose their subjects, developed their techniques, painted places, sometimes the same places many times? I could see how a pattern had developed. I personally knew many of the contemporary painters I was fascinated by. I had done workshops with some, and talked briefly with others, and when I read their artists’s statements the same themes recurred, sometimes hesitantly, sometimes assertively.

A book on Australian landscape art began to take place in my thinking. It would not be a large, elegant, coffee-table book but something much more modest, perhaps supported by images and details on this web-site. The project is in brief outline so far. I am reading artists’ diaries, where I can. There are boxes of letters between various of the “Australian Impressionists” of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. More recently, artists’ diaries had been published. I am reading the vast and beautifully illustrated publication of Fred Williams a little at a time. Not much about painting in there, though. I hope to talk to some of the senior traditional landscape artists while they are still with us (John Wilson, Warwick Fuller, Robyn Collier, Elisabeth Cummings). 

I am not sure how I will go about publishing this material. Ultimately, yes, a book, but I may refurbish and develop a new website specifically to support this work as it progresses. I have so many already: one more won’t hurt!