Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

'SILENCE REIGNS HERE' : Russell Drysdale and the Australian Landscape Russell Drysdale Bush fire Margaret Plant Facing page Russell Drysdale Australia 1912-81 Bush fire 1944 Oil and ink on canvas on composition board 62x77cm Gift of Captain Neil McEacharn through C. L. Harden 1954 Queensland Art Gallery Above Portrait of Russell Drysdale. Photograph by Geoffrey Powell, reproduced in Joseph Burke's The Paintings of Russell Drysdale, lire Smith, Sydney, 1951 Right Russell Drysdale Sheet of studies for 'Bush fire' 1944 Pencil on paper 37x 27.5cm Purchased 1990. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation K ussell Drysdale was probably the most travelled artist fc. within Australia since Eugène von Guérard. His journeys reached from Albury and inner New South Wales through Queensland north of Cairns to Cooktown and Cape York, and through the centre of Australia to the Kimberley region, Broome and Melville Island. These travels were documented in many pen and ink studies and later by photographs.1 The sheet of pencil studies for Bush fire and the finished work of the same tide in oil and ink, both in the Collection of the Queensland Art Gallery, relate to a Sydney Morning Herald expedition of 1944 that Russell Drysdale took with the journalist Keith Newman to report on the effects of drought in inland New South Wales. The first of Newman's three articles began with the headline: 'An artist's journey into a western inferno. The country in which there are no bushfires. There is nothing to burn'.2The destruction and human misery encountered on the journey were dramatically reported. But some years before, Russell Drysdale had already displayed his compassion for the treachery of outback conditions. For the Sydney Morning Herald commission, Drysdale drew remnants of habitation, carcasses of sheep and cattle, and a number of studies that treat dead trees with sculptural feeling.3Pen and ink portraits of the inhabitants were also an important part of the record and, indeed, remained a key form of response to the country throughout his career. The artist's sympathy for the characters he encountered on his travels was acknowledged by many of his contemporaries. Doubtless the commission sharpened Drysdale's commitment to documenting human misery and reconfirmed his notion of the hardship of human endurance on the land. It amounts to an allegorical view. He knew richer pastoral land from his school days in Geelong, but in his mature years his compassion grew after he had moved to the Albury area during the war and saw evidence of the Depression in less fertile country. The repertoire of ruin persists in later pictures, but it was to the forefront in the 1940s, in the decade after the Depression and in the period of crisis during the Second World War. From 1941 he had produced major paintings of inland characters living starkly in bare conditions — Man feeding his dogs 1941, a major Drysdale painting in the Queensland Art Gallery Collection, is an early and assured work in this manner. The land deals out its hardships and inhabitants grow gaunt in its service. The pencil on paper sketches for Bush fire 1944 announce the main composition and elements for the oil and ink painting, one of Drysdale's most accomplished in the medium. The drawings exhibit the fluency and speed of notation and also, in the strong horizontal pencil marks, the spatial sense seen in the infinite extension of distance spreading out energetically to right and left from the wreckage. In the first sketch, the majority of marks come forcefully across from the left to darken on the right, then lighten around the vertical of the chimney, the dominant accent in the preliminary composition. More ruins, 188 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965