Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

less identifiable and more abstracted, are plucked out in the second stage. The horizontal energy diminishes in the third stage, although it remains strong, and the chimney comes into measured focus together with the other uprights and bits of iron which are fully identified in the final work. In Bush fire, the very absence of the human figure is significant: catastrophe has driven the inhabitants from the land, and the elements have destroyed their basic dwelling. The hearth of the home — the centre of the household, the chimney — remains standing, a mere column of bricks. The water tank is long empty, overturned. The galvanised iron roof, that feature of vernacular Australian architecture, has been flattened into the earth. Parts of the vertical frame of the house still stand and the remnants of iron are rendered as an artful silhouette: it has the likeness of some carrion bird scavenging in that unyielding terrain. The dramatised light heightens the apocalyptic feeling. The silhouette effect, the strange geometries wrought by sand, wind and heat, are characteristic of the artist's compositional skill and his directing and choreographing of elements of the landscape from sketches through to more formal works. Drysdale saw beauty as well as pain in the outback. Russell Drysdale M an feeding his dogs 1941 Oil on canvas 51.2 X 61.4cm Gift of C. F. Viner-Hall 1961 Queensland Art Gallery Russell Drysdale Back verandah 1942 Oil on composition board 40.8x51 cm Gift of Captain Neil McEacharn, Italy 1954 Queensland Art Gallery The abandoned markers of human presence are replayed through Drysdale's paintings in the 1940s: the blackened frame of houses, the curled corrugated iron, the broken windmill, the chimney, a bath. Emus in a landscape 1950 (National Gallery of Australia) is a significant painting which continues the construction of space, with wrecks of houses in the middle foreground sharing their silhouettes with the emus. It might be suggested that not since the records of explorers of Central Australia in the early nineteenth century have we had such a sense of the extensiveness of this country, blank to the point of agoraphobia. Drysdale's first-hand exposure to English art in the late 1930s was fundamental in developing this sense of the vacuum of space, as seen, for example, in the work of British artists like Graham Sutherland, Paul Nash and Edward Wadsworth. Some of the British versions of Surrealism would have been known to Drysdale and he was also aware of sculptor Henry Moore's interpretation of nature as organic form.4 In 1945, Bush fire was reproduced for the first time — in colour — in the second volume of Present Day Art in Australia, edited by Sydney lire Smith.5The work was already in the possession of Captain Neil McEacharn who was later to donate it to the Queensland National Art Gallery Collection. It was described in terms that today might amount to cliché: 'vast, monotonous expansions ... silence reigns here... small townships broken down and forlorn'.6But in the 1940s this attention to inland Australia was rare: Douglas Dundas and Lloyd Rees in the same volume show the more characteristic fixation with pastoral country. From these views, at first casually sketched, Drysdale finds a sort of permanence: much of his work has the lucid quality of a stage set. Such an analogy is not casual: it indicates the interest of a circle of artists in Sydney in the artifice of the stage and in actual stage productions. The economy, the focus and the spatial illusions of stage design are relevant, but also the romanticism that surfaces, even in such a context of human loss. The zoning of the landscape into a clear foreground, middle distance and background of deep space, with principal interest in the middle distance, is a basic orientation throughout Drysdale's oeuvre. The lire Smith publication gives an indication of the contact between painters and stage designers in the 1940s. Both Loudon Sainthill and William Constable were also represented in this volume of Present Day Art in Australia and Drysdale's closeness to these artists is confirmed by his association with the Merioola group in the later 1940s.7 Pen and ink with wash was a favourite medium for Russell Drysdale. He used it for preparatory work, but also considered it of importance in itself, having the best qualities of draughtsmanship and colour. In Australian landscape c.1950 (QAG), the bottle tree in the foreground is the key 190 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965