Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

and oranges of landscapes around Sydney, the yellows, greys and oranges of Central Australia, as well as the particular colour effects of both day and night light. Colour may also have carried a symbolic resonance in Miller's art: certainly he was interested in theosophical colour symbolism. Blue, the colour of night, spirituality and compassion, is key in Trees in moonlight. It is the colour of recession and distance and, perhaps most significantly, the colour that Rudolf Steiner believed approaches thought and 'leads one below the surface'.15 For Miller, light also encompassed two different orders of existence. Claude Bragdon, an advocate of dynamic symmetry who was of particular interest to the artist, had written in 1928 of the fundamental duality that bisects nature, the split between night and day, 'so wrought into the very texture of everything that we forget it is there ... twin aspects of one power' and of the artist's responsibility to understand and make manifold 'aspects of this eternally sundered, eternally united pair'.16Miller had already encountered the mystical dimensions of this duality through his commitment to the exultant verses of the nineteenth-century British poet Francis Thompson. Daylight represented 'the active mind', and night, 'the contemplative mind'.17From the time of his early tonal dusk and nocturne paintings in Warrandyte, Miller gave to the absence of daylight the same positive mystical value that medieval metaphysics attributed to it. The dusky tonalities of the Warrandyte paintings are converted in paintings such as Trees in moonlight to the enclosing blues, 'the rich purple and heliotrope evenings' which coloured what Miller saw as the immeasurable depth of nights in Sydney. In Trees in moonlight, Miller applies his model of division and unity to light itself, poetically rather than scientifically evoking the subde radiance of the moon shafting through natural forms. In its still prominence, the moon is presented as both cause and effect. Matter, energy, light and space are conveyed through the interaction of line and innumerable particles of paint consonant to the whole. In this sense Trees in moonlight resonates in the way Miller perceives nature to organise itself. Embedded in its painterly structure is a testament, both concealing and revealing, to a mystical understanding of a universal order, encompassing both permanence and flux. All is divided, fragmented by the tesserae of colour and line, by the impact of light, so that 'each o b je ct... has ceased to exist only in itself and becomes little by little a cell within the whole organism of the painting'18— yet all is also acknowledged in its structure and intactness. The viewer no longer segregates the fleeting from the inert, the atom from the cosmos, the corporeal from the ethereal. The image becomes both macroscopic and microscopic, a conception based in twentieth-century scientific and cultural knowledges that posit the universe as both incomprehensibly small and inconceivably large — Einstein's infinite universe. Godfrey Miller's intellectual and philosophical breadth was put to the service of an ultimately poetic vision, consciously pushing the limits of rationalism. That the lyricism of his essentially mystical understanding of life emerges from an intellectual rigour is an outstanding aspect of his art, made manifest in this work. Deborah Edwards is a curator of Australian art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. ART AND MYSTICISM 249