Joe Furlonger: Horizons

30 He is interested in its economy, too, drawn to periods that exemplify the sparseness of the genre; and with the emergence of brevity in Chinese painting from the fourteenth century. In the eighteenth century, Furlonger notes, Chinese ink painters preferred to signal some small narrative amid the grandiose scenery: ‘There’d be these tiny little figures, travellers, or traders, pointing to a fragment of a bigger story,’ he says. We might connect this with his own landscapes at several levels, looking deeply into panoramas with the occasional red daub (a small tractor), a simple flick of white (a metal irrigator armature) or jots of Phthalo Blue (a bunch of freshly tarpaulined wheat bundles); subtle reminders that such places have long shadows and multiple histories, sites of both disaster and recovery. Cut back to our field trip along the Cunningham Highway, during which I learned more about Furlonger’s working methods (and his love of the Scenic Rim region): we had been on the road a few hours, and up ahead, the mildly undulating plains that had so far appeared as a repetitive blur of grids and lineal plots began to morph into sugar loafs. In the distance, the Great Dividing Range loomed. He thought there might be a turn-off somewhere that would reveal a nice, elevated spot, where he could roll out rice-paper sheets and dash off some ink drawings. Tiny towns such as Frazerview and Morwincha, and Lake Moogerah, shimmered in the haze, off in the distance. We missed the turn, but soon found a new site at which to stop. Several works on paper were done in split seconds, wedged between the car door (a windbreak) and a steep rock wall running alongside the busy road, right at the summit of Cunningham’s Gap. As filtered light and harsh glare alternated through clouds above his view, onto the peaks of Mt Cordeaux and Mt Mitchell, images literally poured from his brush, his eyes transfixed by the scene. Those works remain brilliant in their description of place, made with the most modest of means and available time, laying bare his process. And his means were typically modest — a felt mat; what he called his ‘ticklers’ (ink brushes that look moth-eaten but have in fact been ‘burnt’ clean with chlorine, making them as ratty as possible); some Indian ink — and accompanied by a flask of smouldering, dark, fresh coffee. The coffee, serendipitously, had a dual purpose, also acting as a mixer to soften the jet-black ink. As it happened, the coffee also offered up a rich sepia tonal shift, in keeping with the soils of the region. Here, the thick alluvial and nitrogen-rich ground approximated a pigment range spanning ‘iron-bark brown’ through to ‘crow black’, its mineralised flecks sparkling in the sun. ‘Australian landscape painting is seasonal,’ he told me. ‘If you’re not an opportunist, you have not got a hope. If you don’t get out and paint it, it’s gone.’ Looking up at the face of the escarpment, winding out and away from us, newly defined ravines were suddenly in focus. They are always there, of course, but in the wet season, they are heavily camouflaged, ‘fattened out’ by foliage. But it was winter, and Furlonger knew that the cold, dry winds would clear these spaces out to reveal the bones of the range —