Emma Stuart ‘The Blue Hour’ at Kick Gallery: opening talk

“The blue hour is the time of transition between night and day, between day and night. It is the twilight and the dawn.”

In her most recent series, The Blue Hour, Emma Stuart focuses on the sublime moments that take place as a day transitions to night and night to day. Stuart captures the liminal shift between light and shade, between what is revealed and what is hidden, between the point of focus and distorted peripheries.

All of the works in this latest suite of paintings are based on Stuart’s experience of living and working near the Todd River and its tributaries between Alice Springs and Telegraph Station in central Australia. For over 20 years Stuart has spent time in this part of the world describing this country as having a force not experienced anywhere else. The deep human history and current cultural complex are just as much a part of this energy as is the physical landscape. As the paintings have evolved so has her insight of self, solitude, and connections with people and place.

I greatly enjoyed viewing these works, speaking with Emma about them, and reflecting on the Alice Springs landscape, as in my notes for the talk below.

Emma Stuart, ‘The Blue Hour’, Kick Gallery, 2015: opening talk

Emma has been visiting the Central Australia region for 20 years. She had an immediate connection with the Warlpiri people at Yuendumu (300 km nw of Alice), fell in love with the place, and continued visiting regularly. It had always been a desire of hers to go and paint there.

This series came out of visiting Todd River bed, and the walk to the Telegraph Station, in the early morning and at dusk with her mother, who is also an artist.

A few things struck me about this latest series of Emma’s: firstly, that it was unusual for several reasons; particularly the intimate close-up nature of the style of her landscape painting.

When I visit Alice Springs the aspect of the landscape I am most struck by, especially after flying in from a city like Melbourne, is the sense of vast open space. The big Central Australian sky, would be, if I were a landscape painter, tempting to paint. I would feel compelled to depict large landscapes. But Emma cleverly avoids this obvious tendency, and reaches further and deeper, into a more complex, sensitive and nuanced response to the landscape.

Another aspect these works brought to my mind was my first visit to Alice Springs, some 12 years or so ago. I went for a walk by myself along the Todd River bed. As I was walking, I felt overpowered and in awe of these beautiful ghost gums, and I kept seeing people, Aboriginal people, moving amongst them. Some were there, and some were not. Some disappeared into the trees when I turned to look at them. I asked my friend the Anmatyerre/Alyawarre artist from Utopia, Barbara Weir, herself an expert landscape painter, about this. She told me that the reason I was seeing these people, or spirits, was because the land in Alice is still sung, it was still alive, whereas the land in Melbourne did not have enough Aboriginal people left to sing it, so it was therefore  ‘dead’ land. I saw this with all due respect to the Wurendjeri people upon whose land we stand, and am also in awe of the continued strength of tradition here, in Collingwood, just up the road for example, is a place where Aboriginal people have been meeting for thousands of years, and still do today. It is the end-point of a songline which runs for thousands of kilometres across the land.

When I saw Emma’s tree portraits, I was reminded of this moment, and felt that she felt these living tree spirits too. Through discussion with her, I was struck by how astute and sensitive she was to this environment, and how she, as great artists and poets do, subconsciously picked up on elements in our environment and landscape that few people are aware of.

In conversation, Emma has said to me that she ‘wanted to capture the intimacy and personalities of trees’, particularly the majestic gums, such as the ghost gums, native to Central Australia, the largest and oldest of which she describes as being ‘like Kings’.

The Central and Western Desert Aboriginal language groups’ have as a fundamental philosophical and religious concept known as life essence, in which every living thing: trees, plants, animals, every single blade of grass, and even rocks, contain a life essence. My Maori whanau call it mana; life force, power, spiritual power.

Through her close-up, realist style, expertly executed in oil paint, Emma has captured the life essence of these gum trees, and brought them into being, not as objects as they are often rendered by Western society, but as animate and alive as humans.

Secondly, through her work, I began thinking about the Australian landscape tradition, in particular, the landscape tradition of Central Australia. Of course the first name that springs to mind is that of Albert Namatjira. Namatjira, as a Western Arrernte man, related to the ghost gums of his country as totemic ancestors. When out driving with Luritja and Arrernte artists I have been struck by the way they wave at certain gum trees; when I ask who they are waving to, they answer ‘that old man’, a creation ancestor.

When I began thinking about the Central Australian landscape tradition, I realised that it was quite lacking in a strong school or compelling level of artistic representation. Leaving aside the hundreds of majestic landscape painters of the Aboriginal schools, and the Hermannsburg School in particular, there are few outsiders that have captured the striking and to me hauntingly beautiful landscape of the Alice Springs region. Sidney Nolan came close, but his most striking work was, for me, of the Musgrave Ranges, many hundreds of kilometres to the south, in South Australia. Nolan painted the landscape big: powerful, overwhelming, bright, colourful, as reminiscent of the observations of the first non-Aboriginal explorers. He saw it as a land haunted by drought; perhaps he lacked Fred Williams’ sensitivities to forests and was also viewing the land with Eurocentric eyes, failing to see the myriad living elements of the Central Australian bush.

I believe that Emma has been one of the first Australian artists to really lift the level of Central Australian landscape painting, and to really see it, with eyes sensitively attuned to it. Unlike our Impressionist painters, she has not depicted Australian landscape as a beautiful but harsh, overpowering ‘wilderness’ to be tamed by the heroic pioneer, always a male. Streeton had a wonderful love for trees and was an early environmentalist, but was also a man of his era, continuing a European landscape tradition.

Emma has responded to the landscape, and the light, of Central Australia in a powerful way that heralds a new direction and understanding of the true beauty of the Australian environment. Not an environment to be tamed and made into a faux copy of Europe, nor one to be feared and controlled. She lets the trees and light speak to her, and responds in paint. It is a significant shift in Australian art and one which needs recognition and encouragement.

I am moved by the way she has had the patience and humility to let these majestic beings speak to her, and her skill and obvious highly-skilled technical abilities in depicting her observations and her respect for and relationship with these magnificent tree beings.

And I thank her and Kick Gallery director, Jake Hoerner, for bringing a little bit of Alice Springs to Melbourne, for those of us who miss it, despite not being from there, but who hold it in our hearts and souls.
Emily McCulloch Childs, Melbourne, April 2015

‘The Blue Hour’ runs April 16 – May 03 2015 at Kick Gallery.

Kick Gallery is located at 4 Peel Street Collingwood & open Thursday-Saturday 12-5pm | Sunday 12-4pm & by Appointment

For further information contact Kick Gallery on 9415 8483 or email info@kickgallery.com