Deutscher and Hackett

The noted author Marcus Clarke famously described the Australian bush in 1867 as being infused with a ‘weird melancholy’, one filled with ‘the hieroglyphs of haggard gum-trees, blown into odd shapes, distorted [and] cramped with cold nights.’¹ Painted nearly one century later, Arthur Boyd’s Bush pond, 1958 – 59, captures Clarke’s vivid description with an intensity that verges on the gothic. The landscape was one of Boyd’s earliest subjects, embodied in his paintings of the Mornington Peninsula executed in the late 1930s whilst the young artist was living with his widowed grandfather at Rosebud. In the 1940s, his human dramas were firmly anchored by their own landscapes of the city and its semi-rural suburbia, but between 1950 and 1952, Boyd stunned audiences with Wimmera landscapes filled with piercing light and space. On the strength of such works, he was chosen to represent Australia alongside the deceased Arthur Streeton at the XXIX Biennale in Venice which opened on 14 June 1958. The conservatively-minded selection committee, presided over by the Prime Minister Robert Menzies, had already chosen a suite of eight landscapes by Boyd comprising similar still and poetic scenes from around Bendigo and the Wimmera, but were likely ignorant of the fact that the artist was about to exhibit his confronting ‘Bride series’² close to the public announcement of his inclusion at Venice. The ‘Brides’ follow a narrative wherein a tragic love triangle is played out by doomed indigenous characters set against expressionist visions of primordial forest, and their exhibition so excited local supporters that they urged the Committee to alter their choices. Not surprisingly, the Committee declined.
 
One painting the selectors included nonetheless gave a clear indication of the artist’s divergence, being Mount Terrible (near Gaffney’s Creek), 1956, where the bristling trees and bush possess a highly suggestive anxiety. Related paintings from Gaffney’s Creek are ‘typically confined, tangled, harsh in texture [where figures stand] against dark, rotting undergrowth, or stumble across creeks with thin white branches clawing out of the dark.’³ Bush pond, too, is informed by this approach, but instead of employing the setting for some human tragedy, Boyd shows a man quietly clearing leaves whilst two white goats eat nearby – all engaged in personal thoughts and actions. A kingfisher darts over the darkly coloured pond and even though the surrounding trees twist and turn with their own melancholic weirdness, the man and animals are comfortable within their surroundings. The paint is rich with impasto, and Boyd uses his brush to actively ‘describe rather than circumscribe’ the whole scene.⁴ The goat was one of Boyd’s complex array of symbolic characters and motifs, a collection which also included the allegorical Ramox – part ram, part ox, a beast filled with unbridled lust which had first appeared in the artist’s paintings from the 1940s. The goat has a similarly lewd meaning through history (think of Pan with his caprine legs), but it is apparent that Boyd has a different, less provocative intention here, for goats were already a common sight in the Australian bush, long-time feral since their arrival with the first colonists. Like the bushman, they have now adapted to be at home within the skeletal vegetation – an environment the artist came to consider as being symbolically pure, an antipodean Garden of Eden.
 
1. Clarke, M., ‘Preface’ in: Adam Lindsay Gordon, Sea Spray and Smoke, A.H. Messina and Co., Melbourne, 1867, pp. iv, v
2. The correct title of the series is: ‘Love, marriage and death of a half-caste.’ The term ‘Bride series’ was first coined by Franz Philipp in Philipp, F., Arthur Boyd, Thames and Hudson, London, 1967, p. 83
3. Arthur Boyd Retrospective, supplement to Art and Australia, vol. 31, no. 2, 1993
4. Philipp, op. cit., p.82
 
ANDREW GAYNOR