Deutscher and Hackett

Landscape, 1970, by Sidney Nolan is a deliberately enigmatic painting infused with memory and underpinned by a range of technical strategies the artist had developed over the preceding decades. Since 1953, when Nolan and his family relocated to London, he no longer painted in Australia despite numerous return visits¹; instead, he would gather images within his photographic mind and collect stray plants and flowers which he pressed within a notebook. Only upon returning to his Putney studio would he begin to paint, usually in frenetic bursts of energy as these stored impressions spilled out. Being removed from the actual motif allowed many other inspirations to rise to the surface as he painted. Consequently, attempting to anchor an image to an identifiable location is usually fruitless, as it was when asking the artist for such information. Indeed, as he once explained, Nolan preferred the painting to speak for him, arguing that ‘I’m very interested, in fact, compelled and dedicated to transmitting emotions and I care for very little else.’²
 
Since his earliest days, Nolan had been fascinated by the dream imagery of the Surrealists and Landscape could almost be a still taken from one of their experimental films, with the grass trees (Xanthorrhoea) hovering over the gossamer screen of the background. Such mirage-like appearances date back to paintings such as Island, 1947 (Art Gallery of New South Wales) where a naked figure stands isolated within a moody field that fuses water, land and sky, whilst the central grass tree finds its precedent in Grass trees, 1948. The suggestive ambiguity of Island was pushed further in Nolan’s now-iconic African series of 1963, particularly in works such as Zebra, 1963, of which he said: ‘I feel that there’s a kind of painting to be done with animals and natural camouflage that would be, in a sense, a no-painting; there would be a total disappearance of the image – but if you stared at the painting long enough, the image would eventually waft up.’³ Although there are no animals in Landscape, these possibilities of camouflage and disappearance still hold true. Ironically, Nolan achieved such gossamer effects by using his wife Cynthia’s stockings as a tool to rub the paint into the surface. The shimmering canopy of the background trees, by comparison, have their genesis in the forests seen in the monumental and multi-panelled River bend, 1964 – 65 (Australian National University, Canberra).
 
It is difficult to determine exactly when in 1970 Nolan painted Landscape, as it was yet another peripatetic year for the artist with visits to Germany, Honolulu, New York and Norway, as well as an extended visit to Australia between February and April for exhibitions of his work at the Adelaide Festival and the National Gallery of Victoria, interspersed with a visit to Uluru and central Australia. However, just prior, Nolan’s dealer in Perth, Skinner Galleries, mounted an exhibition of smaller landscapes from 1969 which, like Landscape, included no figures. These were likewise dreamlike and shimmering, with Patrick A. E. Hutchings noting presciently in his catalogue essay that ‘Nolan’s explorer has, for the present, left the stage: Nolan himself is exploring here. These pictures are, in a sense, soliloquies in a landscape.’⁴
 
1. See Lynn, E. and Nolan, S., Sidney Nolan – Australia, Bay Books, Sydney and London, 1979, p. 172
2. Sidney Nolan, 1978, cited ibid., p. 204
3. Sidney Nolan, cited in ‘Nolan in Africa’, Queen, London, 24 April 1963
4. Hutchings, P. A., ‘Introduction’, Sidney Nolan: Recent paintings, Skinner Galleries, Perth, 1970
 
ANDREW GAYNOR