Desert Channels by Robin Libby;Dickman Chris;Martin Mandy;

Author:Robin, Libby;Dickman, Chris;Martin, Mandy;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: CSIRO Publishing

Suite for Season 2008,

Mandy Martin.

Painted Gorge, Cravens Peak Reserve, Simpson Desert, 2008. Pigments/ochres/acrylic on canvas. 100 × 100 cm.

Aesthetic evaluation demands a visual vocabulary with which to assess the landscape. I see this process as being similar to collecting scientific data. It is an intensive process, based on sampling and resampling, reliant on a consistent methodology or approach and susceptible to interference from many variables. Ultimately, its aim is to represent the diversity that makes functioning landscapes visually pleasing.

Desert channels landscapes are visually pleasing to me but for many people who have never before been in such a landscape, it is difficult to know what to ‘read’ or how to ‘see’ it. So I stand in the blazing sun with flies crawling into my eyes, up my nose and into my paint for 8–10 hours, tramping back and forth between four canvases spread around the landscape capturing different viewpoints. Why don’t I simply photograph or write down these visual qualities? I often do these things as well but as an artist I intuitively select and exaggerate features in the landscape, sometimes rearranging them to make a coherent visual composition. Artists open a path for viewers to see the visually valuable or special features of a landscape.

Some landscape assessments are done in words but my evaluations are visual. The art work is the document and it aids different ways of visualising the place, just as a scientific assessment can aid consideration of animals or plants or water flows, by documenting their role in the landscape. William L. Fox, exploring the relations between landscape and cognition in interdisciplinary projects like this one, says ‘Maps are paintings, paintings are strategic documents, documents read like poems, habitat becomes sculpture, and sculpture erodes into an archaeological ruin.’1

Each reading informs the next. By working with ecologists, historians, pastoralists and others with viewpoints on the landscape, the aesthetic view of it is integrated into a larger project that can value – and perhaps conserve – landscapes in more ways.

As we move closer to the surface of the painting, the actual depth in the picture plane reveals itself. Like a real landscape (and unlike a photograph) the viewer can experience the sensuousness of texture. The marks are abstract but they are not ‘homeless’: they are part of a larger form and they are also representational. Such visual information is subjective, but it is also available for appreciation by any viewer. Thus I suggest that aesthetic evidence should be admitted as part of a well-rounded environmental appreciation.

Driving into mobile phone range at Cunnumulla after two weeks painting in the desert, I received an email from London-based geographer David Lowenthal, with an attached essay: ‘living with and looking at landscape’. While contemplating the wonders of leaf litter in the dry creek bed of the Mulligan River, I had recalled David’s fascination with dappled light, something that is rare in city lives. I believe a healthy functioning system is an aesthetically pleasing one but David, in this essay and in previous lectures, takes a different view.

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