Harbour vistas
Sydney Morning Herald
Friday January 1, 2010
No natural feature in Australia has inspired more great painters than our harbour - and their depictions have shaped our perception of it, writes John Huxley. John Olsen was working in a small studio in an old fisherman's cottage at Watsons Bay, hard by the Sydney Heads, when in 1963 he started a suite of sumptuous paintings provocatively entitled Entrance to the Seaport of Desire."It is about Sydney Harbour on a hot January day - the mad rat-race tempo of Sydney's traffic, the waxy fluid, juicy-fruit tempo, that vibrant vulgarity," the artist, who is now in his 80s, said of one particularly controversial picture.The topography of Sydney Harbour, he later wrote, put him in mind of a frightening "bitch goddess", with "breasty contours" and outstretched arms that enticed sailors, deeper and deeper, until trapped in her "spidery net".One harbour. One of a multitude of different impressions, perspectives, visions, emotions.No other national feature, natural or man-made, has so captivated and - more importantly - challenged artists over the past two millenniums and more, says the head curator of Australian art at the Art Gallery of NSW, Barry Pearce."As Olsen said, you've got to be careful with the harbour," he says. "It's such a beautiful thing in its own right it can unravel you like a bitch. It will take over your talent, swallow you up - because the poetry is in nature rather than the art. There is a natural beauty about the harbour that takes your breath away. To try and match that with a painting is to risk coming off second best, of producing [a] postcard."However, those many artists who accepted the challenge, who took the risk, have changed the way Sydneysiders experience their harbour, often centuries after their deaths. "Their images," Pearce says, "have become part of the collective memory of what we think the harbour, what we expect the harbour, to be."For example, a landscape showing Curraghbeena and Cremorne points, painted by Arthur Streeton in 1907, was recently used in a campaign to have harbourside homes heritage-listed.The debate, joined by the painter's grandson, Oliver Streeton, was a timely reminder that the twisting, turning, ever-innovating relationship between artist and harbour was originally based on - what else? - Sydney real estate.When the First Fleeters arrived in 1788 they found not a thing of beauty but a place to fish, to tie up a boat: "the finest harbour in the world, in which a thousand sail of line may ride in perfect security", Governor Phillip said.Times were tough. Life was brutish and short. "The struggle to get a foothold on the continent led early artists to focus on buildings and structures," wrote Olsen, who still falls, swooning, into the arms of the harbour."In these pictures, the harbour recedes in importance, appearing merely as a benign lake sheltering an assorted array of supply ships," he wrote of an early view of Sydney Cove by Thomas Watling, the colony's first professional artist. Instead of the unfriendly, forbidding, fly-bitten Sydney, it was a nostalgic English country scene featuring a "Georgian ornamental lake nestling against a luxuriant foreshore".It was not really until the 1830s, with the arrival of Conrad Martens, an English-born artist of German heritage, that the real harbour, its headlands and its many moods, tranquil and storm-tossed, were portrayed in all their glory."Martens fell in love with the place," Pearce says. "He was, perhaps, the first to truly celebrate the harbour as a miraculous phenomenon of nature. A place of harmony. A kind of Arcadia. There was a sense that here was paradise on Earth."With flourishes reminiscent of Turner, he depicted a harbour "under spacious skies, disposing lights and shadows", dotted with beautiful houses, envisioning an idealised Sydney of "ease, elegance and refinement".Increasingly, the harbour was not just a place of beauty as was captured dramatically in a series of iconic pictures by Eugene von Guerard, another migrant who came to Australia to join the gold rush. It was also a place of leisure, of recreation - picnicking on the heads, messing about in boats.In the late 19th century, art and recreation merged on the foreshores to produce some of the greatest harbour images, executed by artists such as Tom Roberts, Charles Conder and Streeton, the so-called "Bohemians of the Bush". They lived, worked, partied, played cricket and painted "en plein air" in artists' camps, most famously at Edwards Bay and Little Sirius Cove in Mosman.In his diaries, Streeton captured the mood of a relaxing and rewarding environment: "Roberts and I go to Mossman's (sic) Bay. We pull through the lazy green water & then lunch under the shade in the open air, eggs, milk, cheese and 2 bottles of clare grown in Australia. The little bay seemed all asleep & and so peaceful - oh such a rest."As Olsen observed, the vision was "unquestionably that of a hedonist, a poet and a sensualist".Not that the bohemians totally ignored the reality of the smelly, smoky city, which discharged so much sewage, stormwater and industrial waste into the harbour that its foreshores were "foul with putrescent slime".Streeton helped to kill plans to mine coal from Cremorne Point. And Roberts caught some of the coal-fired gloom that hung over the working harbour in An autumn morning, Milson's Point.It is one of Pearce's favourites. "It's copper and smoky brown, a symphony of brown - so very different from the cliched, glittering blue-and-gold, sunlit view of the harbour."Throughout the 20th century, Sydney Harbour's hold on Australia's artistic imagination did not weaken. All the big names, including Olsen, Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan and Martin Sharp, have provided their own unique takes.They range from the menacing to the mellifluous, the sumptuous to the sleazy, reflecting and informing public preoccupations and perceptions. When pressed, curator Pearce nominates three for special attention.Grace Cossington Smith, like other artists such as Margaret Preston and most Sydneysiders, was fascinated and inspired by the construction of the Harbour Bridge, rendering it in quasi-religious terms.Lloyd Rees recalled his first glimpse of the harbour, as a 21-year-old, like a hallucination: "The opal-blue water, a band of golden sand, another of olive green trees; above them a skyline of coral pink shimmering against the limpid sky. In that first long look Sydney cast her spell ..." He never escaped it, continuing to paint its waters, its bays, its headlands, especially from his home in McMahons Point, for the rest of his life.Brett Whiteley was considered by many the quintessential Sydney artist, in whose palette the harbour revealed what Olsen described as "a luxuriant and fetid mood of South Pacific overripeness".And artists still derive inspiration from the harbour. Members of Mosman Art Society paint "en plein air" on the site of the old camps. Thanks to Wendy Whiteley, artists are still able to share the view of the harbour enjoyed by her late husband from high in North Sydney.Ken Done - who Pearce says has probably done more than any other contemporary artist to change the way residents and visitors see the harbour - still works by the water's edge, from "The Cabin" at Chinamans Beach.Born in Belmore, Done recalls the thrill of getting his first glimpse of the harbour from the top of a double-decker bus as it trundled along Pitt Street to Circular Quay for the ferry ride to his grandparents' house in Manly."I was five but I still see the huge gangplank, the hypnotic swirling foam like a giant ice-cream soda, the sparkling blue of the greatest harbour in the world," he says. "I never tire of the harbour. It find it constantly fresh and inspiring."So does Peter Kingston. He, too, enjoys a wonderful viewing point - either from his eyrie above Lavender Bay or on the harbour in his floating studio, the boat MV Anytime - but he has a very different perspective. That of artist/activist.Raised in Parsley Bay, close to the cottage where Olsen painted in the '60s, Kingston was entranced as a child by the harbour and its ferries; their craftsmanship, their unassuming efficiency. Half a century on, his passion is undiminished.He paints the Greycliffe, which sank off Bradleys Head in 1927, with the loss of 40 lives. He fights to save the last of the gracious old Lady-class ferries, of which only two remain. He rails against new, characterless ferries."They look the same at both ends and have hideous seating," Kingston complains.The swap, he says, represents not just a shameful waste of one of the city's greatest assets, "like San Francisco's cable cars", but a "dumbing down of the harbour".And yet looking out across Lavender Bay towards the city on a sparkling summer's day, he cannot help but be optimistic, to rejoice in the harbour's enduring beauty, to reach for his box of paints. Just as countless artists have done before him.Acclaimed artist Peter Kingston is offering this limited edition print of Taronga to the Herald reader who, in his opinion, writes "the most amusing poem addressing the pollution humans have caused to Sydney Harbour".Entries, no longer than 12 lines, must be sent by Jan 8 to harbourpoem@smh.com.au. The winning entry will be published on Jan 15. For rules, see Summer planner.
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