Queensland College of Art

Plein Air Painting

(or … gettin’ amongst it)

2367QCA

Pat Hoffie

Claude Monet Painting by the Edge of a Wood (1885) John Singer Sargent, oil on
canvas. 54.0 × 64.8 cm. Tate Gallery, London.

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Earth's Creation, (1995), Emily Kame Kngwarreye , acrylic on canvas,17 square-
metre , Western Australia Photo: Gemma Page

Introduction:

This course will introduce you to some of the history and ideas
that have surrounded the importance of plein air painting.

It’s possible that it may have struck some of you that there’s
something potentially anachronistic about going to the effort of
taking paints and a kit out into increasingly hostile weather
conditions in an era where the capacity to technologically record
‘what’s out there’ beyond the studio is easier than ever. The
course welcomes questions and critical responses beginning
with the obvious: why do it?

Other questions follow; for example - what did it mean to artists

in the past and in what ways might those motivations back then
resonate with concerns today? We’re living in a hyper-real

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world; the prospect of any kind of searches for a more ‘real’
reality than the web might appear naïve. So what might we be in
search of if we take up this uncomfortable, unwieldy initiative?

Throughout history plein air painting has been associated with

the idea of representing ‘landscape’, and throughout history the
understanding of what constitutes ‘landscape’ has changed too,
as it’s been affiliated with different ideas and ideals and theories
and attitudes.

So, in part, this course also raises questions about what the term
‘landscape’ might mean today, here in Queensland, Australia?
And what changes and continuities do such ideas have with
other places elsewhere? And what is the relationship with other
ideas about place from the past?

Plein air is also a practice that’s associated with the rise of the
tourist industry, and with an increasing awareness of the impact
of the modern industrial world on other ecosystems. It’s a
practice where many artists used their immersion in the
landscape to become advocates for a range of passions that
included a love of ‘wilderness’ and a respect for rural labour.

And plein air is not an approach that has allowed itself to

become ghetto-ised in conservative nostalgia for a pristine
‘nature’ of the past ‘– during the expansion of modern
metropolitan cities and urban scapes the plein air approach was
taken by artists into the zones of both the ordinary and the
extraordinary – into the newly created man-made scapes in cafes
and along boulevards, into rehearsal studios and night clubs and
brothels – to corners of the environment that were part and
parcel of the changing world.

There are so many terms associated with this idea of ‘place’ –

social, political, cultural and environmental associations that
intersect with and overlay any personal associations. Yet no
matter how much the technological ‘un-real’ world has impacted

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on our daily lives, identification with ‘place’ still seems to
matter. The world is on the move – more than ever in the history
of mankind, people are traversing the globe in search of new
possibilities (seeking refuge or asylum) or new sights. As a
result, our ideas about the connection between place and
belonging are changing; the borderlines of countries and
categories, classifications and contexts are challenged and
alternately shrink or expand in new ways.

Environmental crises have also affected our idea of our

relationship to place. We live in an era where the ecological
balance is threatened, and daily news and information networks
bring home to us the idea that the diversity of ‘places’ on the
planet are under threat by climate change, war and the impact of
humanity in general. There’s an urge to ‘get there before it
disappears’ as the snow-peaks of the Himalayan massif melt and
steadily disappear while entire nations such as Tuvalu are
slowly engulfed by the rising waters of the Pacific.

Throughout history, this activity of plein air is about the simple

act of ‘being there’: of spending time; of looking in an attempt
to simply see clearly instead of borrowing accepted schema for
representing particular landscapes in particular ways. Each of
these three conditions (presence; taking time; avoiding clichés)
stands in contradistinction to so much experience today – so
often we experience ‘elsewheres’ through a mediated source;
time spent focusing on one thing and one thing only (no phones
please?) is a rare experience and requires training and practice;
so much looking is only about the visual grab – the ‘byte’ of an
info-slice. This activity requires a much slower process –
immersion and the long slow look.

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Plein air: What does it mean? When and how did it originate?

The term plein air comes from a French term that literally
means "open (in full) air". Although it has been drawn from the
French language to describe the activity of painting outdoors
and on-site, it has been used in a number of countries by a
diverse group of artists over a long period of time even before
the term itself was first coined.

All-too-often the term plein air is associated first and foremost

with the French Impressionists (1867 – 1886), but it is not an
approach that originated with them. The Impressionists, a
loosely knit group of artists that included Monet, Renoir,
Pissarro, Sisley, Cezanne, Morisot and Degas among others, had
been influenced by the artists of the Barbizon School (1830 -
1870) who employed this way of working as part of their
attempt to develop a more direct approach to subject matter.
They in turn had been influenced by the approaches of the
British painters John Constable (1776–1837) and Joseph Turner
(1775 – 1851), whose work they had seen when it was first
exhibited in the French Salon in 1824. The freshness and
immediacy and atmospheric effects in the works of these
painters which so captured the eyes and imagination of the
artists who would later form the Barbizon school had in turn
been influenced by the work of Claude Lorraine (1600 - 1682)
in the seventeenth century, so we can use that as a starting point,
even though artists used the approach even before that.

In some ways (but not every way) an attempt to trace the history
of a plein air approach to painting also traces the development
of the idea that landscape is a subject matter worthy of being
considered as a separate genre – not as a mere background. The
following points follow how landscape was moved from being a
contextual background for the staging of important and epic

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religious, classical, moral and ethical themes to something that
emerged as capable of resonating with richly nuanced
metaphorical power; a subject that enabled artists to develop
their own highly personal and idiosyncratic approaches. The
plein air approach, that so demanded a commitment to being ‘on
site and in the moment’, was pivotal to these artists developing
styles and expressive force that stood apart from the influences
of their contemporary peers and of their historical forebears.

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Contexts of influence for the development of the plein air
approach:

17th Century: Claude Lorraine (1600 - 1682)

An Extensive River Landscape With Classical Ruins, Claude Lorraine (Gellee), il on

canvas

In the seventeenth century the growing fashion for leisure-time

taken in the countryside influenced the young Claude Gellee
(later known as Lorraine) to work outside making sketches
around the picturesque ruins of Italy. At the time archaeology
was an emerging science, and the ruins of Italy provided a rich
source for treasures from past glories. The growing interest in
civilisations of the past also prompted the passion among the
wealthy to undertake the ‘Grand Tour’, a sojourn that catered

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for the neo-classical fervour that was fashionable at the time;
one associated with the wealth and freedom of those few who
could afford the money and time to travel for their own
edification.

The desire for travel was fuelled by the writing of theorists like
Johann Winckelmann, a German art historian and archaeologist
and a pioneer in describing the categories that defined Greek,
Roman and Greco-Roman art. Such theories were also
influential in reinforcing the noble values with which classical
forms and aesthetics were associated; Winckelmann’s writing
extolled the superior virtues of Greek art as transcending the
beauty and perfection of nature.
In this century an essential part of travelling involved the study
of Roman and Greek antiquity. In the early eighteenth century,
painted visions of Greco-Roman monuments were popular in
continental palaces and villas. Such fashions among the wealthy
were fostered by Winckelmann’s argument that “a more
beauteous and more perfect nature” could be found in the
examples of classical art.

Despite these preferences for paintings that continued the great

themes of the past, Claude was an artist in love with landscape.
Orphaned at the age of twelve, after which he made his living as
a cook, Claude’s early experiences made him well aware that he
needed to develop certain practical survival skills - he knew that
if he were to survive as an artist, his own love of landscape was
not sufficiently shared by patrons to make his paintings sell. He
travelled to many destinations to work, but the landscapes
around Rome provided an undying passion for him. As the
philosophical centre of seventeenth century Italian art, Rome
was a city committed to retaining the continuity of tradition of
the Classical era.

Even though Claude incorporated classical heroic, mythical and

religious themes as the focus for his works, his commitment to
capturing light and atmosphere imbue his works with an

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unmistakeable presence and ambience - as viewers we are less
interested (as, evidently, was the artist) in the implied narratives
and epics than we are overwhelmed by the immersive quality of
place.

On his painting trips Claude frequently painted and studied

scenes around the Roman Campagna with Nicholas Poussin
(1594-1665), whose landscape paintings were and are
recognised for their poetic luminosity. However, although
Poussin may also have been as interested in landscapes as he
was in narrative subject matter, he is primarily recognised as the
creator of the classical tradition in French painting. Claude’s
work, by contrast, leaves the viewer with no doubt that the
landscape was the primary subject matter of the work. The
legacy of Claude’s meticulous and richly detailed drawings and
sketchbooks are also evidence of the artist’s personal
commitment to landscape over and above the other subject
matter of his completed works. The romanticism of these
landscapes was later developed in the work of other artists for
whom Claude’s work provided ongoing inspiration. One of
those artists was the English artist John Constable.

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 Romantic painting: John Constable (1776–1837)

Hampstead Heath, (c. 1820), John Constable, oil on canvas, 54 x 76.9 cm

Although he worked plein air at a range of locations throughout

his lifetime, Constable largely remained committed to Suffolk in
England - the region with which he was most familiar and where
he continued to work since his earliest days making amateur
sketching forays into the local countryside. His passion for
landscape as a subject in and of itself had been encouraged by
his recognition that Claude’s work was evidence of a shared
passion. Nevertheless, even though he held Claude’s work in the
highest esteem, Constable was as cautious as was Claude about
using the art of others as the driving force behind his own work.
He was rigorously self-critical about any lapses of his own
dedication to primarily drawing from his own experiences and
expressive capacity; this is evident in his words,

I have not endeavoured to represent nature

with the same elevation of mind with
which I set out, but have rather tried to

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 make my performances look like the work
of other men .. there is room enough for a
natural painter. The great vice of the
present day is bravura, an attempt to do
something beyond the truth.” Parkinson,
Ronald (1998), John Constable: The Man
and His Art, London: V&A.)

Constable avoided what he termed ‘bravura’ at all levels, even

to his choice of scenes that celebrated the humble, everyday
aspects of landscape rather than representing overblown wild
romantic visions that called up references to a mythical or
classical past. And despite the fact that for most of his life he
was not financially successful from his art, Constable did not
deviate from his personal vision; he had to wait til he reached
the age of 52 before he was honoured by selection to the Royal
Academy.

However his works, along with those of his contemporary

Joseph Mallord William Turner, (1775 – 1851), whose
luminescent paintings of landscapes rivalled the majestic themes
of any history or allegorical paintings, were recognised with
great acclaim during his lifetime by artists in France, where they
were highly influential in the formation of the Barbizon School.
Like Constable, Turner was also influenced by Claude, although
Turner recognised Claude’s mastery of light and atmospheric
conditions - rather than his subject matter - as the artist’s
greatest contribution to art.

Constable’s commitment to a plein air approach to painting was

fundamental to his search for ‘truth’ and which lead to works of
clear stylistic conviction. Constable’s words "painting is but
another word for feeling" are evidence of his conviction that
painting’s role as a form of personal expression is a more
important role than its role as a continuation of tradition that
relies on knowing and extending the ‘canon’ of art history.

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The Barbizon School (approx. 1830 -1880)

The Forest of Fontainebleau Morning (1850 - 1) Theodore Rousseau, 97.5 x 134 cm,
the Wallace Collection

When the works of Constable and Turner were exhibited at the

French Salon in 1824, a growing fervour shared by a number of
local artists for a new, more direct approach to painting was
fanned into action that produced outcomes that eventually
challenged the very foundations of the conservative Salon.
Every year the open exhibition at the Salon de Paris was
selected by a jury from the Adademie des Beaux Arts, an
institution regarded as the apogee of the French artistic
establishment. The exhibition was regaled as the pinnacle of
what was best in contemporary painting, and the jury’s role was
to protect the artistic traditions it upheld by only admitting
works that fitted in with their idea of excellence. Needless to

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say, those artists who challenged the jury’s control of
approaches to and styles of art were not included in these
prestigious annual shows.

However for some time the ‘naturalist’ elements of Dutch and

Flemish landscapes had also fuelled the growing interest in
landscape painting The term ‘landscape’ emerged from the
Middle Dutch ‘landschap’, a term initially introduced in direct
association with painting. During the seventeenth century the
golden age of Flemish painting developed distinct genres, and
landscape painting was being developed through reference to
more realistic scenes based on plein air studies rather than being
drawn from more schematised frameworks. The directness and
‘naturalism’ of this approach stood in contrast to the academic
approaches to historical landscape painting encouraged by the
French Academy at the time.

Among other historical impacts, the Revolution had wrought

devastation on the countryside. This political background
prompted a surge of nationalistic zeal for local environs even at
a time when the establishment valued other European
destinations (like Italy) that were more closely associated with
the classical tradition. From 1816 on, the French Academy
sponsored a coveted prize every four years where the most
promising painter of historical landscapes could live and work
in the academic tradition at the Villa Medici in Rome, where
they were encouraged to further develop their own versions of
neo-classicism.

But many artists were hungry for something else; something

more resonant with their own roots; something more local. The
Forest of Fontainbleu, an estate of 42,000 acres that was once
the domain of kings, provided the ideal venue. Only an hour’s
(new) train ride from Paris, the Forest offered the artists, as well
the members of the leisure classes that followed them, a range of
landscape experiences that satisfied their desires. There were, as
the name suggests, forests, but there were also rivers and
pastures, marshes and meadows, grand gorges, sunny clearings

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and small villages. For a populace reeling from the effects of
industrialisation and modernisation that were so rapidly
transforming cities and city life, the landscapes beyond the
metropolis seemed to offer the promise of a more ‘natural
nature’ (natura naturans) – somewhere people were still able to
connect with place in a meaningful way.

Within the Forest of Fontainbleu the village of Barbizon boasted

a newly established inn - the Auberge Ganne - that provided
cost-effective room and board in a region where the weather
pattern was seldom stable. It offered a sanctuary artists could
return to after a day’s plein air painting to talk about life and art
and to foster relationships, many of which continued long after
they returned from their sojourns. Although the artists who
found their way there to paint ranged in age, inclination, style
and temperament, they shared a love of painting landscape
outdoors. Many of them also shared an ambition to shake the
foundations of the Salon by having landscape accepted as a
genre in its own right – not as a mere backdrop to classicist or
Romantic ideals. Even so, the name ‘Barbizon School’ was not
used until much later; the term has survived to unite the eclectic
gathering in a way that suggested a far greater organised
cohesiveness than the way in which the loose collective formed.

Among the large group of painters who gathered here were

Camille Corot (1796-1875), Charles-François Daubigny (1817 –
78), Jean-François Millet (1814 – 75) and Théodore Rousseau
(1812 – 67). The extent of Rousseau’s passion for plein air
extended to his commitment to working right round the seasons,
even in the numbing cold of winter. The depiction of nature as a
calm, rational background for other themes and subjects was not
for him – he chose to interpret nature as a much more wild,
untamed and at times threatening presence. His Study for The
Forest in Winter at Sunset (an oil-on-paper work painted
between 1835 – 40) has a strong, brooding quality that seems
contemporary in its emotional frankness.

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Rousseau was an equally passionate advocate for the need to
preserve these wild spots from the impending destruction of
modernisation, and his relentless appeal in 1853 to Napoleon III
about the necessity of preventing the encroaching destruction of
the forest lead to what could be described as one of the world’s
first successful acts of environmental advocacy. The ties
between imaging the landscape and making the broader
populace aware of its importance are manifest in this aspect of
history, and it is something that has continued to the present.

Rousseau’s choice to spend so much time away from the art

centre of Paris may have contributed to the fact that for so much
of his productive life as a painter his work was not included in
the prestigious Salon hangs. This artist, it seemed, spent a lot
more time lobbying on behalf of the landscape he loved than on
behalf of his own career. His fellow artists’ nick-name for him -
“le grand refuse” was an acknowledgement that recognised the
Salon decision-makers’ wilful oversight as a kind of
punishment. Even Charles Baudelaire noted the repeated failure
of the Salon to recognise his work; he, however, recognised the
vitality of this artist’s spirit and work as “perpetually restless
and throbbing with life”.

Ultimately it was not only the passion of his advocacy for the
country he so loved that amounted to Rousseau’s success as an
artist; his art was of enormous influence on his fellow artists and
on the Impressionists to follow, and his legacy as a passionate
advocate, as the encouraging leader of a group of painters and as
the creator of richly evocative, moving imagery remains.

While the subject matter of Rousseau’s work was undeniably

that of landscape, fellow resident at Barbizon, Millet, drew from
his plein air studies to incorporate deeply moving studies of
peasant life in the region. Born within a farming community, he
moved to Barbizon with his wife to escape the cholera epidemic
in Paris that followed the Revolution. Millet was well familiar
with the difficulties of life in the country; here he and his wife
raised nine children living in a very modest cottage. Millet’s

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subject matter includes symbolic images of the social conditions
of the time. Images like The Gleaners (1857), Potato Planters
(1861) and The Angelus (1857 – 59) depicted the back-breaking
grind of peasant life in the country. The Gleaners’
representation of the practice where the poor would search for
remaining grain on the ground after the fields had been
harvested left no doubt about his socio-political convictions. As
the women stoop to survive, fat harvests of abundance are
silhouetted along the horizon line behind them. Here is an
example of a landscape criss-crossed by the invisible dividing
lines between the haves and have-nots in nineteenth century
France. Here is a painting that appears at first as an image of
bucolic harmony; subsequent considerations reveal its power as
an image of powerful political, social and cultural commentary.

The Gleaners (1857) Jean-François Millet, 84 x 111 cm, Musee D’Orsay, Paris,
France

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 Millet’s brand of Realism dealt with epic issues, heroic subject
matter and challenging themes and propositions; his images
were given all the more power because of the artist’s ability to
set the scene in a convincing space and time. This skill was
honed by the time he spent in the landscape working plein air,
then using these studies to resolve the studies in the studio.

If the Barbizon painters were ahead of the ‘experts’ at the Salon

in their search for the metaphoric power of landscape and a
closer experience of ‘reality’ through the landscapes and people
of their regions, their zeal and passion fuelled the interest of
many others in partaking in travel beyond the metropolitan
regions.

By the 1860s, the area had been visited by almost seven hundred
artists from all across Europe: ironically, the artists of the
Barbizon School were inextricably linked to the growth years of
what has become known as ‘the tourist industry’. Some of them
were frank in their embrace of the developments – the artist
Jacque became a real estate developer and made sure artists kept
coming to the area to keep the demand for the region’s delights
alive amidst the wider public. His entrepreneurial spirit also
extended to his planting of a niche market crop emblematic of
bucolic delicacies – asparagus; this enterprising spirit is
evidence that a number of the artists mixed good business sense
with pleasure.

The experience of painting plein air reinforced the importance

of ‘being there’ – of living experience directly rather than as a
mediated, controlled series of events. It’s based on the belief
that this kind of experience somehow leads to a ‘truer’ sense of
self, and whether it’s right or wrong, it's a belief that has and
still does fuel the motivation to travel.

In the wake of interest generated by the painters at Barbizon

flourished the burgeoning commercial developments that are
part and parcel of the travel industry of today – transport, tours,
accommodation, souvenirs and publications, all of which

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depended on the capacity for the landscape to be imagined into
being. Artists were pivotal to the process of ‘imagining’ the
landscape. And, it could be argued, the search for an antidote to
‘modern life’ (or perhaps post-modern life) has continued to the
present day, where package tours offer palatable byte-size
experiences of ‘elsewheres’ that seem to stand apart from the
homogenising effects of the increasingly globalised world.

If history reveals the artists of the Barbizon school to be

compromised by their ideals as artists whose very passion for
the landscape brought about the increasing commercialisation
and exploitation of it, then their history provides only one of a
range of contradictory challenges that have faced, and that
continue to face, artists who are committed to ideals of any kind.

Perhaps the most enduringly interesting aspect of the Barbizon

school lies in the role of the artist. Barbizon artists chose to ‘be
there’ because they believed that their role as artists was one
where first-hand interpretation could visualise things with fresh
eyes. They placed experience over the need to continue the
tradition as sanctioned by the Salon, and so as early as the mid
nineteenth century they had moved the critical questioning about
‘objective naturalism’ to the foreground.

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French Impressionism (1874 – 1882) (including Monet,
Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro, Degas, Manet, Sisley and Toulouse-
Lautrec.

Waterlilies, Green Reflection, Left Part 1916-1923; Monet, oil on canvas, Orangerie,
Paris

The modernisation and industrialisation that drove the painters

to Barbizon did not suggest the same threatening spectre of
doom in the minds of the painters who are recognised as the
French Impressionists. Between 1853 and 1870, Napoleon III
had commissioned civic planner Georges-Eugene Haussmann
(as prefect of the Seine) to gut the unhealthy centre of the city to
make way for a more efficient modern metropolis. On the ruins
of the destruction and demolition of the old city Haussmann
erected the buildings and boulevards, parks, fountains and wide
avenues and grand buildings and apartment blocks with which
we are familiar today. Even though there had been a number of
previous attempts to clean up the city, the renovation project
drew strong opposition, especially among those who saw the
new Paris as the epitome of industrialised artificiality they
believed was a threat to the traditional, rural and natural world
they idealised.

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Although the Impressionists often used scenes around Paris to
suggest the sense of alienation brought about by the world’s first
modern metropolis, they also used scenes from cabarets and
cafes to convey a new sense of joie de vivre that was possible in
the new environments of the man-made world.

Their adoption of the plein air approach used by the Barbizon

painters offered the Impressionists a way not only of directly
responding to the world around them, but also of responding to
other major influences on representation at the time. Virtually
overnight the invention of the camera rendered the necessity of
recording imagery through painting redundant. This invention,
together with the scientific enquiry into the optical effects of
light, raised the awareness of artists about what they were
actually looking at; beyond and before and behind the subject
matter were optical effects: light being refracted, reflected and
absorbed into the shapes and spaces and shadows of forms.
Scientific enquiry also provoked further thinking about the
extent to which our capacity for seeing is influenced by what we
know – by how the brain controls the eye. The move towards
plein air provided a counter-balance to the control of
assumptions and expectations that are a part of ‘knowing’ with
the searching, provisional, experimental approaches that are
linked to the physical experience of ‘being’.

But the effects of industrialisation had produced other factors

that moved the Impressionists further towards the endorsement
of plein air approaches - the invention of paint tubes and
portable, lightweight, machine-made easels and supports made it
much more physically easy to make art on site. While the
subjects of modernisation were turned away from by artists of
the Barbizon school, the Impressionists looked steadfast and
front-on at some of the worst effects of modernisation; Monet’s
Forest of Fontainebleau (1864) features the destruction of a
cleared area of the forest by the encroachment of roads.

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The fact that the camera seemed, at the time, to have fully taken
on ‘realistic’ depictions of daily life freed artists to move
towards more expressive ways of working. The subject matter
could be transformed by their own personal stylistic
idiosyncrasies into almost limitless new ways of seeing and
interpreting. This is especially apparent in the multiple studies
artists did of a single subject matter where the changing light
effects transformed each of the works in unique ways, such as
with Monet’s series of studies of Rouen cathedral and in his
renditions of his Giverny garden scenes. Each study of his
backyard waterlily pond offers a meditation on the act of
painting itself, as well as on the compressed cosmos of reflected
sky, watery realms and the earth sustaining the floating lilies
beyond.

Often these plein air paintings were produced quickly, and the
brushy, almost breathless effects of the surfaces reinforced not
only the fugitive nature of the scene depicted, but also the
material qualities of painting itself. When we look at
Impressionist paintings we are simultaneously as aware of the
act of painting as we are of the artifice of painting – that is, of
the fact that it has come from a meditation on something other
than itself. As such, it could be argued that the seeds of abstract
painting were sown in the love of surface brought on by the
immediacy enforced by the conditions of the plein air approach
to rapidly changing atmospherics. When the brushy gestural
elegance of some aspects of Impressionist painting are
magnified, the spawn of de Kooning and Pollock, Kandinsky
and Klein seem latent.

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Blue Poles: Number 11 (1952) Jackson Pollock, oil on canvas, National Gallery of
Australia

The bold designs of Japanese woodblock prints, popular in

France at the time, were another influence on the Impressionists.
Their asymmetrical arrangements, contrasting large areas of flat
colour with patches of intricate pattern, offered a compositional
format that the Impressionists could use to develop their ideas
about colour. Sometimes, even the most avant-garde artists need
the security of knowing that the path they have chosen to follow
has some roots in tradition. The compositions of the Ukiyo-e
masters such as Hokusai and Hiroshige offered the
Impressionists an alternative tradition, albeit from another
culture, and fuelled their excitement and confidence to forge
ahead with their new ideas. This means of representation proved
surprising and satisfying to many Impressionist artists. As a
result the laws and limitations of traditional linear perspective
were often modified towards compositional approaches that
were increasingly quirky and experimental.

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Evening view of a temple in the hills, 1854, Utagawa Hiroshige, woodcut on paper

To many critics at the time, the Impressionist style of working

appeared unfinished, too experimental and therefore amateurish.
However the loosened approach to brushwork, the liberation of
colour to optical mixing and the breakdown of carefully
separated divisions between forms and space and colour had
begun a way of approaching painting that was to continue in a
number of different directions in the following decades. Where
the plein air approach had lead the Barbizon painters, as with
the painters before them, out of the studio and into the
countryside to imagine a more pristine idealisation of nature, the
Impressionists brought this observational strategy to bear on the
metropolis as well as to rural areas. Even interior scenes were
approached plein air, and in so doing, were instrumental in
reconnecting the severed divide between ‘natural’ realms and
cultural environs.

While the Barbizon painters had mostly used their plein air
studies to provide first-hand information for the works they
would resolve in the studios, many of the Impressionists would

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complete their canvases on site, making minor adjustments back
in the studio. The Impressionists also used a range of
background primers to work on – instead of the often moody
dark tonal preparations of the Barbizon school, higher key
palettes were used to refract the light through the often
transparent paint so that the surface bounced with a fresh airy
vitality. The repetitive and rapid executions of a series of
paintings from a single plein air subject enabled artists to
consider the effects not only of the changes light and
atmosphere made on the forms, but also on the way their own
mood and approach could vary the interpretation of a subject.
Monet’s Haystacks of 1891, his Poplars series of 1892 and his
series featuring the edifice of Rouen Cathedral in 1894 are as
much studies of the effects of light and experimentations with
colour theory as they are records of painterly attitude and
approach. The breathless freshness of the work has an appeal of
its own; the influence Impressionism remains today and its
advances and experimentations lead to many further directions
in the consideration of the links between representation and
meaning.

Impressionism is often regarded as the first movement of

modern art. This, however, is a difficult claim to make, as even
in this short précis it becomes obvious that changes happen for a
range of reasons in a range of contexts, and it’s difficult to draw
a sharp dividing line between modernism and what came before.
Nevertheless, the practice of painting plein air spread across
Europe where artistic groups and colonies were mushrooming
up at a range of destinations including Grez-Sur-Loing, Pont-
Aven, and Concarneau in France, Skagen in Denmark,
Abramtsevo in Russia, and at Newlyn and Glasgow in Britain
and beyond as well as to the US with the important Hudson
River School and a clutch of other groups in destinations that
included Cos Cob and Old Lyme, Connecticut; Taos, New
Mexico; Laguna Beach and Carmel-by-the-Sea California; New
Hope, Pennsylvania; and Brown County in Indiana.

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Yosemite Valley (1868) Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902) Hudson River School,.36 x 54
inches. Collection Oakland Museum of California,

In Australia the plein air approach was taken up by a group of

artists who became known as the Australian Impressionist
School. It’s a contested title for all kinds of reasons, including
the fact that the artists did not adopt all of the French
Impressionistic styles and approaches. But their commitment to
the values of painting plein air and the attractiveness of the idea
of living and painting together in a rural or bushland setting held
enormous appeal. Even though the Box Hill and Heidelberg
artists’ camp of lean-to’s and tents were only at the end of the
train line that ran from Melbourne Central, their capacity to
weave a dream about the unifying glory of “the Australian bush”
has survived underneath the thin skin of scepticism and
historical revisionism all the way through to this day.

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Australian Impressionism or the Heidelberg School (1887 -
approx. 1900) Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton, Charles
Condor, Fred McCubbin, Walter Withers

Still glides the stream, and shall for ever glide (1890) Arthur Streeton, 82.6 x 153.0
cm, Art Gallery of New South Wales

Most of the 183 works represented in the first exhibition of the

9 X 5 Australian Impression Exhibition in Melbourne in 1889
were painted on cheap, light and portable cigar box lids whose
dimensions granted the show its title. The catalogue to the
exhibition described the importance the artists gave to faithful
on-site recordings of fleeting light in the landscape. This was
married to their belief that such frank directness would lead to a
uniquely Australian painting tradition.

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Dandenong from Heidelberg (c.1889) Charles Conder, 9 x 5 inches

On the political front, the years leading up to Federation moved

the growing need to unite the divisions between the
metropolitan and rural areas towards a crisis. Wealthy groups
with vested interests – the squattocracy in the country and the
industrialists in the cities - each aimed to capture a big slice of
the Australian imagination about where the ‘real core’ of the
country lay. The members of the Heidelberg group expanded
their romantic bushland settings to include depictions of
pasturelands, working life and metropolitan landscapes. In each
case, the plein air approach to what they did contributed to their
capacity to capture the special qualities and light and shadow
and colour that are so identifiably part of the national landscape.
The ‘national life of Australia’ became a mandate for visually
imagining who we were as a country, and ideals of mateship, of
‘giving it a go’ and of egalitarian spirit were myths that drew
from invention as much as reality, and they were painted in as
integral elements in compositions that re-structured the way the
nation visualised itself into becoming.

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Tom Roberts, 1890, Shearing the Rams, 122.4 x 183.3 cm. National Gallery of
Victoria, Melbourne

Each of these artists were highly skilled in areas of drawing and

traditional painting techniques reinforced in their education at
the National Gallery School in Melbourne. They employed these
skills to paint a range of subjects including working and leisure
themes and narratives as well as landscapes. Tom Roberts’
Shearing the Rams (1890) is an example of how his
understanding of how to capture atmospheric light achieved
through the plein air approach lent the compositional structure
of the painting a sense of locale that ‘rang true’.

Tom Roberts had spent a number of years traveling in Europe.

He shared part of his journey – a walking tour of Spain
undertaken in 1883 – with fellow Australian John Russell (1859
– 1930) who had worked alongside a number of the French
Impressionist artists. Although Roberts himself did not have
direct contact with French Impressionist artists, his time spent
with Russell – among other experiences there - developed his
knowledge of their approaches and styles.

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Beyond the Heidelberg School: plein air and Australian
identity

A Natural History of Swamps II, Purple Swamphen Gwydir Wetlands (2010 – 11)
John Wolseley, 114 × 327cm, watercolour on paper.

However plein air painting and drawing has had a long

tradition in Australia well before the approach became identified
as the practice of the Heidelberg School; artists were part of the
first non-indigenous forays to what was, to them, a new
continent, and artist-explorers were essential to gathering data
and documentation that was so crucial to coming to terms with
the strange new environments. The Early Colonial period of
Australian painting includes the work of a number of artists who
worked plein air, and although there is a popular historical
mythology in this country that discredits any attempts to capture
Australian landscape prior to the Heidelberg School as a history
of failure (cf, for example, Robert Hughes), there is a plethora of
works that are highly successful in capturing particular nuances
to what could only be Australian landscapes.

As the decades moved on, for many critically responsive artists,

critics, art historians and curators, the landscapes of the
Heidelberg School (or Australian Impressionists) have come to
be associated with a nationalistic zeal that was later critically
rejected as being limiting, conservative, gender biased and
essentially racist.

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Water Rings (2015) Gerry Joe Weise, Land Art, sand installation, Muttonbird Island,
Coffs Harbour, NSW Australia.

During the 1980s, a decade when the Australia Council

promoted a number of exhibitions of Australian art at
international venues, the contemporary artists whose work was
included in these exhibitions took great pains to dissociate their
work from Euro-American assumptions that all Australians were
identifiable with the ‘outback’, the ‘bush’, kangaroos and an
easy-going detached larrikinism. Landscape in general, and the
very idea of working in a plein air fashion, smacked of
conservative old-school values and a failure to realise that
environment is a mediated, language constructed experience
dominated by cultural, political, gender, race and sociological
biases. Not a gum tree in sight during that decade – unless it
was cast in the irony of visual parentheses.

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Since then there has been an ‘expanded field’ to the way we
understand and approach painting. Some might argue that it was
a plein air approach that took us right out into that landscape
and eventually made us realise that the landscape WAS the
artwork. ‘Land art’, installation art, site specific practices and
performance art forms are approaches that each in their own
way have benefited from the plein air practice of ‘being there
right amongst it’.

La-la-Land (2013) Kate Shaw, Acrylic and resin on board, 30 x 70cm

Today place is, like all definitions, a contested term. First and
foremost in Australia, it calls up native title – the fact that the
continent ‘was, is and always will be’ (as the saying goes),
Aboriginal Australian land. In turn it calls up the idea of
possibilities of ‘setting the record straight’ in terms of history,
legislation, consultation and accounting. And in turn it also
points to the possibility of new connections to place, ones that
might be informed by Indigenous as well as non-indigenous
knowledge, practices, history, story telling and representation.

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Secondly, in Australia today, the idea of place and belonging
also inevitably calls up what’s considered as ‘ours’. We
guardedly define the borderlines of what’s ‘ours’ in terms of
place whenever questions about immigrants, refugees, emigrants
and outsiders arise. It’s been said before that we define our
Australian identity through “our fear of the heart and the edges”
– a latent terror about the otherness of the Aboriginal centre and
the Asia-Pacific beyond the coastal shoreline.

We may be one of the most urbanised populations in the world,

yet we cling to our myths and legends and images and stories
and films that bind us to the land – to the bush, the outback, the
small towns… and the beaches. Despite our awareness of the
necessity of SPF 40, Max Dupain’s 1937 black and white image
Sunbaker remains an icon of who we imagine ourselves to be as
a nation – out there plein air, flat out like a lizard drinking, and
soaking up all that outdoors-ness like we are part of the land
itself.

But icons, as all artists know, are there to be shattered;

expectations and assumptions are there to be shattered, and
histories are there to be refuted, challenged, amended and
extended. And the approaches and styles and materials and
methods of the past are only as dated and worn-out as the
attitude of those who make use of them. It’s always up to the
contemporary artists of their time to take on old approaches and
use them in new ways. As artists we work in an awareness of the
past and of the contemporary world we live in; we must
understand the values of tradition as well as change, and we
must be aware that there is no such thing as a neutral landscape.

Happy painting.

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Some points worth considering (an alternative way of
considering the development of Australian painting):

The two images used to introduce this course stand in sharp

contrast: one is a John Singer Sargent painting of his colleague
Claude Monet painting in the plein air tradition. It’s a genteel
looking work – the artist is depicted as cool calm and collected
perched on his little purpose-built painting stool before his easel
in the meadow on the edge of the woodlands. His female
companion appears crisp and pristine – her skirts fan out like a
flurry of foam around her. They are the epitome of the kind of
European figure-in-the-landscape tradition that features artists in
what is rendered as their ‘natural habitat’ of ‘nature’.

The other image, of renowned indigenous artist Emily Kame

Kngwarreye by photographer Gemma Page, depicts the artist
sitting on the ground as she paints her Earth’s Creation in 1995,
a year before her death. At the time the artist was 85 – she’d
been painting for the last five years. The massive 17 square
metre canvas is spread across the sandy territory at Utopia, 270
kilometres north-east of Alice Springs. She works alone.
Presumably there’s someone to help to fold and care for the
painting she worked on from first light to end of day for four
consecutive days – and there’s the photographer’s inferred
presence. But the image is definitely of someone prepared to
stick it out until it’s finished – there’s a thin pile of collected
sticks behind her, and the camp dogs have the look of being
used to just waiting around. There’s a beanie for the cold nights
and early mornings, and the folded-leg stance of someone who
knows what it requires to sit directly on the earth.

Each of these images shares the role of having been painted by

an artist on the spot/ in the landscape/ on-site/’amongst it’. But
one of the images carries the legacy of its incorporation as part

33
of the western historical canon – plein air painting is, history
suggests, a European tradition. And according to the way the
development of Australian painting has unfolded, the major
influences on the development of Australian painting have been
European in origin.

But there may be other ways of describing this history. If we

accept the idea that the Australian ‘landscape’ could not be
neatly fitted into existing categories and genres, we might also
accept the fact that each time an artist sat down to record the
‘new’ land they had to make adjustments and changes from
accepted approaches to representation. And that these
adjustments may have looked ‘awkward’ or incompetent to
historians and critics (like Robert Hughes) who compared their
work to that of other artists working in European traditions.

But what if we were to think about the awkward and apparent

’incompetent’ aspects of these works as the hallmarks that this
land requires a new way of seeing – a different way of
negotiating it – another way of representing place? What if we
re-connected these clues to establish another way of telling the
story of the development of Australian representation of place?

What if, for example, Sydney Parkinson’s imagery, (1745 –

1771; the botanical illustrator who travelled on Cook’s first
voyage to Australia on the Endeavour in 1770) was considered
as the first attempt by a non-indigenous artist to re-create a new
way of seeing this ‘place’? What if we looked for clues about
the perceived ‘differences’ of place from amidst the hundreds of
drawings he produced as part of the folio of the First Fleet?

And what if we looked at these images not as (for example)

‘second-rate Claudes’ or ‘third rate anthropology illustrations’
and instead as evidence of the clues of how this new
environment impacted on and contradicted the codes of
representation that had been carried along with all the other ill-
fitting European excess baggage?

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What if we looked at the plein air sketches of William Westall
(1781 –1850, who travelled with Matthew Flinders in 1880) as
evidence of a new way of approaching place – one that had to
operate on a preparedness to jettison some of those treasured
codes and approaches? Westall, for example, openly expressed
his disappointment that he found little in the Australian
landscape that could conform to these sense of the ‘picturesque’
qualities of representation so highly valued in Europe. But his
sketches and paintings are evidence of a kind of landscape that,
like the flora and fauna that resisted fitting neatly into the
European taxonomies, could not be shoe-horned into
conventional European styles and approaches.

In his diary titled Letters from an Exile at Botany-Bay to his

Aunt in Dumfries (1794) convict artist Thomas Watling also
remarked upon the belligerent resistance of the Australian sense
of ‘place’ to conform to European approaches His thwarted
attempts to employ European codes and conventions were met
with the surprising details of flora and fauna 'tinged with hues
that must baffle the happiest efforts of the pencil’, and as a
result, he adopted an approach where he would 'select and
combine’ aspects from his traditional skills in new ways. It’s
possible to interpret his “mash up” approach to styles and
approaches as a harbinger of the postmodern approaches to
representation that happened many, many decades later. And in
this sense it is also possible to trace linkages that connect the
approaches of contemporary Australian artists right back to the
responses of the first non-indigenous artists to this country. A
provisional historical ‘link up’ would provide clues about
Australia’s sense of place as being a ‘no-fit zone’ for European
conventions such as the ‘picturesque’ or the ‘sublime’ or of
romantic idealism. From painters like those mentioned, and
including the work of John Glover (1767 – 1849), the Port
Jackson painters (working between 1788 – 90’s), Conrad
Martens, (1801–1878), Louis Buvelot (1814 – 1888), Eugene
von Guerard (1811 –1901) and others it is possible to trace a
consistent refusal to make works that ‘conform’ or ‘fit’ with
prevailing landscape schema of the time. In this sense it could

35
be argued that the history of Australian landscape painting has
been a history of wilful mistranslation of dominant codes and
approaches to representation.

Emily Kame Kngwarreye would not have described her imagery

of country – her country – as ‘landscape’. When asked what the
painting was ‘about’ she apparently replied: “The lot”, a
statement that could be understood as meaning that, for her,
country, place, land – call it what you will - provides an entire
cosmology for understanding relationship to ourselves, to each
other, to forbears, to the species we share country with, to time,
to spirits … to the whole lot of it all. It’s also, in it’s way, a kind
of ceremony as well as a way of mapping – of making
connections. The artist, apparently, would talk quietly the whole
time she was painting, weaving the story telling into the imagery
as she steadily worked while the light remained. Painting, in this
sense, is not perhaps about representing as much as it is a kind
of bringing into being – an act that is a kind of extension of
country itself – and that results in ‘artefacts’ (paintings) that
grow from and are extensions of country.

In some ways such paintings are artefacts of very recent history

– the first images painted on canvas were made by the Papunya
Tula artists in the early 1970s. But prior to this images were
rendered in and onto the landscape itself as both practical as
well as spiritual ephemeral outputs – in places where they often
disintegrated and had to be re-created anew

Knowing what we now know about the Indigenous

custodianship of this country – one that has extended for an
estimated 40,000 years or more, provides non-indigenous
Australians with an-other alternative point of reference for
thinking about possibilities for depicting landscape.

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A course like this one can raise certain questions –

What might landscape mean in Australia in 2016?

What might it offer us in terms of thinking about our changing

relationships to place?

To what extent do representations of place still feed the tourist

market ideals of difference?

To what extent do we choose to be the inheritors of European

traditions of representation?

And to what extent might it be possible to work alongside

Indigenous artists in ways that acknowledge a heritage that is –
and that only can be – their own, while developing ways of
working that reflects that recognition?

Or, has the technological world rendered the attachment to and

dependency on place redundant?

Have our predispositions towards ‘tribal’ affiliations been

satisfied with on-line link-ups? And to that extent, is place still
something that binds us together in shared experiences?

To what extent has our growing awareness of environmental

crisis affected the way we see landscape?

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Practicalities of the course:

Materials:

You can work in acrylic, oil or watercolour, but remember that

your kit is going to have to be as portable as possible.

If you work in oils, try carrying a small piece of acrylic sheet as

a palette in a large lunchbox, so you can continue to use the
colours you’ve mixed back in the studio.

Think about whether you want a little trolley to cart your kit
about with.

Make sure you have an abundance of rags.

Prepare a number of grounds in a number of base-colours.

Experiment with a range of supports – canvas, boards,

cardboard, stretched paper where practical, aluminium,
previously used items.

Think about whether you’ll need something to sit on or not. If

so, make sure it’s light and compact and preferably has a dual
purpose.

Protection:

Think about weather conditions and what you’ll need to use to

best protect yourself from the elements ‘out there’.

Aims and Ambitions:

There will be a high level of experimentation in a course of this

nature – you’re putting yourself in a situation you may not have
been in before. Be prepared for the unexpected, and be prepared
for the fact that when you put the act of actually looking and
seeing as a high priority, you may end up producing work that
surprises you and that may not look like your usual work.

38
Be prepared to either complete some of the studies in the studio,
or to return to the site to complete the work. You will need to
have a number of resolved works as well as preliminary work.

Schedule:

Except for the days we will meet for critiques and assessment,
weather permitting, we will be painting outdoors. In the first
lesson we will workshop together to prepare a schedule for the
places we will visit. We might do this in consideration of some
of the ideas above, and also in terms of the kinds of possibilities
the site-locations might provide in terms of thinking about ideas
associated with ‘place’. However (and with regret) we are also
limited to the three short hours together to get ourselves to and
from uni, AND we are limited by transport requirements … so
let’s think about what we might be capable of doing with those
kinds of restrictions.

Possible Sites:

Here are a few kick-off thoughts:

The South Bank site offers a rare view of pristine clean ordered
man-made ‘nature’ (the beach) right next to a very old ugly (and
wonderful) muddy river who seems to choose to wreck
intermittent havoc.

The Botanic Gardens offer plenty of possibilities to focus on

introduced as well as native species with glimpses of river
and/or city.

The river banks offer some glimpses of the sucking, smelly, rich
and strange mud of the mangroves, those wonderful trees that
are capable of surviving in both fresh as well as saline water and
that have for so long been dismissed as ‘ugly’ ecosystems.

39
Musgrave Park actually still has a Bora Ring and retains its
importance as Aboriginal land (we would have to seek
permission to paint here).

West End offers glimpses of inner ‘burban scenes that are so

specific to Brisbane that they could easily appear ‘twee’.. but
there are always new ways of presenting images

There are plenty of sites used by graffiti artists that are more or
less ‘hidden’ round corners and behind industrial parks and in
drainpipes and parking lots.

South Bank and the inner city offer plenty of possibilities of

recording architectural landscapes.

I welcome your own input and direction to the course and look
forward to lots of interesting images, discussions and outcomes.

Pat Hoffie

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