The things that still move us: Philip Hunter in conversation with Fiona Hile
Art & Australia April 2011
Fiona Hile
Philip Hunter has talked about his work as ‘an invariably complex field of conceptual possibilities and material outcomes; a zone where different foci, fragments, textures, perspectives, illusory spaces, moods and views coexist.’ A conversation with the artist can be as complex as one of his paintings, and when I visited him recently at his Melbourne studio where he was preparing for a forthcoming exhibition at Sydney’s Tim Olsen Gallery we discussed, among other things, his recent trip to Europe; his new ‘tropical inland sea’ paintings; Borges; Calvino; wasp nests; dog fences; horseshoes; memory palaces; horizons and ‘a vast book with no pages’ . What follows is a slice taken from that conversation.
Fiona Hile: Your private painting commission, Ocean Rhythm, 2009, is almost like the start of a new series.
Philip Hunter: When I started painting Ocean Rhythm, some of the things that were in my head were about tropical Queensland and inundation and greenness. There was obviously that whole ocean idea that I’d been working with earlier- inland seas and the effects of water on landscape. A lot of our Australian experience is about the impact of former inland seas where the terrain has become the residue of waves or water movements. I’d been working a lot with terrain that’s been in drought for ten or fifteen years and so the palette was really determined by those sorts of conditions – dryness and brownness. But in the case of this painting, it’s going to live on a wall beside the Pacific Ocean, so what does that mean for the painting? What’s that conversation going to be about?
FH: When you started Ocean Rhythm you’d just been in Europe, visiting lots of galleries and museums.
PH: I’d never travelled to Europe in their summer before, and I was amazed at the kind of colour in the landscape – the density of green. There were greens that I’d never experienced. And so, when you put that experience alongside European painting that you’re already familiar with, you understand them in a way that makes them even richer.
FH: So it’s a conversation between landscape and its representation.
PH: Yes, there are things that can happen. In the case of Albrecht Altdorfer’s forest paintings, for instance, he’s able to paint the canopy of leaves in such an extraordinary way that no-one could think that up, but he did- especially in St George and the Dragon [1510] in Munich. When you actually get to walk outside through forests that are full of greenness you think: ‘I get it now.’ That the forest is somehow or other capable of being an Altdorfer. It’s true that there are things that happen in nature that surpass anything our imagination is capable of. And yet, at the same time, there are things that happen in painting where you go: ‘What a fantastic way of deciphering and explaining and portraying that.’
I remember the first time I walked in the Rijksmuseum and there were half a dozen Vermeers, little paintings that are like beacons on a hill. They’re 350 years old now and you wonder hw they can have that much presence. They’re paintings about about domestic activities: a woman pouring milk or some people standing in the street. They’re at the beginning of genre painting and in a way they’re about the things that still move us- experience and feelings that we know but cant quite put our finger on. Is it the sunshine or is it the texture of the woman’s garment or is it just the light in the room?
FH: Or the very impossibility of that taking place.
PH: Not just taking place, but taking place ten squillion times a day in every corner of the earth. The ability for someone to turn that into a panting and for us to be absolutely fascinated and intimately involved – I find that extraordinary. I don’t think its any accident that people continue to persist with painting – as a way of negotiating the world.
FH: Much of the writing around your work is prolifically descriptive: ‘Well, that’s a tractors headlights’, or ‘They’re scripture ribbons evoking Celtic manuscripts’ or ‘That’s a shearers oiled rocker hairstyle’..
PH: One of the things my paintings do is create associations. I wouldn’t say its stream-of-consciousness stuff. But you can freely associate all sorts of parts of these paintings with things that you know and things that you’ve felt or sensed and things that you’ve only vaguely thought about. There are things that preclude verbal description. It’s the difference between commentary and poetry.
FH: Yes, hay bales or tractor lights cant help us her because we’re in the ocean now..
PH: An imagined inland ocean. So Ocean Rhythm is really the memory of water. Or the knowledge of it having once been an ocean. Or an attempt to describe inundation. So you’ve got all of these things that are potentially its subject.
FH: Could you talk a little about how you manage your own potential for inundation?
PH: Have you ever read Richard Wollheim’s Painting as an Art? Wollheim speculates about how drawing might have originally happened – he calls it Ur- painting or Ur-drawing. So you’d go through and you’d make a mark and you’d make another mark and you’d start to create speculations about the relationships between those marks that you’d made. The point of remembering Wollheim is that one of the things we do with any sort of formal practice is to ask what it is that we can and can’t include. And part of it becoming art, I guess, is to make a determination about when to stop or what its not about. My paintings are constructions that participate in a sequence of pictorial and cultural traditions. At their best, I think my works give amplification to some of those traditions and, with some good luck, alter the view occasionally.
FH: The last time we spoke you mentioned an autobiographical essay by Italo Calvino ?
PH: The Road to San Giovanni [1994]. There’s such a beautiful idea in the essay – that ‘balustrade looking over an endless sea of balustrades’ and in a sense maybe my pictures do that. They’re pictures that look at themselves. And you get to the next one and you’ve got another view of yet another balustrade.
FH: Do you think of these paintings as bellowing to a series?
PH: I would say that there are some motifs that have developed into elaborate versions of paintings that were quite primitive and unsophisticated ever just a few years ago. The ideas have evolved; structures have been elaborated on and the range of mark making has been expanded. There has been a continuity and focus on certain terrains which has allowed me to explore ways of picturing the Australian landscape. In that sense the ‘Flatlands’ project has been a series.
One f the things that really used to upset me was that view of Australia as just a tedium, a monotony, a terrain that would go on and on. Then I saw a wonderful documentary a comparative study of the Great Sandy Desert and Death Valley. All the components are really similar – the temperature ranges, the weather patterns – and they couldn’t work out what it was that made the two places so incredible different. Then they realised there’s not insect noise in the American desert. In Australia the insects drive you made. The ants and the flies – it’s totally seething with these insects. And then it struck me, this is what makes this place so fantastic. It looks like there’s nothing and right under your nose there are millions and millions of things going on.
Image credit: Ocean Rythm, 2009, oil on linen, 243 x 335cm, private collection courtesy of the artist.