A Brush With Greatness
Sydney Morning Herald - Spectrum 20/8/11
Steve Meacham
Is landscape painter Luke Sciberras the next John Olsen?
Artist Luke Sciberras bounds up the stairs of Tim Olsen's Woollahra gallery, his ebullient tones preceding him.
He's nursing a hangover, he boasts to the women clearing up after last night's launch party for his latest exhibition. Twelve hours previously, 300 artistic friends and prospective buyers crammed into these immaculately white-walled spaces to witness his annunciation as John Olsen's heir apparent.
''It's more of an emotional hangover,'' Sciberras, 36, says after his favoured coffee arrives unbidden (''Thanks, gorgeous!'').
The 83-year-old Olsen - often described as Australia's greatest living master of landscape painting - hadn't made it to the opening of their twin exhibition, following triple heart-bypass surgery. But he sent an apologetic fax containing an emotional postscript:
''A special note for Luke Sciberras - who I pass my battered baton to - my congratulations for your splendid enthusiasms - how you follow where your heart takes you. The necessary fusion of heart to mind.''
Much is being made in art circles of this metaphorical exchange. Cynics sneer that Olsen snr conveniently anointed a rising star represented by his art-dealer son. Anyway, who says the landscape baton is Olsen's to pass on?
The Herald critic John McDonald describes such relay talk as ''ridiculous hyperbole … You could say Bill Robinson is the outstanding landscape artist of our day … and, of course, Fred Williams is the man synonymous with Australian landscape''. Romantics, on the other hand, point out the similarities between Olsen and Sciberras. Both have European ancestry (Scibberas's surname comes from his Maltese-born father). Both are gregarious, with a talent to engage. Both possess a seductive charm (Olsen has been married four times; Sciberras is recently separated from his first wife, fellow painter Gria Shead, and is dating another artist). And both have a profound love of food and the sensuality that goes with it.
When Spectrum spoke to a recovering Olsen this week to clarify his baton comment, he made light of it.
''Luke's always asking for the baton and I've assured him it is very battered and has been dropped many times,'' he says. ''I admire his enthusiasm. He has lots of energy and an ability to spread his gregarious personality very widely. He is unquestionably a young artist of promise. He's a person on the run … We'll see.''
McDonald's verdict is much the same: ''Luke is one of the significant emerging landscape artists of his generation but I wouldn't put him ahead of the pack.''
Hyperbole aside, Sciberras remains a fascinating subject. Born in Campbelltown, his parents separated when he was three, leaving him an only child raised by his mother, the daughter of Ukrainian refugees. When he left school, Mount Carmel High, he knew little about art and had no ambitions to be a painter.
Yet in the next decade he came to be mentored by some of the greatest names in Australian art, including Martin Sharp, Robert Klippel, Elisabeth Cummings, John Peart, Peter Kingston, Guy Warren, Ann Thompson, Tim Storrier and Garry Shead.
When he married Shead's daughter the couple moved to a cottage in Hill End, the former gold rush town west of the Blue Mountains famously rediscovered in the late 1940s by Russell Drysdale and Donald Friend, who were followed there by fellow artists Paul Haefliger, Jean Bellette, Brett Whiteley, Jeffrey Smart and Margaret Olley.
Sciberras still lives in Hill End, though Gria and their daughter have returned to Sydney. He recently bought one of the hamlet's old stone churches for his new studio, replacing the poetic but impractical open-air shed that is now his daughter's playhouse.
How has Sciberras come so far, befriended so many influential people, so soon? How does he live such a seemingly charmed life when most young artists struggle without a teacher's stipend?
Why has one of Sydney's most celebrated restaurateurs, Lucio Galletto, asked him to collaborate on a cookbook? (''We started exchanging art for food and became close friends. Gria and I were married at Lucio's family home in Italy,'' Sciberras says. The finished artwork, incorporating tablecloths, napkins and splashes of food itself, appears in The Art of Pasta, published by Penguin in September.)
And most of all, why has Olsen repeatedly invited him on private painting trips by plane to some of the most remote landscapes on the continent? (Their latest artistic odyssey took them over Lake Eyre, perhaps Olsen's final source of inspiration: a location on the map that is both part real, part ephemeral.)
''John has really taught me an enormous amount about landscape painting,'' Sciberras says. ''Not only how to look at the landscape and how to paint it but how to join the two - how a landscape painter feels in the landscape. The experience of being out there really is life-giving and I like to share that with John.''
Their relationship was formed over food: one Olsen painting, Beanfest, depicts the creative juices of one of their culinary collaborations.
''I love to cook,'' Sciberras says. ''That's one of the reasons John and I are such friends. We like to cook the same sorts of food - old rustic Spanish, Italian and French. And we have a passion for the batterie de cuisine, the actual pots and pans.
''Work in a kitchen and work in a studio are very closely connected for both John and [me]. There's a flavour and a process that comes out both in our painting and our styles of cooking: an acquired patina.''
Several paintings in his new exhibition, Highways and Other Recipes, feature plucked hens or geese. Sciberras relishes that stage between death and dish, he says: when a bird or animal is no longer alive but still has the shine of existence in its eye or on its pelt.
''I actually catch and grow a lot of the food I cook,'' he continues. ''I shoot, fish. I've even run over a few things I have wanted to eat.
''Rabbits, roos. What is the difference between killing an animal with a car or with a gun?''
His love of cooking comes from watching his two grandmothers in the kitchen (though ''Ukrainian cuisine is not the most exciting. Practically everything is white. Cabbage, potatoes, pork''). So it's tempting to cast Elisabeth Cummings (''a major mentor'') and John Peart (''an enormous influence on me'') as his artistic grandparents.
He met them in rural Wedderburn while working in a pottery trying to decide what to do with his life. Peart suggested he study art at the East Sydney Technical College (now the National Art School).
''I didn't know you could go to art school,'' Sciberras recalls. ''I'd never even been to Darlinghurst before. I shot into Sydney with all this energy that I had stored up. That's why I had the courage to approach all these people.''
''These people'' are the well-established painters he approached out of the blue. His first call was to the semi-reclusive Martin Sharp, whose number he found in the phone book.
''He didn't exactly throw the gates open but I offered to help out in his studio in exchange for a picture,'' Sciberras says. ''It's nicer than being paid an hourly rate.''
For three years he lived part time at Sharp's rambling home in Bellevue Hill. ''Martin is now my daughter's godfather.''
Peter Kingston was also won over by the Sciberras charm. ''I had a studio at Peter's house for three years. That was like having a scholarship. I didn't have to pay the rent and I had his help and guidance.'' An arrangement with Guy Warren was similar: Sciberras mowed in exchange for long conversations about art history.
''It was important for me to associate myself with as many different sorts of artist as I could,'' he says. ''Being in the studio, you become quite intimate. You get to learn the domesticities of their lives. How they work. How they keep their brushes. How they apply their paint. At what rate they apply their paint. Some paint very quickly.
''Others, like Martin, can spend 20 years on a painting, which would drive me bananas.''
Sciberras had been working in Garry Shead's studio for several years when his future father-in-law said, ''You've got to meet my daughter''. ''So finally we met and we were married for 13 years.''
The couple separated last year. ''But Gria was here at the opening last night. It meant a lot to me that she came. I'm proud that we're still friends. The reasons we fell in love haven't been lost.''
Tim Storrier is another mentor, though they originally detested each other.
Sciberras and Cummings were among a group of artists and students invited to have lunch with Storrier when he lived in Bathurst.
''It was the worst first meeting you could possibly imagine,'' Sciberras says.
''Tim was sitting there with a big balloon glass of red wine while the rest of us had plastic cups. Elisabeth and I ganged up on Tim and had a terrible argument.''
The two made up over subsequent lunches. And it says much for Sciberras's charm that when he and Gria had given up on raising the $50,000 to buy their dream cottage in Hill End in 2002, he received a call from Storrier.
''Tim said, 'It's ridiculous. Tell the woman you are buying it. I'll tell my bank manager, my solicitor. I'll guarantee the loan if I have to. This is the beginning of your family history.'
''Tears fell down my face. It was such a generous thing to do and say. Tim gave us our life in Hill End, which has become a big story.''
So in which direction is the Sciberras saga headed?
McDonald credits him with ''working in an area that is unfashionable with artists of his generation … a lot of them are avant-garde, making videos, doing subject paintings with a conceptual edge''.
But the exhaustingly exuberant Sciberras says the future of Australian landscape painting is assured. ''Frontiers have always been broken. With [his paintings of] Lake Eyre, John Olsen is like [the explorers] Burke and Wills. He has found something that has recaptured the Australian imagination.
''We had one kind of [European-influenced] painting in Australia for 100 years. Then explorers like Drysdale, [Sidney] Nolan and Ray Crooke in the Atherton Tablelands came along.
''As a younger Australian landscape painter, there are so many frontiers left to discover.''
Luke Sciberras: Highways and Other Recipes is at Tim Olsen Gallery, Woollahra, until August 28.