Much of life is spiritually unexplored country, and for Tasmanian-born landscape painter Clifford How, immersing himself in Country, to paint what he sees, smells, hears, tastes in the air, and touches underfoot, is about transposing a spiritual and physical topography of the landscape to the sensual process of painting.
But what is country? It is a question writer Hilary Burden asks in her book Undersong: A Tasmanian journey into Country – a beautiful celebration of the landscape through the journeys of indigenous and non-indigenous women. Burden suggests that Country is, “More than land. Greater than territory. A thread, a tapestry, a sense of where you belong in more than three dimensions. Where words and dance and drawing come from. It is what ignites your soul.”
And for Clifford How, being on Country is about being in the bush. “Luminous State brings together my perception of the ways the wilderness works its magic on one’s being, of how its restorative powers can heal. By walking in this ancient terrain, sensing the light and dark of its history, by repeatedly journeying into its depths and working to depict its beauty, I hope to draw attention to the importance of its preservation and the profound implications of getting perception right while moving forward.”
From the Cradle Mountain-Lake St Claire National Park to the Gordon Franklin wild rivers, the sub-alpine moorlands of the Central Plateau and the stunning mountainous Walls of Jerusalem, How depicts the Luminous State of lutruwita/Tasmania. It is a geographical location and a condition of the mind, a place augmenting an emotional response to the landscape communicated with the artist’s raw materials.
How’s unique ability to capture the timbre of the light in these World Heritage-listed areas, the sense of a biting southerly breeze or the blaze of alpine sun, to mark out the shapes and forms with graphite, to then drop in oil paint and push its edges with brushes, fingers, even plasterer’s trowels, is what makes this artist a stellar practitioner.
“Despite the variety of locations in this recent body of work, the one constant is the transient nature of lutruwita’s luminescence,” says How. “Whether through clear alpine air or via filtered heavy atmosphere, the light quality captured in the material laid down on the surface provides an ambient thread of connection to the viewer. At certain times of the year as the sun tracks a low trajectory across the sky, the radiant clarity and warmth of the light is magnificent.”
As a fourth-generation Tasmanian from an agricultural family, How, an avid bushwalker and fly fisherman, has grown up with the landscape in the marrow of his bones, aware though that the contemporary time in which he is working is a space that holds colonial shadows and that the art he is creating evolves from a western history of landscape painting. It is one that classically strives for a sense of timelessness, an unpeopled arcadian paradise far from the brutality and danger that the landscape can hold.
It is through this intrinsic attachment to the landscape that ideas around space and place live and breathe. British cultural geographer Doreen Massey explored the emotive attachment people experience in particular environments, suggesting that “… space is not a flat surface across which we walk … you’re cutting across myriad stories going on … its like a pincushion of a million stories … we see space as a cut through the myriad stories in which we are living at any one moment. Space and Time become intimately connected.” And connections with place become complex.
The Australia, the Tasmania, that How was born into were places that presented as a kind of dream, Britain’s dream of what Australia could be. Decades on and the idea of place is fraught with muddy questions of ownership, but for this artist, painting is a way of engaging in a conversation about the beauty of place and its significance for indigenous and non-indigenous people.
In Courting Blakness: Recalibrating Knowledge in the Sandstone University, contemporary indigenous artist Archie Moore asks, “What happens when you pursue or try to validate ideas based on inauthentic experiences?” The question of authenticity and an ethical future was one that art historian Bernard Smith posed back in The Spectre of Truganini: The 1980 Boyer Lectures: “It is this new awareness of what actually occurred that, it seems to me, constitutes a central problem for the integrity and authenticity of Australian culture today.”
Clifford How acknowledges working within a tradition of Western modernism and in a landscape layered with histories. “I aim to capture an accurate rendering of the landscape by painting en plein air, by taking in the emotive qualities of nature’s ever-changing palette then, in the studio, seeing how far I can push it, gauging where the weight of my attention falls, exaggerating the contrasts, heightening the mystery, the drama before me.”
In a style he describes as “a kind of organic abstraction”, the artist segues from palette knife to paint brush to landscape to studio, shepherding brilliant swathes of colour and movement. Indeed, his consummate skill in manipulating those tools may in part be attributed to his former life as a tradie sanding floors.
Witness the vital energy in works such as Aerial Depth – Frenchman’s Cap Track, 2024 and July Calm – Little Pine Lagoon, 2024 where the lilting perspective journeys the viewer from a tactile vertiginous foreground to scuffs of mountainous terrain aeons away.
Witness the confident shift from meditative grand scale canvases Origin 2 (Overland Track), 2024, and Morning Calm – Western Lakes, 2024, to more intimate paintings, Shorter Days (Walls of Jerusalem), 2024 and Plateau Ambience, 2024, their mossy greens feed into swatches of buttery yellows intensifying the nuanced silence of the bush. It is all part of this artist’s way of connecting us with Country and going deeper into discovering what Country can mean.
Clifford How’s Luminous State exhibition runs until October 27, 2024, at Handmark Gallery, 77 Salamanca Place, Hobart.
Courtney Kidd has worked in the visual arts sector as a broadcaster, lecturer, consultant and writer for such publications as The Sydney Morning Herald, Artist Profile, Qantas magazine and British Art Monthly. She is passionate about the significance of art and literature in contemporary Australian culture, seeing it as a tool propelling ideas about the way we live and seek out beauty. Courtney lives in Sydney and is slowly making her way back home to Tasmania, en route discovering the wealth of artistic talent available on this magical island.
