Wimmera Landscape with Jinker and Ram c1985

ARTHUR BOYD (1920-1999)

Wimmera Landscape with Jinker and Ram c1985

oil on board
89.0 x 119.0 cm; 118.5 x 149.0 cm (framed)
signed lower right: Arthur Boyd

Provenance:
Art Galleries Schubert, Queensland, 1999 (label attached verso)
Private collection, Queensland
Acquired from the above, private collection, Melbourne

Estimate: $80000 - 100000

Result Hammer: $130000

Wimmera Landscape with Jinker and Ram c1985 is an impressively mature painting by Arthur Boyd. It strikes a familiarity that is reassuring yet at the same time projects a slightly more melancholic outlook ­– the element of time passed and with it, a sense of loss and even abandonment. It is a juggling act that the esteemed Australian artist maintained across a six-decade-long practice. For Boyd, the world is a place best described as the harbinger of inextricably linked dualities – love and/or passion coupled with the fear of rejection, or as is the case with this painting, of bringing past and present into the one dimension and space.

The Wimmera, in Victoria’s northwest wheatbelt, was a subject that captivated Arthur Boyd. Known for its wheatfields and vast plains, the Wimmera had attracted the attention of famous artists before him such as Russell Drysdale (1912-1981) and Sidney Nolan (1917-1992). Each artist left their own indelible imprint on the national psyche. When Boyd first visited the area in the autumn of 1948-49, the surrounding countryside was flat, dry and dotted with mostly empty waterholes and boggy creeks. In their heyday or in better seasons these waterways would have supported a plethora of domesticated animals and wildlife. Boyd was struck by the fecundity of the land but also by its fragility, impermanence and occasional hostility. In this sense, the Wimmera paintings from the 1950s through to the 1980s project a feeling of nostalgia for Australia’s pastoral history. At the same time, they are tied to the artist’s highly personal take on the contemporary malaise and challenges experienced by the people and animals who had made it their home.

The first group of Wimmera paintings received high praise when exhibited in 1950 and 1951. Critics celebrated how Boyd had utilised the medium of egg-tempera – first used in his religious and war-related paintings – to infuse each work with a highly translucent quality and how he had deftly rendered the bleached colours, endless horizons and small, intricate details such as the dry grass. The art writer for Melbourne’s The Age, for example noted approvingly that the artist’s ‘parched landscapes echo the spirit of the countryside.’(1)

A third of a century on and it is apparent in Wimmera Landscape with Jinker and Ram (and a series of related paintings from the 1980s) that Boyd had fully mastered his craft. The painting is divided into three pulsating colour bands. A dark pink and plum-coloured tonality in the foreground denotes a waterhole, dried in the summer sun and waiting for the rains to replenish and fill. This band transitions seamlessly into a golden, wheat coloured middle and background that stretches endlessly into the distance. Tufty clouds complete the composition, filling the sky with stretched cirrus clouds spread over a hazy, blue atmosphere. It is a perfectly integrated and harmonised scene.

On top of this rich cacophony of atmosphere and colour the artist places a single red jinker and a lone ram. The misshapen timber-spoke wheels, bare metal seat and stripped harness of the red-rusted jinker exert a strong physical presence, though here signifying neglect and probably being long since discarded. The jinker is a portal to a bygone era. To its right and in rough parallel formation is the equally standout motif of one of Boyd’s infamous rams. Characteristically, the ram is painted in a heavy and moody black, with the oil paint applied in a swirly motion. This is then contrasted against the blood red colour of the beast’s weeping eyeball and prominent genitalia. The inclusion of the ram adds drama to the painting and to the sense Boyd builds up of a somewhat lonesome presence left to wander in a beautiful though desolate landscape.

Works such as Wimmera Landscape with Jinker and Ram reveal how past, present and future are all ingenuously matched and play out from the early to the more mature work of Arthur Boyd. And how the subjects of this extraordinary artist often carry double meanings. The jinker is emblematic of Australian settler-culture history for example but also has clear personal and familial associations. Its recalls the lives and pastimes of the artist’s family, growing up at Murrumbeena, but also time spent specifically at various family member farms held at Narre Warren, Yarra Glen and Merricks North. Similarly, the black ram echoes the bestial figure – the Ramox – a mythological creature invented by Arthur Boyd that he often incorporated in his works from the 1940s onwards. The creature is part ram, part ox, and represents a presence that is sometimes protective, sometimes fearsome and occasionally out of control.

FOOTNOTES

1. 'New Approach by Arthur Boyd', The Age, Melbourne, 18 September 1951, p.3

Rodney James
Rodney James is an independent art consultant who specialises in valuations, collection management, exhibitions, research and writing, and strategic planning for art galleries and museums.

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