Evening (Nostalgia and Embers) 2001

TIM STORRIER born 1949

Evening (Nostalgia and Embers) 2001

synthetic polymer paint on canvas
106.5 x 244.0 cm; 114.0 x 252.0 cm (framed)
signed lower right: Storrier
signed, dated and inscribed verso: 3 Evening (nostalgia + embers)/ Storrier/ 2001

Provenance:
Metro 5 Gallery, Melbourne
Private collection, Melbourne
Bonhams & Goodman, Melbourne, 23 April 2008, lot 103 (as Waterline)
Private collection, Victoria

Exhibited:
Storrier, Metro 5 Gallery, Melbourne, 10 October - 4 November 2001

Estimate: $120000 - 160000

Result Hammer: $150000

As one of Australia’s most significant contemporary artists, Tim Storrier has developed a body of work that is instantly recognisable and universally admired. His outback paintings evoke wondrous feelings of nature and of the Earth as an arena of mysterious rituals, ceremony and celestial surprise. Often featuring glowing embers, leaping pillars of fire and brilliant skies, these works have placed Storrier’s work in the highest echelon of Australian art. Storrier purposefully sets his work amongst the similarly styled works of other high achievers from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He creates a legacy that has ongoing social and cultural significance but that is also uniquely his own.

Evening (Nostalgia and Embers) is a particularly skilful rendition of a fire in the night-sky theme. Painted in 2001, this work shares with other major paintings by Storrier from the same period a focus on burning embers arranged in a desert landscape. The blaze is not out of control. Rather, there is a sense that the fire has been carefully lit and is being watchfully controlled. Other works from the same period – notably Storrier’s Waterline series place the row of burning embers on an island surrounded by an ocean of water. In the current painting however, the emphasis is on the juxtaposition between fire, sky and earth. Three different elements but no less primal in their origins than the traditional fire, air and water.

Storrier’s strong links to the land, particularly his early childhood roots to the family property 'Umagarlee', in the Central West of New South Wales, are important in the development of his art. While Storrier continues to produce work charged with ‘direct and associative references to that place and period since 1970’,(1) his work since the early 1980s has focused more broadly on inland regions and in particular the Australian desert. Vast tracts of land promote the idea of Australia as a unique landform composed of primordial natural features, the feeling of endless space and of limitless skies.

In a 1981 trip to Broken Hill, Storrier famously tied a rope between two poles stuck into the ground and set them alight.(2) The practice of interacting with nature in this way – of recreating and constructing fearsome events to meticulously record them in photographs and paint – became a cornerstone of his work and a hallmark of his mature style.

Detailed, ordered and experimental, Storrier’s consummate paintings of fire in the landscape began to combine popular perceptions and experiences of the Australian landscape with elements of ancient ritual. Storrier set up situations that draw upon and excited our collective imagination. Evening (Nostalgia and Embers) distils points of resonance between individual pictorial elements so that they become seamlessly integrated into a uniform whole. The burning stack of embers closely echoes the horizontality of the land and dramatic pink-red sky, light illuminates both land and the atmosphere and the heat generated by the fire is paralleled by parched and cracked earth. Within the burning stack itself we see parts that have been segmented and fissured, burning at different rates and stages. There is the feeling of a time-based performance piece that is carefully orchestrated to achieve a sense of realism ­–what fire does – but also culturally – what fire means.

Fire is central to the Australian story. From the management of the grasses and plains by Indigenous custodians, the wildfires that followed in the wake of European settlement through to the use of fire as a comforting presence for generations of weekend campers, fire has not lost its capacity to be a signifier of both destructive and benign forces.

Fire has also played a central role in Australian art. Storrier continues on the tradition of prominent 20th century artists including Sir Russell Drysdale (1912-1981), Fred Williams (1927-1982) and Peter Booth (born 1940) who reference fire as either a metaphor for rebirth or the emergence of a nation’s identity.(3) The National Gallery of Australia’s curator of Australian art, Deborah Hart, perceptively noted similar sentiments at the time when Storrier first started to exhibit his fire-related works: ‘These paintings are about light, action and stillness. They deal with the real and imagined landscape together with the myth of the outback.’(4)

Storrier’s works look back further also to 19th century European visual traditions in which fire was depicted as wild, spectral, uncontrollable. For example, William Strutt’s (1825-1915) opus Black Thursday, February 6th, 1851, now in the collection of the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, which documents a fire that burnt almost a quarter of the colony. The apocalyptic resonance of Strutt’s painting was captured by James Fenton who recalled how the Victorian fires appeared to him from as far away as the Tasmanian north coast:

Early in the afternoon clouds came rolling over the heavens, obscuring the light of the sun in a most ominous and mysterious manner. There was a lurid glare in the sky, mixed with dense columns of blackest cloud-banks in the distance, which stole gradually upwards from the horizon until the sun became entirely obscured.(5)

For many contemporary observers, the out-of-control fire, fierce winds and unmatched temperatures signified the end of the world that was sure to follow.

Coming only six years later, Eugene von Guérard’s (1811-1901) equally iconic painting, Bushfire between Mount Elephant and Timboon, March 1857 1859 (Ballarat Art Gallery, Victoria) also shows the uncontrollable forces of nature and the wide front of the fire as it looks to be burning out of control. Von Guérard experienced the fire at first hand, transforming the immediacy of his vivid sketchbook drawings into a fully worked oil painting.(6) Prominent individual landmarks and details are swallowed up in this painting (completed two years later) by an all-encompassing wall of red flame and billowing smoke and a mostly blackened foreground.

Changes and juxtapositions reinforce the real and imagined terror of the foregoing scene; however, they also have the affect of taking the moment out of this world and giving it a more universal, eternal dimension. There are clear visual crossovers between von Guérard’s 1859 painting and Storrier’s Evening (Nostalgia and Embers) produced over 140 years later. From the intense colour palette through to the wispy cloud formations that peep through the rich, red firmament, Storrier too is concerned with how to create a memorable and awe-inspiring portrayal of fire, one that is timeless and draws on his love and respect for the elemental forces of nature.

FOOTNOTES

1. Tim Storrier, Nanda Hobbs, Sydney, accessed May 2024, http://nandahobbs.com/artist/tim-storrier
2. Lumby, C., Tim Storrier: The Art of the Outsider, Craftsman House, Sydney, 2000, p.45
3. For example see Wilson, G., Fireworks: Tracing the Incendiary in Australian Art, Artspace Mackay, Queensland, 2005
4. Hart, D., Tim Storrier: Burning Gifts, Australian Galleries, Melbourne, 1989, p.18
5. Fenton, J., Bush Life in Tasmania Fifty Years Ago, 1891
6. ‘Education Kit’, Eugene von Guérard. Artist–Traveller, Ballarat Art Gallery, Victoria, 2018, accessed May 2024, https://agb.flywheelsites.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/vg-education-kit.pdf

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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