Figures and Tent 1974-76

ARTHUR BOYD (1920-1999)

Figures and Tent 1974-76

oil on copper
31.0 x 22.0 cm
signed lower right: Arthur Boyd

Provenance:
Sotheby's, Melbourne, 27 November 1995, lot 2
Savill Galleries, Sydney (label attached verso)
Private collection, Sydney

Exhibited:
Arthur Boyd - The Spirit of Australia, Savill Galleries, Sydney, 17 October - 16 November 1996, cat.22

Estimate: $60000 - 80000

Result Hammer: $55,000

Arthur Boyd chose the uncommon technique of oil on copper to execute a number of paintings between 1974 and 1976 in response to the Shoalhaven River in New South Wales. The artist first went to the region in the early 1970s, visiting art dealer Frank McDonald’s property at Bundanon on the Shoalhaven River. He immediately became fascinated by this dramatic Australian landscape, so different from the verdant English countryside where he was based at the time, or indeed any Australian environment that he had previously painted.1 Upon returning to England, Boyd embarked on a series of small oil paintings on copper, fresh with new impressions of this primordial place which he claimed was ‘the only untamed landscape I have ever seen.’2 

Boyd’s engagement with this region was to provide profound and lasting artistic impetus, as Arthur and his wife Yvonne purchased a property on the Shoalhaven in 1974, and later acquired Bundanon in 1979. His oil on copper paintings, most of which were completed in England, some Australia, display a marked departure from his heavy impasto paintings of the preceding decade, where the landscape is often embroiled in expressing mythological and biblical themes. Conversely, in the early Shoalhaven works, Boyd reconnects with his homeland roots through a creative response to the land itself, where naturalistic observation replaces allegorical interests and masses of swirling paint.

Figures and Tent reflects the stylised approach that Boyd developed to handle the epic Shoalhaven terrain. Reducing this environment to its essential compositional elements of water and earth, here they consume the picture plane which is bisected by a sharp division between the two that Boyd described as like a ‘knife-edge’ when the water was still.3 Upon this planar structure, the smooth hard surface of the copper allowed for fine mark-making and an almost miniaturist approach to representing detail within the bush. In the current work variegated bush-land detritus of sticks, leaves and boulders are intricately defined between the strong verticals of tree trunks. This contrasts with the wide, smooth expanse of amber coloured river that resides below.

Unlike many of Boyd’s oil on copper paintings made between 1974 and 1976, here the landscape has been somewhat humanised through the presence of a tent and the two figures. During this period Boyd was absorbed by the work of Eugene von Guérard and Tom Roberts, and perhaps the tent reflects the artists re-acquaintance with his colonial forebears.4 Its shape also mimics the triangular form of a cleft in the rock face that Boyd frequently incorporated into his Shoalhaven compositions, as for the artist it had obvious sexual connotations.5

While the landscape is no longer conceived of as part of a larger human tale of mythic proportions (as exemplified in his Brides and Nebuchadnezzar series), in this work it remains a space for human complexities to unfold. One figure swims in the honeyed oil on river, face turned to the viewer while the other, leaning against a tree, watches on. A strong note of voyeurism exists in this interplay, which also occurs in one of the few copper works of the same period that is similarly peopled, titled Woman and Waterfall. Here a man spies upon a woman bathing, of which Boyd stated ‘…perhaps it is just the idea of the artist as voyeur.’6 Yet most convincingly this work, and Boyd’s other oil on copper paintings, mark a fresh renewal of the artist’s relationship with the ancient landscape of his Australian homeland.

Footnotes

1. McKenzie, J., Arthur Boyd at Bundanon, Academy Editions, London, 1994, p.14

2. McGrath, S., The Artist & The River, Bay Books, Sydney, 1982, p.50

3. ibid p.52

4. Hoff, U., The Art of Arthur Boyd, Andre Deutsch, London, 1986, p.71

5. McGrath, S., op cit, p.130

6. ibid p.198

Marguerite Brown MA (Art Cur)