ARTHUR BOYD

Private collection, Sydney; purchased circa 1973

Contemporary gold timber frame. Signs of yellowing across the sky and on the left hand side along the frame rebate. UV inspection: areas of retouching in the sky to all 5 cockatoos and to the top edge in the sky and left edge.
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Arthur Boyd's paintings of the wide expanses of the Wimmera landscape encompass both the richness of growth and harvest of the Victorian wheat fields, and the searing heat and barren dryness of summer, to which this painting is inclined. The fields of grain are worked with the palette knife in thick textures of oil paint, as in The White Cockatoo, circa 1948-49. He turned to tempera for the smoother, thinner paint in such a work as Irrigation Lake, Wimmera, 1950 (National Gallery of Victoria). Boyd had a special gift for adapting his medium and technique to the images and the ideas he wished to convey. In the Wimmera paintings this heavy impasto was reserved for earlier works, dating from his first visits in 1948-49. They tend to relate thematically more to the farmed and fertile fields of Berwick. This approach, however, was not exclusive, for Burnt Wheat Stubble, 1949-50 (private collection) is painted in smoother tempera, the textures of the thistles and foreground grasses being decidedly unpronounced.

After the closeness of the Berwick countryside, which he populated with busy Brueghelian motifs of human activity, the Wimmera presented Boyd with a challenge. It was vast, open and empty, with endless low horizons and dominant skies. Even the colours were different. He responded with his usual creative and inventive energy, as seen in this painting, combined with his deep love of the Australian landscape. In an atmosphere of stillness, the air hangs over the land, the birds almost suspended in its heat haze. Their pattern of flight picks up the gentle rhythm of the landforms, the curves of the mounds and very distant hills. Whatever else may entrance the eye, the technique itself is beautiful, a metaphor of what is seen and felt. In an early essay on Boyd, James Mollison wrote that 'even in the most agreeable of these landscapes Boyd includes details that surprise us'. Although he was referring to Boyd's Rosebud landscapes of the late thirties, his observations are entirely apt for this Wimmera work. Mollison continued: 'Certain birds or beasts, tree or plant forms tell of the artist's mind impinging on what his eye sees. Sometimes these serve to make the pictures more magically convincing. When they are treated with expressionist distortion the pictures become haunting.'¹

While no haunting images stalk our painting, the intention behind the contrast between the white native cockatoos and the black intruding crows is obvious. Crows are well known scavengers of the land. Boyd relegates their blackness, for Wimmera Landscape is a paean, rather than an exploration of an evil that enters Eden.

1. Mollison, J., 'Arthur Boyd', Art and Australia, Sydney, vol. 3, no. 2, September 1965, p. 115