Remnants of Perception: 'Ivan Durrant: Marmalade Skies Through Opal Eyes' and 'The Good'

In this remote district, I am even less inclined than I was in the suburbs of the capital city to seek out some or another obscure fact...

Gerald Murnane, Border Districts, 2017

In the company of cows

The cow is an indelible feature of the rural and regional landscapes of Australia; more domestic than sheep and more productive than horses, but still as foreign as they are familiar. Cows accompanied some of the first white squatters and drovers into Aboriginal land, announcing the invasion of settlers and cattle. Treated mythologically or within the pastoral landscape tradition, rarely do artists express such intimacy with cows as Ivan Durrant and Anna Louise Richardson do. Much about these two artists is suggested by attending to the figure of the cow.

While Marmalade Skies Through Opal Eyes at Hamilton Gallery exclusively features ‘late style’ paintings by Durrant, his reputation was established by the Slaughtered cow happening (1975), in which he deposited the carcass of Beverly, a cow he had slaughtered himself, on the forecourt of the National Gallery of Victoria. Durrant sought to challenge the way ‘people are willing to take the benefits of living but they don’t really want to know the background.’^[1] Despite his effort to avoid moralising, Durrant’s act was treated as a vulgar stunt. While Slaughtered cow happening provoked almost universal condemnation, Durrant’s Butcher shop (1977-78) and Quality meats series (1977), with its pristine, realistic reproductions of meat as a commodity, was almost universally lauded.^[2]

Durrant’s relationship to cows precedes these notable incidences, having established a love of dairy cows while billeted out to dairy farms as a child in an orphanage. He worked at an abattoir to fund his degree at university in the 1960s, and some of his earliest paintings in 1969 and 1970 feature ostensibly the same placid, curious cow. This affection seems strangely incongruous with the flayed cow heads that have punctuated his career, including the monumental oil painting Big cow’s head (1995) and The slaughtered cow (2019), a sculptural work whose painted resin shines like clammy viscera.

Durrant’s approach shifted in the early 2000s, with works that anticipate those in the current exhibition, including Angus cow (2001) and Blue stones (2000) which present frontal portraits of cows in a yard. Works like Friesians and Blue polls (both 2002) and Full pen (2003) feature soft-focus, oblique arrangements of multiple bovine figures in a closely cropped herd, which do not so directly confront us with the fate allotted to these docile animals. Durrant remains insistent that despite his ‘sense of betrayal and sadness’, these cows are ‘being sold for slaughter’, and he offers ‘some kind of apology’ through paint.^[3] Recent paintings such as Red ear tag (2023) present the cow as beastly, almost ghoulish, while in Sunset pen (2023) a group of cattle face away from the viewer with their hind quarters lit up by a diseased red glow. The direct confrontation of the early works has dissolved into an ominous mood, yet Durrant offers the sense that in moving away from literal carcasses and realism, his work hews closer to real vision or perception.

Richardson’s touring exhibition The Good has fewer bovine-as-subject works, but the cow plays a central role in some of her earlier works. In Aziza’s Zodiac (February) (2018), a calf born at the same time as Richardson’s own baby lies carefully drawn in graphite against a background of dark glitter. The calf died, making the work a somewhat saccharine tomb. In Struck (2015), two engorged black bulls mirror one another across an illuminated crack bisecting the cement fibreboard support. The work recalls an incident in which two bulls were killed by lightning; ‘we found them in the paddock 50 metres apart, dead on their sides.’^[4] The bull is treated with awe, rendered almost sacred by the emanation of light. Richardson’s engagement with animals frequently evokes death, either directly or indirectly: the live cow becomes a corpse, as articulated in the identical works Sundae and Carcass, both from 2019.

Carcass, the only beast in The Good, depicts a skinned, decapitated and bisected animal. Dead and disidentified, it becomes a nameless commodity, replacing Sundae, a named ‘poddy calf’ sold for 'a record price’. The sentimentalism suggested by Richardson in her note to the work, ‘you can’t eat an animal you’ve named’, is challenged by Durrant’s slaughtered cow, Beverly. By contrast with Beverly, Richardson’s Carcass becomes a symbol of something unacknowledged in the sustenance of life, perhaps too fraught to enter the collection of ordinary objects in The Good, but necessary for something living up to ‘the good’. The exquisitely rendered texture of Carcass–the sinews and meat on the mountain range of ribs–gives the work an almost landscape-like quality, as though the crags and knobs of meat and bone were rugged terrain. However, it is hung vertically in a manner that recalls the painted carcasses from Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox (1655) to Chaim Soutine and Francis Bacon works evoking the crucifix–a gory memento mori.

And other animals

Among other subjects, Richardson and Durrant approach death and loss through the allegory of animals. Their works suggest an aftermath. Richardson’s works in The Good are apophatic totems of her mother’s death, with her characteristic monotone, stripping objects of colour. Durrant’s intensely luminous paintings, by contrast, suggest the aftermath of overwhelming perception, a memory image or the fuzzy coloured remnant of staring at a screen for too long.

Durrant turned to rural life, following his love of horses and cows, while Richardson maintains a seventh-generation farm in Western Australia. Richardson is more conscious than Durrant of wishing to communicate some of the trials of agricultural work, though The Good affords little sense of context for the landscape of such labour. Her family, including the artist Abdul-Rahman Abdullah and their three children, seem to feature as an implicit first audience. The works are approachable, enlarging objects as if to populate a semi-magical world in which everything–from a shipping container to a cape weed stalk or cooking pot–shrinks or expands to fit the span of adult arms.

For both Richardson and Durrant, the perspective of the child appears formative. For Durrant, it is his own childhood: a lurid pallete defamiliarises the mundane world, projecting private, perceptions shaped by childhood recollection (‘a trip behind my eyes’, he calls it), interior landscapes emanating in vivid synthetic colours.^[5] For Richardson, the works engage the child as an implied viewer. Frameless and almost sculptural, the works project into space as if to invite tactile perception. This is also reflected in the inclusion of an interactive corner towards the front of the gallery space at Wangaratta, with an instructional video featuring the artist. The child is after all a valuable cultural consumer, and inclusive regional programming seems evident in both these shows.

The Good

But I envy the artists for finding their subject in the same world where they walk and drink and eat.

Gerald Murnane, Landscape with Landscape, 1985/2016

Richardson’s 2020 exhibitions When night falls and We should be more afraid of the sun than the moon as well as Dead Things, featured in Contra Viento journal in 2019, were predominantly animal-focused. As Wiradjuri elder Cheryl Penrith’s catalogue essay ‘The Good: Finding, doing and rejoicing in it’ tells it, Richardson attends to the familiar and quotidian object central to the rhythm of ‘the good life’. For Richardson, ‘the good’ has modest implications associated with phrases like ‘a good egg’ rather than Plato’s metaphysical forms. Pristine is the enemy of the good, her objects might say; patient, loving attention and Richardson’s meticulous rendering are allies of ‘goodness.’

In The Good, the spring flower, noxious plant and ecological hazard Capeweed (2023) is weighed down by its shadow; by contrast, Windfall (2023), a testicular passionfruit in vertical orientation is offset by its long shadow, as if the object were floating. The use of shadow reminds the viewer that the charcoal drawings are cut to the figure, as if silhouettes, without frame or ground to contain the object. They reach, sculpturally, into the gallery, but remain flattened against the wall, deprived of illusionistic space. Pillows (2023) and Sprout (2023), both graphite on paper, are exceptions, framed to suggest a sort of homely container.

Protection and exposure are thematically balanced in the exhibition, with the banana’s weathering, cape weed flowers or shooting sprout flouting containment, while pillows and stock pots hold and comfort. Works either represent the protection of domestic space, or present objects of an exterior site. It’s this conflict between agricultural labour, its industrial scale and homely consolations, that adds tension to The Good. Richardson’s detailed rendering occasionally gives way to a rugged or romantic pastoralism, like the homogenous shipping container’s industrial, multinational freighting function–Container (2023)–being turned into a space of family memory. The objects in The Good are composed as comforting reminders of family rituals and intergenerational labours, tender acknowledgments of the unglamorous accompaniments to living and dying on a farm.

Marmalade Skies Through Opal Eyes

Now I was ready to take up my life’s work of searching for the many skeins still missing from the huge, coloured fabric strung between my nervous system and the world.

Gerald Murnane, Landscape with Landscape, 1985/2016

Of the three informal series in Marmalade Skies, Durrant’s Studio (2017-19) recalls the enumeration of domestic objects in The Good, in theme if not in style. Indeed, the visitor to Hamilton Gallery may first encounter a reconstruction of Durrant’s desk, with protruding brushes like echidna quills and paper plates spattered with the detritus of painting in his distinctive palette. Yet the studio in the paintings has a seedy quality, suggesting a swelling darkness that bears no reference to the humble, well-lit desk. Durrant seems less interested in the record of a domestic environment and more in the forensic examination of the aftermath of his art production. His exhibition is filled with overwhelming blotches of bulging colour, but in the studio, the sparse negative space is ominous and abyssal. There is something disconcerting about Durrant’s perception, as in Red ear tag with the cow-subject glowing a monstrous green.

Durrant also paints stills from horse racing broadcasts, close-ups that crop the moment out of any narrative context. By being faithful to the gaudy digital colours, he turns the jockeys into daemonic, bug-eyed figures, as in Blue horse (2014). And dialling up the lurid glow of the screen image, Durrant lingers on the edge of perception, inviting colour to dissolve recognisable forms. His neologism ‘supraphotolism’ describes an oscillation between image and abstraction, and Durrant has long engaged with the effects of reproductive technologies like printers, photography and TV, as though they restore something of the enchantment of childhood perception commonly referenced by the artist.

The third series presented at Hamilton Gallery is of middle ground landscapes, trees reflected in water, often in flood. While calmer in some ways than the Studio and horse racing imagery, Durrant persists in heightening the density of colour almost to the point of pure abstraction. Colour in the landscapes is a sort of temperature, with cool cyan water contrasting with the burning, coal-red of sunset light on the trees. Like Sidney Nolan’s muddy, panoramic Riverbend series (1966), these are landscapes without a plane, their orientation given only by the vertical struts of ghostly white tree trunks shimmering above rising water. Informed by memory, these paintings also seem to anticipate a future of changed landscapes, increasingly saturated with technological perception.

Colour and other Bleeds

Durrant’s landscapes suggest an exterior viewed through a distorting window or mediated through screens. His frames contain the wash of colour from bleeding too far into the world, whereas Richardson’s objects are autonomous and complete, vivisected from the landscape. While both artists’ subjects are generically rural, these are gallery works. Entering the exhibitions after long drives skirting the Grampians or brushing the Victorian high country, the viewer is sealed in a reverent space, alone with the products of the artists’ labours and perceptions. One can detect the connection to the fields just passed, but it is faint and pulls instead inward, to reflection on the intensity of vision and its boundaries.