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Lot Essay
In 1994 the Robinsons moved to Kingscliff, on the New South Wales side of the Queensland border. From his studio in Springbrook, Robinson continued to produce large scale landscape and seascape paintings, in a style that had first evolved in 1987. It is now generally acknowledged that these works marked a new direction for both the artist and the tradition of Australian landscape painting.
While landscape has always been the dominant subject in the history of Australian painting, the great modern practitioners of the genre, such as Drysdale and Boyd, chose to depict the deserts of the interior, the agricultural areas of Australia and the rural towns. While Nolan had painted the Queensland rainforests in the 1950s, Robinson is arguably the first artist to extensively turn his vision to this aspect of the Australian landscape; to the tangle of the tropical undergrowth and a far more primeval Australia, which is still extant in the living forms of monolithic trees and ancient species of plants.
This particular work depicts Coomera, in the Gold Coast hinterland. The paradoxes of the landscape, in which one looks upwards, following the soaring lines of the tree trunks, only to see a canopy of undergrowth, is continued in the temporal ambiguities evident in the painting. The outline of the moon that hovers in the blue sky has its counterpart in the sphere that is just visible above the horizon line beyond the fertile ranges. The anomaly of the tilting and shifting landscape is not invoked as the stereotype of the upside-down antipodean world, rather it reveals what is both natural and strange in the Australian landscape, creating a fantastic experience through actuality.
When walking through this environment, the height of the tree trunks and the density of the surrounding foliage invite the viewer to crane their neck and look up. As Klepac perceptively noted:
"The landscape wasn't 'ahead' of him, as for Drysdale and Nolan, who both gazed at the distant horizon. Robinson's landscape was all around him. In order to see it, to get to terms with it, and observe it closely, he had to swivel his body, turn his head, make physical contortions. Whereas in Drysdale, Nolan and even Fred Williams one looks forward or back, in Robinson one looks up and down. It is this change of physical attitude before a landscape which has produced these highly original paintings. These multi-view experiences gathered while walking in the rainforest, were eventually transformed into paintings which contained all sensations at once. And in doing so they abosrbed the viewer and made him a participant in the landscape." (L Klepac, op.cit, pp.22 - 23)
While the idea of the Sublime (that which is awesome in Nature and contains metaphysical overtones), should not be overstated in Robinson's work, these paintings do share with the nineteenth century German-based Romantic movement a concentration on the spectacular elements of Nature such as gorges and waterfalls; points of topographical drama that inspire awe and invoke the grandeur of Nature.
The creation of depth is also a paramount consideration, with the gorge evoking a sense of dropping away, or falling into, with the subject matter complementing the visual style so that the viewer falls into both the picture and the landscape. Rather than gently inviting the viewer in, there is an immediacy and drama to the work that is created through a conflict with known experience; for this is not the flat earth depicted by the majority of landscape painters, rather there is the sense of the revolving, curvature of the planet. This sense is heightened by the simultaneous temporal movments of the moon overhead and the sphere lowering on the horizon.
Robinson's characteristic device of the use of multiple perspectives or visual entry points operates differently in this work than they do in his paintings of Birkdale Farm for example. This visual idiosyncracy is utilised in a far more sympathetic manner in the landscape paintings, that once again relates to the visual experience of walking through a rainforest. As Klepac stated in the following extract:
"Our way of looking at a landscape is through complete body movement where we turn and swivel the head and consequently sometimes we look up and behind us. When looking at a work such as this, where a combination of viewpoints are used, the mind should try to understand how we would in fact be using our eyes in the natural world." (L Klepac, op.cit, p.130)
While landscape has always been the dominant subject in the history of Australian painting, the great modern practitioners of the genre, such as Drysdale and Boyd, chose to depict the deserts of the interior, the agricultural areas of Australia and the rural towns. While Nolan had painted the Queensland rainforests in the 1950s, Robinson is arguably the first artist to extensively turn his vision to this aspect of the Australian landscape; to the tangle of the tropical undergrowth and a far more primeval Australia, which is still extant in the living forms of monolithic trees and ancient species of plants.
This particular work depicts Coomera, in the Gold Coast hinterland. The paradoxes of the landscape, in which one looks upwards, following the soaring lines of the tree trunks, only to see a canopy of undergrowth, is continued in the temporal ambiguities evident in the painting. The outline of the moon that hovers in the blue sky has its counterpart in the sphere that is just visible above the horizon line beyond the fertile ranges. The anomaly of the tilting and shifting landscape is not invoked as the stereotype of the upside-down antipodean world, rather it reveals what is both natural and strange in the Australian landscape, creating a fantastic experience through actuality.
When walking through this environment, the height of the tree trunks and the density of the surrounding foliage invite the viewer to crane their neck and look up. As Klepac perceptively noted:
"The landscape wasn't 'ahead' of him, as for Drysdale and Nolan, who both gazed at the distant horizon. Robinson's landscape was all around him. In order to see it, to get to terms with it, and observe it closely, he had to swivel his body, turn his head, make physical contortions. Whereas in Drysdale, Nolan and even Fred Williams one looks forward or back, in Robinson one looks up and down. It is this change of physical attitude before a landscape which has produced these highly original paintings. These multi-view experiences gathered while walking in the rainforest, were eventually transformed into paintings which contained all sensations at once. And in doing so they abosrbed the viewer and made him a participant in the landscape." (L Klepac, op.cit, pp.22 - 23)
While the idea of the Sublime (that which is awesome in Nature and contains metaphysical overtones), should not be overstated in Robinson's work, these paintings do share with the nineteenth century German-based Romantic movement a concentration on the spectacular elements of Nature such as gorges and waterfalls; points of topographical drama that inspire awe and invoke the grandeur of Nature.
The creation of depth is also a paramount consideration, with the gorge evoking a sense of dropping away, or falling into, with the subject matter complementing the visual style so that the viewer falls into both the picture and the landscape. Rather than gently inviting the viewer in, there is an immediacy and drama to the work that is created through a conflict with known experience; for this is not the flat earth depicted by the majority of landscape painters, rather there is the sense of the revolving, curvature of the planet. This sense is heightened by the simultaneous temporal movments of the moon overhead and the sphere lowering on the horizon.
Robinson's characteristic device of the use of multiple perspectives or visual entry points operates differently in this work than they do in his paintings of Birkdale Farm for example. This visual idiosyncracy is utilised in a far more sympathetic manner in the landscape paintings, that once again relates to the visual experience of walking through a rainforest. As Klepac stated in the following extract:
"Our way of looking at a landscape is through complete body movement where we turn and swivel the head and consequently sometimes we look up and behind us. When looking at a work such as this, where a combination of viewpoints are used, the mind should try to understand how we would in fact be using our eyes in the natural world." (L Klepac, op.cit, p.130)