October: Peter Hill
"Ever since I studied art twenty years ago, I have grown to love landscape paintings. I am drawn to images that are striking yet remain within the ‘everyday’ scope of experience - by learning to see the wonder in an ‘ordinary’ scene that we may walk or drive past on any given day.
"My work has absorbed many diverse influences over the years from the early Cubism of Picasso and Braque with its stark lines and abrupt shifts in tone to the strong contrasts of light and shadow found in the epic works of Caravaggio. Influences from a range of other painters have seeped into my work, such as Australians Arthur Streeton, Rick Amor, Jeffrey Smart & Tim Storrier, the semi-Surrealist landscapes of English painter Paul Nash, the minutely-detailed work of eccentric Englishman Stanley Spencer, the mysterious, intensely psychological landscapes of American Edward Hopper and the sad romanticism of the landscapes of the great German Casper David Friedrich
"I love strong colour and, especially, the value of strong contrasts between light and shade. And I love to convey the feeling of distance and depth, which makes the Wimmera/Mallee region an ideal subject!
"Australian artist Sydney Nolan, when he was in the army in 1942, found himself stationed at Dimboola. It was the first time he had been to the Wimmera and when the train from Melbourne headed beyond the Grampians, he was stunned and awed by the landscape that confronted him, huge empty brown-yellow vistas stretching away into the distance (Australia was suffering a severe drought at this time). He confronted the new landscape with his own unique vision and in doing so, changed the entire course of landscape-painting in this country.
"Today, new arrivals must experience similar sensations to what Nolan did all those years ago. The starkly flat horizon line sharply divides the earth and sky, stretching off into the remote distance in all directions. The sky becomes a vast dome overhead, unbroken by skyscrapers or overhead cables.
"A visiting Italian painter named Girolamo Nerli remarked exasperatedly in 1890, “I need mountains, snow-covered alps. This landscape has no drama…..it’s too worn down!” After experiencing the grandiose (and relatively ‘young’) European Alps, to then visit Mount Arapiles and the Grampians, amongst perhaps the oldest mountains on this earth, a remark like this can be seen as predictable. When Russian-born Nicholas Chevalier painted Mount Arapiles in 1863, he rendered it as a European scene, a moist & cool majestic scene, bathed in a gentle, soft light that one would rarely find here in reality.
"To me, Mount Arapiles has its own drama. To me, it’s an ancient survivor and like its sisters in the nearby Grampians, it has watched over many immense changes to the surrounding world, as has the flat-lands that surround it. The landscape has a hard-edge to it, emotional as well as physical. It can be your best friend and, all too often, your worst enemy. To scrape a living from it takes a certain kind of person and as a Community Health Nurse, I have seen the costs and hardships that rural people and their families have to endure in order to survive.
"The landscape of the Wimmera has a unique beauty to it, a beauty of simplicity and harshness. It is a very old landscape with many memories and secrets."
