The Perils of the Interior Each year, the National Library is host to two or three Norman McCann Summer Scholars under the age of 30, who undertake research in Australian History and Literature, based on the Library’s collections. The scholarships are named for a former National Library Council member. Here Alexander Taylor, one of this year’s scholarship holders, looks at both artists’ studios and the great outdoors as competing venues in the creative process. It is not just the art that makes artists’ biographies so popular. The idea of a bohemian artistic life continues to seduce, with its mixture of cheerful poverty, promiscuity and inspired creativity. Romantic, naughty, but above all, mysterious—and unlike the paintings that leave their birthplace for ever—the allure of the studio is that it remains largely unseen. The studio might be a real place, but it is also very much part of the imaginary. As the place where images are made, its own image is a vivid and intricate construction.
The idea of studio is central to the way we imagine the artistic life. In early postcolonial The preference for paintings made outdoors was chiefly propagated by the rhetoric that grew around the Heidelberg School. J.S. Macdonald’s account of Tom Roberts describes a distrust of the studio. We learn that Roberts ‘tabooed studio-painted landscapes’ and that ‘a studio was not enough for Roberts’. Similarly, Lionel Lindsay’s claim that Arthur Streeton’s ‘faculty could only be acquired by years spent outdoors; it is no studio art of sauces and tricks’ marks the Australian artist’s studio as a place of dishonesty and deception. Post-Heidelberg landscapists working in the first few decades of the twentieth century, operated within the same discourse. Deep yearning for the bush, even when stuck in the studio, became a characteristic preoccupation of many Australian artists. As well as representing the metaphorical wellbeing of an honest and true art, the bush was imagined as offering city artists a healthful respite from the diseased city. John Ford Paterson, working on a landscape in his extravagantly decorated city studio, was ‘oppressed by the city’ according to one unidentified clipping in the Paterson Family papers, but after a spell in the country he returned in ‘robust health.’ Not only was plein air painting described as resulting in fidelity to the landscape, the space of the outdoors itself was constructed as inherently honest in a way that the studio was not. One contributor to The Bookfellow magazine thought that the worst types of artists were those who sat inside ‘excogitating landscapes from studio consciousness instead of going forth and grappling with nature’, or, as a writer in The Bulletin put it, those who ‘never venture out from the sanctuary of their well-appointed studios, and paint colourful scenery that was never on land or sea. But there is a great army of artists and writers who get out into the rough and tumble of life and paint things as they are and not as they dream’.
Ronald Steuart proclaimed not only that he painted outdoors, but that ‘All the work I do is finished out of doors. I don’t think I’ve ever worked on a painting when I’ve brought it home’. The threat of the interior suggested more than insincerity. While Lionel Lindsay thought Will Ashton ‘always a good out-of-doors painter’, Hans Heysen went a step further. Not only was Ashton ‘essentially an out-of-doors painter’ but ‘He is unhappy in the confinement of a studio; at least, I gather this when I look at his work’. Heysen’s desire to uncover an emotional aversion to the studio suggests that the often-applied designation ‘outdoors artist’ signified more than just honest technique. In an interview with Hazel de Berg in the Library’s Oral History Collection, Ernest Philpot gives the choice of making art outside the walls of the studio an explicitly moral tone:
And if one was not making art in the divine cathedral of the outdoors, one was indeed in the mausoleum of the studio. For some, the glum depression of work made in the studio suggested death, with one writer in The Bookfellow praising an artist’s work because it was ‘not swathed in the conventional wrappings of the studio mummies that greet us year after year’. Popular medical opinion regarded interior space as inherently less healthy than the outdoors and this also affected the way artists thought about the studio. For instance, the 1919 influenza epidemic prompted the Melbourne Camera Club to introduce a temporary ban on indoor meetings among its members. The hazy science of eugenics was particularly forceful in asserting that the interior was the enemy of health—as closely linked with disease as was the overcrowded city. Sunlight and fresh air became the therapeutic remedies for the sickly interior—wholesome and natural, it was a vital component of happy and healthy living. The concern for natural studio lighting was thus more than a practical requirement of production: it suggests how artists attempted to remedy the repercussions of working indoors. If artists had originally taken up lofts because their exhausting flights of steps made them cheap, it was the joy of light that kept them up there—as an advertisement for Gayfield Shaw’s Sydney gallery in Art in Australia pointed out.
The window itself became of prime importance—by letting in light and air it could save the studio from the ills of gloom and stagnation. ‘The only time I can really successfully paint,’ claimed Stephen Earle in his interview with Hazel de Berg, ‘is during summer because then I can have the doors at both ends of my studio open and the window open, and there’s a complete feeling of freedom. It’s not as though I was in a room, it’s as though I were out on a platform with the wind blowing’. To block out the light was clearly an appalling prospect for Lionel Lindsay, who proudly announced that his studio windows were ‘guiltless of curtains’. Even worse than the fixed and impure ‘half-tone light of the studio’, was the artificial light from the electric bulb. Lloyd Rees remembers with some contempt a still-life being set up ‘under the inevitable electric light’ in the studio of one Meldrum-school artist. Of another disciple of Meldrum’s scientific tonalism, a critic observed ‘because of the conditions in his studio, Archibald Colquhoun’s portraits are somewhat nakedly lit with the sort of uncompromising illumination favoured by passport photographers’. Finding that he did not have time to enter a lucrative landscape painting prize, Ernest Buckmaster installed a 500-watt Phillips ‘daylight’ lamp in his studio so that he could work in the evening. He won the £500 award, and later recalled with some satisfaction that a friend exclaimed ‘Look at the sunlight!’ upon seeing the work. One suspects Buckmaster would not have been so quick to reveal his dazzling deception at the time—his anecdote, recalled in an interview with Hazel de Berg, reveals an awareness that his method was a serious transgression. If sunlight was endangered by the naturally lit studio, then the electric light signified a distance so far from the outdoors that it represented profound artistic dishonesty. As work places for artists, Australian city studios were routinely positioned in opposition to the exemplars of pastoralism and the bush. While ALEX TAYLOR works at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image at Federation Square in Melbourne. His research as a Norman McCann Summer Scholar will become part of a forthcoming book. |
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