She Oak and Sunlight – Australian Impressionist Art
We visited the NGV Ian Potter building yesterday to view the “She Oak and Sunlight” exhibition which features 250 artworks by Australian artists (sprinkled with a few Europeans). She Oak and Sunlight is a small 30x30cm 1889 oil painting by Tom Roberts that I believe is a very good choice to name the exhibition after. For me the golden dry summer grass contrasted against the blue summer sky evokes the hot Australian days that have been part of my life for almost 7 decades. When I was a kid I would often go up to visit my Mum’s family in Shepparton. I was aptly called “the city slicker”. What I saw back then were long country roads, railway tracks surrounded by sleepers and rocks, paddocks and dams, rivers and there was always heat. Somehow the images painted by the 19th century Australian artists evoke memories and perceptions that I had back then.
I’m not certain what it is about the Australian Impressionists that appeals to me. Maybe it’s simply familiarity. Maybe it’s my fascination with how the locations looked only 150 years ago. Maybe it’s the visual history of Europeans in Australia and the simple fact that my grandmother was born around the same time as these artists were painting or that it somehow ties in the boom in Victoria in the late 1800s when the suburban railway lines proliferated and the inner city dwellers were able to explore the outer reaches of Melbourne. Maybe it is simply a pride that this school of art originated in Melbourne and is called The Heidelberg School of Art. Or maybe it’s just a mix of all of these things. I certainly don’t have the same response to European Impressionism.
