Richard Flanagan on the paintings of Richard Wastell

Text of speech delivered by Richard Flanagan on Thursday 07 October 2004, at the opening of Land that I love, an exhibition of paintings by Richard Wastell, held at the Depot Gallery, 2 Danks Street, Waterloo, Sydney, NSW 201.  Exhibition dates: 04 to 16 October 2004.

Oratory doesn’t have to be interesting to be arresting.

I was with the media caravan following John Howard last week and though there for a major broadsheet to capture telling detail, I must confess that during an interminably long campaign launch speech in Brisbane by the man of steel, perhaps more accurately described as the orator of stone, I was unable to prevent myself from dozing off. I awoke to discover that $6 billion had been spent during my catnap.

Lamentably, the speech I am about to make will be the only one heard in recent weeks which will be unrelieved by the promise of some hundreds of millions of dollars. For that I ask your indulgence, and instead of undecipherable policy, I offer you instead a very short story about Richard Wastell’s life.

It is an unusual story; in its single minded purpose it is possible to detect an unnerving trajectory.

Perhaps from his childhood he gained a sense that life is not about pursuing bourgeois careers, as some contemporary artists erroneously think it is, but about living it on your own terms.

He went to art school, graduated, but then, unlike so many other young contemporary Australian artists, he did something which in today’s art world is seen as deeply unusual.

He went and painted.

He didn’t bother with art school sinecures or the provincial politics of the local art world. He didn’t hang about playing the game of chasing post graduate scholarships or seeking grants.

Instead, to support himself, he spent several years stacking Woolworths shelves of a night, and then of a day, he painted.

It wasn’t easy. I remember how poor he was, and yet rather than seeing it as a burden, it was for him a necessary freedom, because everyday he got to paint and he got to paint how he wanted to paint, not the way it might be deemed necessary to paint by those dispensing patronage.

I once offered Richard a very old car I had. It wasn’t much of a car I admit, but Richard didn’t want it. He didn’t want it because it would cost him money to run it, and earning the extra money to run it would cost him time he could be painting.

Devoted to painting as he is, courageous he might be, naïve he is not. He seems to have absorbed the great traditions of Australian landscape painting both whitefella and blackfella, and arrived in the best of the paintings here at something new.

And that originality seems to be connected with a determination to achieve that most simple of things, that most difficult of things: a transparency between his soul and his images, uncluttered by fashion or ideology.

Paintings, art, so much of what ought to matter to us is these days spoken of in terms of ideas. There is much thought in these paintings, but what ultimately gives them their power is that they are so deeply felt: there is rage, humour, serenity, and finally a huge love.

I am here tonight to launch this exhibition because, to be truthful, I was moved almost to tears when I first saw these paintings in Richard Wastell’s studio two months ago.

For the first time I saw in paintings a Tasmania I recognised as my own; a Tasmania as wounded, as dreamlike, and, ultimately, as undivineable as these images.

Here, for the first time I saw reflected its intense passion and the mesmerising hold it has over its people. Here for the first time was truthfully revealed the exquisite colour of Tasmania; and here for the first time was an extraordinary attempt to depict the tragedy, the hope and the possibility of this island that broke with the past.

The word landscapes seems wrong for these paintings. The word landscape arrives in English culture along with pickled herrings from Holland, near the end of the 16^th century. It derives from the Dutch word landschap and suggests an idea of viewing the world from a watchtower, evoking a static vista that is controlled by human aesthetics. It is a grand artistic tradition, but these paintings seem to me to evoke something different: a land that flows in and out of people, that shapes them as much as they shape it.

In Richard’s paintings, land, plants, trees, people, fish are constantly moving in and out of each other. He has a gift for communicating what is rarely communicable in painting: the dynamic nature of our land; the way when we are within it, it moves around us and through us, passes in and out of us.

Thus the painter and fish and forest all merge in High country plateau. Moss, bark, me where the painter’s coat has become at once a salmon skin and burnt out tree trunk.

There are things Richard Wastell has achieved in these paintings that no painter of Tasmania before him has: not least that extraordinary, inescapable sense one has when in the Tasmanian bush of the land constantly metamorphosing. In World that I Love, Autumn Camp, Penstock Lagoon, the lichen of silver wattle have taken flight from their trees and float through the land, mottling it with the mystery of a natural world that can never be contained.

A seemingly realistic depiction of Tasmanian alpine snowgum forest, in Last Night I Dreamed an Island Gentle, becomes at once dreamlike and yet more real in its carpeting of the forest floor in the patterning that etch and score rocks in such places. This is as much a spirit world as a natural world, and its accurate rendering is only possible by someone who has spent his life in it.

I don’t want to portray Richard as having some sort of mystical relationship with the land. Far from it. His pleasures and understanding are far more earthy and precise, grounded in daily life, as very clearly depicted in Joy Looks Like This, a painting of a caught trout dangling in the painters camp, framed by Woods Lake beyond it.

Growing up in a working class family in Tasmania, Richard Wastell’s two great passions from the earliest age were painting and the bush. Like many poor Tasmanian families the Wastells took their holidays not on the Gold Coast or mainland resorts, but camping and fishing in the Tasmanian highlands.

Yesterday Richard’s dad dropped by my home.

We chatted a while, and as he was leaving, he said:

He always did come from the one place and he always will.

What place is that? I asked.

The bush, said his Dad looking at me as if I was a fool, where else would it be?

Where else, indeed?

But in Tasmania, that place cuts to the heart of everything that one is, personally, politically, artistically.

Tasmania is a society where a cabal of a woodchipping monopoly, Gunns, with a history of corruption, and a curiousily craven state government are clearfelling, napalming and poisoning vast tracts of globally unique forests at record levels. It is a place where any crime can be committed in the name of logging profits and no action taken: most recently an official cover up of the wholesale accidental poisoning of a community that appears linked to a spate of inexplicable cancers.

He lives in a state where a culture of fear has been inculcated over recent years so that these crimes not be named; where blackballing and intimidation take place, where it is very clearly understood by all that art, like art in old eastern European states, is vigorously used by the government and its various arts bodies to promote the government line and deny the truth, and where any artists and writers who question the status quo are attacked in parliament and pilloried in the media as traitors and declared by the premier as not welcome in Tasmania.

I mention this, because I want to you know that in the Tasmania Richard lives in, it is not a good thing for a young artist’s career to paint clearfells. These then are brave paintings in every sense, and it is undeniable that the pained political circumstances of art and artists in Tasmania informs both their elegiac essence and their mute rage, and gives them an urgency absent from so much other contemporary Australian art.

The sense both of a union profound and a rupture terrible with the natural world, is clearly seen in the haunting What smote the mountains from the stars and left man a poor,snivelling root outside of himself?—a line incidentally from a poem of another artist concerned with the growing abyss between man and the natural world, William Blake—where the painter’s coat of bark shapes itself around a vanished human body.

It is perhaps this painting which acts as the hinge in this exhibition joining the forest paintings with the clearfell paintings, depicting the aftermath of clearfelling and napalming of the great regnant forests of the Styx Valley, and joins all the paintings with the painter.

In Valley of Love, his quadtych of a Styx valley clearfell, the world has become a place where nothing any longer moves, where not only the forest and all its myriad creatures has vanished, but the power of the land in all its metamorphosing wonder has also been destroyed. In the distance the lower half of the mushroom cloud that the napalm bombings throw up rises into the sky.

These vistas are the Passchendales of our time; a point not lost on Richard Wastell who titles the clearfell painting of  four charred man fern trunks Goodbye to All That, a conscious reference to Robert Graves great anti-First World War book of the same title. They demonstrate how nothing can be more new and unsettling, than a determination to be true to what you see.

Good art rarely arises from pure emotions and as any one with a passing familiarity with the world of art will attest, the biggest bastards often make the best art. But not always and not in this case. Whether of trout or snowgums or clearfells, these are pictures of love made by a much loved and loving man, who has distilled this most difficult emotion into his paintings.

Often when you see some paintings that you like, the truth is that the artist may do different work in the future but you know that they are unlikely to do anything that much better. Remarkable as these works on display here are, the most extraordinary thing about them for me is the sense that they are only a beginning, the beginning of what I happily predict will be a most auspicious and original career in Australian art.

Richard Flanagan
October 2004

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