A Hard Rock Artist in Australia
Monday, May 12th, 2008Painting The Wonders of Australia
By: Phoenix Arrien
While I was visiting Central Australia, I met two amazing women, painters who spend part of each year, painting the glorious colours of the Outback. In a two-part series, here are their stories:
The paint dries on the brush even before hitting the canvas. At the height of summer heat baking central Australia, two unique international artists are seen at work in the Mulgara Gallery, surrounded by brilliant splashes of colour on swathes of textiles and palettes layered with of globs of colours that are an artist’s creed.
Based in Yulara, the tiny town near Uluru, it’s an artistic pilgrimage for Elisabeth (Liz) Sherras Clark and Helga Muschinski who faithfully return each year to see, absorb, paint and learn, interpreting the unique colours and textures, light and forms of the desert life and unique monuments of the arid landscapes.
Liz sees herself as a botanical illustrator and bird painter, painting the diverse wealth of flora and fauna around Uluru on canvas. She divides her time between a village in southern England and Australia, with Uluru being the highlight of her stay. “The rock is magnificent, as it stands over the flat landscape, its colour forever changing with the hours and weather,” she explains of her attraction to the area.
“I try to capture the brilliant stars and hanging clouds as well as the desert winds and plants, even the dry spinifex, using mixed mediums of water-based paint, dye and wax.” Visitors to the Mulgara gallery, to view its fascinating collection of hand-crafted glassware, pottery, textiles, metal and leather, stop and watch Liz work.
There is symmetry and form in her paintings, clarifying and transforming the mass of shapes, light and colour reflecting in the outside environment. Her pictures asks you to consider a tree’s bark in all its different colours, to watch a grass tree grow from the red soil and spiky leaves against an almost invisible sky or follow the changes Uluru presents as the day’s light waxes and wanes or the weather throws itself against the ageless faces of the rock.
Near Liz, works Helga Muschinksi who, painting on silk, responds to the organic forms of the desert environment. Helga’s work complements Liz’s during this annual pilgrimage to Uluru by bringing the irresistible textures of silks to the coarseness of the desert. Draped over frames, flattened on tables, bunched, hanging and wrapped, the smooth luxurious material beckons one to touch and in relation to Helga’s silks, to gaze.
Here are the animals one glimpsed before they scuttled away or the landscapes just travelled through. Here is the life and souls of the desert, ready to be picked up and worn, taken away and remembered. All the crazy reds and brilliant oranges; the yellows blazing through the greens and contrasting with the eggshell blues or stormy greys.
Across the materials fly cockatoos and galahs, a lizard grins from a rock, the sun shining on scaly skin; flowers, previously lost in the plethora of abstract desert forms, find a moment to shine on a scarf. Circles, lines and bold silhouettes capture the ruggedness of the desert and the way the environment - hot, intense and raw - grabs your attention. The silk paintings do the same thing, they are statements rather than backdrops, and they demand and hold the gaze instead of just existing quietly. One’s neck will never quite be the same again.
Helga uses the forms around the ‘Rock’ as the highlight of her year’s work. “I have spent the greater part of my life in Australia but I am still in a state of original surprise and wonder at the landscape, in particular the flora and fauna.” Both women are part of the monthly resident artists’ program at Mulgara Gallery, housed within the Ayer’s Rock Resort.
The resort is built using innovative artistic and architectural forms and is also a home for a number of plants and animals, so the women do not have to go far (though they often do). “I am constantly amazed at the insect life at Yulara. It is as if the resort is a magic carpet which had landed on an insect metropolis,” explains Liz.
Tomorrow: art forays into the desert
