Away from his bestselling tropical paintings, Ray Crooke is an inspired observer of Australia's still, eerie landscapes.
ART HISTORY IS a Sargasso Sea, littered with the remains of those who showed promise but not perseverance. On the other hand, there are artists such as Ray Crooke (born 1922), who has demonstrated such patience, industry and application for more than 50 years that he is forcing a radical re-evaluation of his place in Australian art.
This might give heart to any neglected painter, yet most artists are neglected for the best possible reason - because their work is no good. Crooke is a different proposition. He doesn't rate a mention in the two most recent short histories of Australian art, by Christopher Allen in 1997 and Andrew Sayers in 2001, but he has never been ignored by the market. In fact, he is one of the all-time best-sellers.
The problem was that, for more than two decades, Crooke appeared to settle into a comfortable holding pattern, producing painting after painting of islanders in villages in Fiji or the Torres Strait. The palm trees, the thatched huts, the sun, the sea, the fruit and flowers were roughly similar from one work to the next. Crooke became everyman's Gauguin, giving us glimpses of a tropical paradise where generic, dark-skinned figures lived lives of apparent indolence and calm.
This is a slight caricature, but there is no denying that these paintings were repetitive, and largely decorative. They sold - and continue to sell - to collectors who looked for nothing more than a handsome ornament for the lounge room wall. They are escapist images with no pretensions to challenge or disturb. They are easy to like, but also easy to dismiss.
Yet, amid this profusion of lush, tropical pictures, one occasionally came across a tiny landscape from the 1960s in an auction or a group exhibition that showed a miraculous feel for the light and colour of the Australian bush. When, in 1997, Sue Smith put together the travelling retrospective North of Capricorn: The Art of Ray Crooke, it was suddenly apparent to viewers such as me, who were more familiar with his later work, that Crooke was an artist with an original and distinctive vision. When so many of his peers were experimenting with different forms of abstraction in the 1960s, Crooke painted some of his most lyrical views of the Australian landscape. In both style and subject he was working in a manner that was contrary to the spirit of the times. Or, to put another complexion upon it, anchored in Far North Queensland he was beyond the reach of fashion and all the anxieties and pressures it generates.
If further confirmation of Crooke's talents were required, one need only look to his portrait of the novelist George Johnston, which won the Archibald Prize in 1969. This picture, which now can be seen in the National Portrait Gallery at Canberra, is one of the most powerful portraits ever painted in this country. "Haunted" is the only word to describe the look on Johnston's face, and that feeling is emphasised by the great, misty envelope of gloom in which Crooke encloses his subject. The writer's sensitivity and intelligence seem to be shot through with pain.
So it was a great pleasure this week to view Encounters with Country: Landscapes of Ray Crooke at the S.H.Ervin Gallery, and an accompanying survey at Savill Galleries in Paddington. The S.H.Ervin show has been selected by freelance curator Gavin Wilson on behalf of Cairns Regional Gallery. The Cairns gallery is a little more than 10 years old and has benefited from Crooke's input as both a trustee and a donor of major works. He is the senior artist of Far North Queensland, and has been friendly with all the painters who have spent time in the region, including Ian Fairweather, Russell Drysdale, Donald Friend and Margaret Olley. He has also had a close relationship with the indigenous communities. No artist could have been a more appropriate choice for a 10th anniversary show.
Crooke was born at Auburn, on the outskirts of Melbourne, but found his spiritual heartland in the tropical north when he was posted there as a soldier in 1942. He had already been studying art at Swinburne Tech when World War II broke out and he resumed those studies in 1946. During the war years he had been shunted around the country, from Melbourne to Perth, to Cape York, and finally to Tarakan in Borneo, when the fighting had finished. Every war entails a huge amount of sitting around, waiting for something to happen, and Crooke used that time to study a range of different landscapes, to read the classics and to familiarise himself with the history of art and music. He also attended a party at Drysdale's house in Sydney and saw the great man's studio.
Crooke began exhibiting his work in 1948 while he was still at Swinburne. Like Arthur Boyd and John Perceval, he was fascinated by Breughel's paintings of peasant life, but more by his handling of the landscape than the human drama. The pale, dry landscapes Crooke produced in those years have affinities with Boyd's Wimmera pictures, but the touch is very different. Paintings such as North East Victoria (c1950) have a painstaking, semi-naive atmosphere, far removed from the fluency of Boyd's work.
Little by little, Crooke's pictures grow more sophisticated, as he learns from experience, yet they never become slick or formulaic. One of the curiosities of the Savill exhibition is Still Life, Norwood, Melbourne (1949), reputedly the first picture Crooke painted entirely in oils. The work has its charms, but the colours and handling seem incredibly crude when compared with the paintings of even a few years later.
By 1951, when Crooke and his wife, June, left Victoria to begin their long residence in the tropics, he had evolved into a highly original landscape artist. Every element in a picture has been carefully considered and his control of tone is masterful. By the early 1960s, he was creating works imbued with an extraordinary poetry of place.
The bulk of this exhibition is made up of paintings from Far North Queensland, along with some pictures of the Hamersley Range in Western Australia, and the fruits of a residency at Hill End, at the end of 2003. From start to finish, one sees Crooke as an astute observer of light and landscape. He is sensitive to the unique features of every environment and responds accordingly. There is probably nothing better than the works completed in the old mining towns of Normanton and Chillagoe on Cape York Peninsula. These paintings, mainly from the early to mid 1960s, have a sense of melancholy that reflects the bruised and battered nature of the region, scarred with gullies and hillocks, covered in ramshackle dwellings.
In a painting such as Sunrise Albion Hotel Normanton (1962), Crooke looks out from the shadowy interior of the local guest house, while the first rays of the sun bathe the town in a golden light. He returned to this form of composition from time to time, creating a dramatic frame for the landscape.
Yet his paintings of low-key, humdrum views, as in Normanton, North Queensland (1962), are perhaps even more impressive. The pale, slightly dirty sky and the undulating brown gullies in the foreground, criss-crossed by withered black plants, create an atmosphere seemingly charged with eeriness and expectation.
In some paintings, such as Early light, Deighton River crossing (c1970), Crooke has used a strong blue under-painting and this gives the finished work a strange tonality. Over time, the blueness has insinuated itself into every other colour, making it feel as though we are looking at these pictures through blue-tinted sunglasses. This creates a mysterious ambience, but is so insistent it actually becomes distracting.
More successful is the large painting Sandstone escarpment, Laura, Cape York (1990-96). This work is drenched in the bright light of day, but the details of the sparse, nondescript bushes have been so subtly blurred and fuzzed that one's eye is never allowed to settle.
To imagine the same escarpment painted by a Romantic artist such as Eugene Von Guerard is toenvisage it transformed into a sublime panorama. Crooke's approach, however, is one of understatement. He flattens out the contrasts in a way that is faithful to the glaring light and invites us to concentrate on details. The small, straggly trees have a spectral quality, as if they are mirages. The vegetation is shaded with the same ochre as the earth itself.
As with Crooke's best works, it exemplifies a quintessential aspect of Australian landscape painting - how a view may be devoid of drama and movement, but completely compelling.