Glacier. S. H. Ervin Gallery.  I8 November – 14 December.

Then & Now. King Street Gallery on William. 18 November – 13 December 

Review by Anthony Frater. Arts Wednesday.

There are two exhibitions on now at different galleries featuring the work of one this country’s most gifted painters in the Romantic style; actually he isn’t Australian but is in fact a Kiwi but he moved to Sydney in 1981 where he now lives and works. 

I’m talking about Euan Macleod (b.1956), whose exhibition called, Then and Now, is on at King Street Gallery on William. As the title implies it features works from the last 30 years or so, mostly Australian Landscape paintings. And if that’s not enough, and it never is, there is also a collection of recent works being exhibited at the S. H. Irvin Gallery. Entitled, Glacier, it’s a dramatic series of large scale paintings depicting his recent journeys to Haupapa Tasman Glacier in New Zealand’s South Island.

Euan has an impressive list of achievements: he has been a serial finalist in the Archibald, Wynn and Sulman prizes, winning the Archibald in 1999, and the Sulman in 2001. In 2006 he won The Blake Prize for Religious Art, The Gallipoli Art Prize in 2009, and in 2021 he won the Dobell Drawing Prize.

In 1979 he received a Diploma of Fine Arts (Painting) from the Ilam School of Fine Arts, Canterbury University, New Zealand. He also teaches at the National Art School in Sydney. He has held more than 50 solo exhibitions in Australia and Internationally, he has been included in countless group shows, and his work is held in many public and private collections both here and overseas.

Best known for his epic landscape works, when we see one it’s relatively easy to identify them as quintessentially his: his trademark painterly style, his recurring motifs and his subject matter makes them unmistakable. He applies broad expressive swathes of either acrylic or oil pigments to his chosen surface with at times a brush, other times a spatula or even a scraper. He isn’t one to apply his paint delicately or carefully or slowly, or painstakingly, no, as he says he “stabs” the paint into the canvas; he moves almost like a symphonic master conductor in that his working style is for want of a better word aggressive, but mostly his painterly application is expressive and more often than not he builds up the layers to a rich powerful impasto. 

Like all the great landscape artists he paints en plein air in order to immerse himself in his chosen environment, meditate upon his subject, get a sense of belonging or conversely, otherness: symbiotic on the one hand, alien on the other. He often finishes the painting in the studio, therefore memory plays a big part in the completion of the work so that in retrospect and hindsight the work becomes more layered in terms of interpretation and meaning: a selective remnant becomes a romantic ideal, or, turning what seemed negative at the time but now in the relative comfort of the studio and on reflection is turned into a glowing positive. Perhaps to the die-hard romantic this will thus make it more true to life because, like life, there is the obvious but there is always also an imperceptible other, or in this case, a romantic ideal.

But one wonders how can these rough, rugged, awe inspiring works be romantic? Prevalent in the late 18th to 19th centuries Romanticism was a reaction to the rationalism and logic of The Enlightenment and the subsequent orderliness of the Neo Classical style in visual art. Despite what they might have in common (ideal rather than real; concepts of nobility, grandeur and virtue) Romanticism was nonetheless the antithesis particularly of the Neo Classical style. It was a revolt against conservatism and moderation, but an insistence on the dream or imagination in artistic expression. Think masters from the past such as Blake, Turner, Delacroix, Gericault or Freidrich.

Looking at his paintings, particularly his recent Glacier paintings, one feels a sense of vertigo as we ponder the overwhelming grandeur of his massive mountain landscapes. Its frightening jagged peeks, an alpine wildernesses, walls of ice and vast rocky vertical drop-offs.

His work invariably values the experience of the individual and these works are no exception for they do indeed feature a lone male figure at times dwarfed by his own shadow, or is it a ghost, perhaps an alter ego – wild, exotic, or mysterious; gallant and confident yet vulnerable and insecure, uneasy, looking to find safety; a romantic hero pitting himself against a hostile environment but at no time coming to terms with it even though he strives and believes he will. It’s an ideal, a dream, an aspiration, rather than something actual.

And further, his figures seem at one with his daunting landscapes. Macleod exaggerates this idea by painting the figure as if made of ice, or fire, or rock. The viewer is only left to consider the relationship between the landscape and the figure, is it autobiographical, or more likely we imagine ourselves through the figure in these vast awesome wildernesses. But despite the challenges, trials and tribulations we are able to survive, we believe, we climb the mountain, build a fire in the midst of the ice and snow – the romance inherent to prevail against all odds. 

Let’s end it there, there is always so much more, but If you can’t make both exhibitions either is worth seeing, but Glacier at the S.H. Ervin is an exhibition of new works never before seen all together in the one gallery – a must see really for all, but particularly lovers of the Romantic style and of course fans and admirers of Euan Macleod.