Luke Sciberras

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Landscape painting is futile in the same way that a drawing of water is futile. Catch the light. Grasp the fluidity. Race the foam. But when the stroke is made the water has already dissolved into itself, refusing possession. And so it is with a mountain. Mutable in the trail of a cloud’s shadow, subtle even in the broadest glare of daylight, apparently silent but speaking a language you are not invited to learn; something as solid as a  mountain range can never be ‘taken’ whole. The earth can’t really be framed. Some part of that vista will always stretch well beyond the reach of the eye, the lens or the canvas. And so, we love the myth of the painter pitted against the mountain. I imagine Cezanne carving into the hard knuckled profile of Mont Saint Victoire over and over or Williams dissolving into his blurred Dandenong horizons in a thousand variations on a single screaming hot summer’s day. And eventually the task implodes on itself. Cezanne’s mountain gives birth to Cubism and Williams develops an intimate spacious short hand something like jazz.  
 
The best landscape paintings force themselves back into the abstract and the best painters develop their own hand.  They have to. Landscape ‘noted’ is so different to landscape ‘felt’. When Hans Heysen painted the gums of the Flinder’s Ranges his trees looked like the fleshy torsos of society portraits; faithfully polished, respectably erect, duly noted, but a little dull. And so, the task of landscape remains a stubborn challenge, the passage through which is strewn with the skeletons of dead art forms and obsolete dreams.
 
The same initiation haunts and propels the paintings of Luke Sciberras.  Driving to the Flinders Ranges to paint with friends last year, he tasted the deception of the terrain almost immediately. From the car window at high speed the earth looked monotonous, a dehydrated scudding line, but he stopped the car. “We stopped in Wilcannia it was part of the breakthrough to the outback where the land just gets flatter and flatter. At this point the land became a completely new vocabulary to me because the landscape is drawn through like a mandala drawn on sand, with the rivers dissecting like a gigantic finger cutting back into itself, cleaving into the river, interlocking into its own very ancient logic. The land is incredibly eventful when you are in it, literally kneeling into it; feeling the sensuality and the detail. Nothing flat or uniform at all.”
 
The following weeks spent ‘sleeping, walking, working in the desert’ took the artist through an initial dislocation (the aridity, the silence) that gradually blossomed into deep connection. Sciberras’ described his immediate impression as one of “intimidation” in a land that doesn’t need you. “On the third day the silence and sense of scale and obliterated history became a part of me and I drew all day scattering the paper onto the ground around me…and the tonal transitions I encountered even within the space of half an hour were astonishing, as was the surreal paradox that a land without rain had river beds full of water worn stones.”
 
Some works on paper in this exhibit reveal that process of excavation. And more and more they are abstracted with markings that stand for nothing except light, shadow  and vibrating energy.  The gestural shapes in a the work  ‘The Raw and the Cooked’ serve to confuse and converge forms that only seem familiar: rock face and earth’s core, pebble and boulder, dead tree and seed, as the paint digs into itself with a burrowing force. And Sciberras makes it clear that there is nothing dead ‘out there’, stressing the point with every twisting mark.   “It’s an experience to see the landscape crackling and hanging in front of you and knowing that none of it has changed for hundreds of thousands of years. The ancient is the obvious monument but the process is so close and so fresh.” This is made palpable in the very frontal ‘Barrier Highway’, a work where the horizon line is dragged up so abruptly that we feel its gravitational swell like a crashing wave of earth.
 
Seizing this sense of  visceral immersion, the horizon line in many of the new compositions is hung high and cleaved right into the face of the land, generating both imposing scale and a certain tenderness of detail. The usual convention of a flat broad blue slab of sky in the most famous Australian landscape icons (from Streeton to Nolan) is compressed instead. Obliterated, muted, sliced at a diagonal. And that change in the horizon line is critical to making the land  “intimate like a portrait” and immediate. Unlike so many generic “red and orange” visions of the desert here is the dry earth tactile and sensuous, painted in a palette of sun burnt flesh tones, animal pelts and subterranean bulbs.
 
The Flinders journey forged a tonal change out of the bleached palette that had become Sciberras’ Hill End signature. In some regards the result is more violent. The flat glaze of yellow sunlight is replaced here by pierced night skies or blocked out altogether in an exploding knot of roots and stone that devour a canvas whole. The prolific nature of this show invites us into nuanced stratas of unexpected variety within a clearly arid zone. Excited and impatient, the artist’s line presses through a relentlessly dense lexicon of furrows, caves, root networks and clefts of cloud. And some of these works are exhausting in the way that a sunset is exhausting because your eye is forced to search. And keep searching.
 
And that nails the perplexing nature of landscape. Often we can barely see it because we want to see it so badly. As visual beings we come to rely on knowing where something begins and where something ends. The road. The river. Even the rain. Yet, if you have ever watched night fall over a vast terrain you might remember the moment when brilliant clarity of detail starts to disintegrate into shadow. As night stains the scene, you will find your eye racing to salvage what it can find – a branch, a bird, a clump of cliff. Standing above the earth there is some vain assumption that the senses can grasp in the whole, to own it all in one sweep. I remember watching a sunset in Leura where I tried to track to the receding line of light along the treetops in a valley where the darkness had taken root.  And my sight became worthless, reaching into a massive void and the night coming on, falling with gathering speed. In the end my gaze was forced to settle upon a single tree. And the whole mountain valley could be understood in those singular graceful lines. It is usually at this point of surrender where you realize that the beauty of a landscape does not dwell in the ‘big’ view at all but rather the vision of where the eye is forced to rest. Humbled and satisfied.
 
Sciberras admits that the interiors he traveled through of the Flinders, MacDonells and Central Australia took over a year to ferment within and take seed as paintings. Like sediment, they needed to seep into the imagination before finding their palette and their means. “The works” he stresses “do not come from an idea of the desert but a deep seated experience, a completely new geography posed the need for a new language.”  And, perhaps, a new conflict. Mountains, as we know from art history, don’t care about the painters who thrash about at their feet.  -Anna Johnson, 2009

 

The paintings here are intimately felt nuances harvested by Luke Sciberras out of a particular landscape, orchestrated into an abstract language he has made distinctly his own. Yet they recall precursors. The khaki yellows and pale greens, punctuated with grey, blue and alizaron, and indeed the very scale of the works, have a curiously loose echo of those small oil sketches made by Lambert in Palestine, the mood of which the expatriate artist hoped to continue (but didn't) back in Australia after the first world war. If only Lambert had lived long enough to witness the creative focus that moved west of the Blue Mountains through Rees in the 1930's, establishing a kind of lineage that runs through Drysdale, Strachan, Olsen and many others who have created the sense of place that is at the heart of of this exhibition.

Sciberras is still in the envious position of changing the way he travels. His talent is young. He is yet in the delicious place of promise. He may eventually go beyond Hill End and Central New South Wales where he has honed his vision thus far, or he may not. One thing is certain. Which-ever way, the works here and those which have come before, declare a natural voice that can be allowed to dictate its own path forward. Blessed is the instinct that this can happen. The poet follows a map sketched by others, yet is still an explorer, and these paintings are its indelible markers.'  - Barry Pearce  Head Curator, Australian Art, AGNSW

 

'In his expeditions through western NSW Luke Sciberras vividly renders the continually variable nature of the land. With deceptive simplicity, he conveys seasonal variations in colour, from earthy autumnal tones to the barren grey and icy blue hues of winter, along with the effects of changing light, from early morning crispness to the muted colours of dusk. The compositions seem at once structured and solid, with strong blocks of colour and confident sweeping brushstrokes, yet at the same time tremulous and ephemeral, as though the forms could transmute or dissolve. His landscapes are not fixed; instead they reveal a moment in time. His fresh images appear like a vista fleetingly snatched from a car or a train window, a temporal scene that has left a brief but indelible visual imprint.'  -Victoria Hynes, 'Galleries,' Sydney Morning Herald, August 2000

 

'It was Cyril Connolly who observed that the reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication. And so it seems in the spirited presence of Sydney painter Luke Sciberras, who, at the age of 25, has already dazzled gallery goers with his beautifully realised landscape paintings.

Sciberras is an artist with energy and drive who constantly stalks the countryside snaring desirable material in a series of quick sketches or ‘notes’. He tends to favour the central west of New South Wales, particularly the old gold mining town of Hill End that has endured as a painter’s paradise since Donald Friend and Russell Drysdale ediscovered it in 1947. They revelled in the stark upturned diggings and tough vernacular qualities of the place.

Back in the studio, the ‘notes’ executed on site act as the catalyst to re-enact that elusive moment of desire in paint. Working on small-scale square formats, the artist’s rigorous pared back imagery reveals the disciplined urgency and sure touch required to wrest an authentic image from the catalogue of memory.

Sciberras’ confident treatment of mood and tone stamp his offerings with a quality rare in someone so young.'  - Gavin Wilson, Independent Curator

 

“Sciberras paints like a steam train” - Phillip Adams

“Absolutely Delightful” - John Olsen

 

Hill End is one of the sacred sites of modern Australian art, a gold mining town whose charms only seemed to increase when the ore was gone. Donald Friend was so seduced that he bought a cottage, as did Paul Haefliger and Jean Bellette. Recently Luke Sciberras has continued the practise by becoming a Hill End resident and householder.

It says a lot for the attractions of Hill End that it can hold a personality as gregarious as Luke’s. It says something about Luke’s dedication to his art, and sense of tradition, that he would immerse himself in the life and landscape of this battered little town that provided the inspiration for some of Russell Drysdale’s most celebrated paintings.

And yet, while Sciberras is keenly aware of the artistic legacy of Hill End, his vision of the landscape is a personal one. In his paintings he portrays ravaged fields of clay beginning to meld back into the earth. He takes pleasure in the abstract patterns created by human labour and the healing powers of nature. While Sciberras’s paintings are always recognizable as landscapes, he simplifies forms, turns light and shadow into solid shapes. His works are not apocalyptic like Drysdale’s, they are lyrical, muted and understated. His paintings are not momentos of a vanished boom-town, but a celebration of a countryside returning to life.  - John McDonald 2005

Luke Sciberras

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Artist Features

Luke Sciberras talks to the ABC 7.30 Report about his work and inspiration. Includes footage at his latest opening, interviews with Luke and the artist at work.

Luke Sciberras talks to the ABC 7.30 Report about his work and inspiration. Includes footage at his latest opening, interviews with Luke and the artist at work. » more

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