Our November-January issue of aAR focuses on the resilient impulse to paint landscape - even as our relationship with it changes. Indeed, we might call it ‘the new arcadia’ for the richness and imagination with which a number of painters have imbued it.

In Landscape and Memory, art historian Simon Schama reminds us that the word ‘landscape’ entered the English language “… along with herring and bleached linen, as a Dutch import at the end of the sixteenth century … like its German root, Landschaft, it signified a unit of human occupation … as much as anything that might be a pleasing object of depiction”. This interpretation is not out of place when we cast an eye over landscape painting in Australia - an activity which we might like to consider as a form of subliminal habitation.

A response to landscape has been with us from the first. From the imagery of Indigenous art on stone and bark and the earliest colonial topographies produced by naval crews trained in watercolour rendering, to today’s narrative and abstract canvases. It invariably embodies the stylistic imperatives of the artist - that is to say, the flourishes which enable us to associate the work with a particular painter.

The plein air (outdoor) paintings of the late 1800s, often referred to as Australian impressionism because brushstrokes were visible and outlines blurred, were often more bound to narrative than their French counterparts, who frequently explored colour for its own effects. Later in the 1920s and 1930s, post-impressionist ideas received from artists’ travels freed the brown/green, yellow/blue palettes of traditional landscape painting and would give us the rainbow colours of Roland Wakelin and Grace Cossington Smith - to name just two. By the 1940s, other narratives, centred on the harsh outback, appeared in the garnet/tandoori palette of Russell Drysdale, and a harsher palette again would dominate the numerous inland and ‘drought’ series produced by Sidney Nolan.

Landscape did not become scaffolding for abstract excursions until the late 1950s and early 1960s, when a number of painters such as Leonard Hessing and Frank Hodgkinson arrived at semi-abstract canvases with textured surfaces that lent themselves overwhelmingly to a landscape metaphor. Elwyn Lynn became the best known and most consistent exponent of texture to embody a desiccated landscape. By 1960, John Olsen’s works darted and meandered playfully, while Ray Crooke’s hinted at a kind of South Pacific arcadia. Surprisingly, the world-famous New York art critic Clement Greenberg was much taken with Ray Crooke’s works, to the consternation of the local gestural abstractionists.

The Australian landscape is an untidy and unfinished one - not readily framed. It lends itself to open-ended compositions and abstract patterns with surprising ease. One might also venture to observe that there are two kinds of landscape painters in Australia - wet landscape painters and dry landscape painters. Elioth Gruner was wet, Russell Drysdale was dry. Fred Williams was dry but got wetter as he went along. William Robinson is humid, Abram Louis Buvelot was dry - even dusty - and so on. Wet landscapes are evocative of fertility, growth, perhaps prosperity. Dry landscapes evoke desiccation, hopelessness and decay. Drysdale’s outback paintings were often a visual repository of ennui and disappointments bravely borne.

A number of our landscape painters have actually infiltrated perceptions of our landscape and prod a sense of recognition. Dewy lilac dawns on the south coast put one in mind of Elioth Gruner’s dairy farm canvases, while the sinuous balding hills around south coastal Gerringong are Lloyd Rees’s domain. The undulations of the ‘You Yangs’ in Victoria were fixed by Fred Williams, and when white gums lurch out at us along Victorian coastal roads, we think of Nolan’s scrubbed Ripolin compositions.

In this issue, we feature Australian contemporary landscape painters and one who paints the domestication of nature. Each has a highly individual style. We also look at a remarkable offering, Making nature: Masters of European Landscape Art, curated by Jane Messenger from the Art Gallery of South Australia and accompanied by a handsome hardcover publication of the same name. Lastly, as this issue spans the holiday period and many of our readers will be on the move, aAR features a listing of regional galleries and a holiday quiz with a prize which encourages adults and young ones to visit them.