JEREMY ECCLES profiles a remarkable painter whose lyrical landscape-inspired watercolours are now celebrated in a long overdue retrospective.

More than 80 years after he began painting, 60 years after his first solo show in Brisbane, and 40 years after his death, Kenneth Macqueen is at last being recognised by the Queensland Art Gallery.


[Kenneth Macqueen, The tank, c. 1950, watercolour and pencil on paper, 38 x 48.5cm. Courtesy Queensland Art Gallery.]

"It seems to me that it is not sufficient just to express oneself without first having something of interest and worthwhile to express; and second, expressing it with style."

If only a few artists today lived by the firm philosophy of Macqueen, the remarkable farmer/watercolourist who saw nothing wrong in painting over and over again the Darling Downs landscapes in which he lived and worked for almost 40 years. Of course there was progress too - both in the landscapes that he and his brother Jack were creating through ring-barking the Millmerran brigalow and cactoblasting prickly pear; later contour ploughing to stop erosion and preserving 40 acres of the once-hated trees; and in Macqueen's art.


[Kenneth Macqueen, Contour ploughing, c. 1945, watercolour with gouache over pencil on paper, 39 x 47.4cm. Courtesy Queensland Art Gallery.]

But there was no sense of change for the sake of art fashion. When Macqueen's career from 1922 until his death in 1960 was last celebrated by the University of Queensland in 1981, curator Stephen Rainbird noted the Thoreau quote in the artist's notebook: "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears".

And Kenneth Macqueen heard loud and clear the rhythms of nature, saw its patterns, and felt "in his bones" a spirituality that was not unlike Aboriginal relations to country - or "a primitive people with their amazingly complex tribal laws", as he put it himself in his delightful 1948 self-portrait, Adventure in Watercolour. But he was also, always a farmer, happy to have that income that allowed him to paint just what he wanted (and his brother to amass a 6000 beetle collection that ended up with the CSIRO), even if milking the cows or ploughing the sorghum paddocks had to take precedence.


[Kenneth Macqueen, Under the casuarinas, Maroochydore, c. 1938, watercolour over pencil on wove paper, 39.2 x 46.3cm. Courtesy Queensland Art Gallery.]

In 1926, the almost untutored painter, who had snatched a few months at the Slade in London after his demob from the First World War, presented work described as "laboured" by Rainbird at the Sydney show, A Group of Modern Painters beside such luminaries as George Lambert, Margaret Preston, Grace Cossington-Smith and Roy de Maistre. Even though Macqueen kept showing with Sydney Society of Artists from 1922 to 1957, he tends to appear in books - though not in James Gleeson's Modern Painters 1931/70 or the Queensland Art Gallery's own Brought to Light 1850/1965 - simply as a name at the end of a list.

Which has lead more recent enthusiasts such as Rainbird, Tim Bonyhady (in The Ploughman's View) and the curator of the imminent QAG exhibition, Samantha Littley, to hail in him a modernism that emerged in the late 1920s, boldly simplifying his landscapes, then adding an anthropomorphism to works such as Stranded Tree Trunk (c1936), suggesting a surrealist influence, and finally allowing a criss-cross of wheat stalks that almost dissolves into abstraction in the 1959 work, Wheat Motif.


[Kenneth Macqueen, Stranded tree trunk, c. 1936, watercolour over pencil on paper, 39.8 x 46.7cm. Courtesy Queensland Art Gallery.]

Kenneth Macqueen's grand-daughter, Susy, is not quite so sure. Having been brought up on the Milmerran property surrounded by the late artist's work, she believes that "he and his art revelled in isolation as the only way to retain close links to the land. And he couldn't have done that if he was pre-occupied with being a modernist. He was certainly conscious of contemporary art movements through magazines; but he simply wanted to persist with his watercolours, even when they fell out of vogue. I'm sure that was one reason he admired Namatjira so much, writing that he was 'telling us something new, something the European mind could only sense, not express'."

Perhaps we need to go back to the known influences on Macqueen: Constable at Flatford - especially in the cloud paintings the National Gallery brought us a year or so ago; Macqueen was surely his match in Cumulus, and van Gogh, Labouring under a blazing sun at Arles. Taking influence the other way, Macqueen must have spoken intimately to that other Queensland farmer/painter, Bill Robinson in a work like Bringing in the Cows. Samantha Littley goes further, "Evening by the Creek has a pool with reflections offering a distorted perspective of the world revolving around the water which simply has to have been part of Robinson's consciousness in his finest work. No wonder we believe Kenneth Macqueen has a great deal of significance for Queensland".


[Kenneth Macqueen, Flying cloud, c. 1950, watercolour on paper, 38 x 47.7cm. Courtesy Queensland Art Gallery.]

Making it Modern: The Watercolours of Kenneth Macqueen runs at the Queensland Art Gallery from 10 November until 5 May 2008.