Wonderful Wizards of Aus

It was one of those journeys that probably never would have happened if the participants had known beforehand how long and difficult the path ahead would be: five years and more than 30,000 miles by air, water, and road to document Down Under’s greatest living painters. The result, nothing short of stunning, is Studio: Australian Painters on the Nature of Creativity, a book that reveals the incredible scope of Aussie ingenuity as well as the determination of photographer and publisher Ian Lloyd and writer John McDonald.

“The idea came out of me wanting to explore my new environment,” says Lloyd, a Canadian photojournalist who moved to Sydney in 2002 with his Australian-born wife. “I kept running into artists on other stories I was doing around Australia, and I began to think about how geography affects their art and how they came to create in so many different landscapes.”

Lloyd drafted McDonald, art critic for the Sydney Morning Herald, to the project and then set about the almost impossible task of figuring out who should (and shouldn’t) be included in the book. As part of the process, he consulted curators at six leading public art galleries in Australia, asking them to list 60 painters whom they thought worthy of inclusion. Lloyd and McDonald eventually decided on 61 painters spread across the length and breadth of the world’s smallest continent. And thus began their seemingly endless all-terrain travel. “The book doesn’t really show what John and I went through to produce the words and photos,” says Lloyd. More driving than one could ever imagine. Hours of flying in small planes. And lots of hanging around, sometimes for days at a time in the middle of nowhere, waiting for an artist to come in from a walkabout or for the right conditions to snap a portrait.

“A lot of the public thinks artists are a bunch of wankers who don’t really do anything,” says Lloyd. “But in doing this book, I found out that the successful ones work harder than you or I: 14 hours a day, seven days a week. They put in a huge amount of time and spend it in a little room that the critic Robert Hughes has called ‘Imagination’s Cave.’ They may get their inspiration from outside—the outback or the shore or whatever—but all the work is done inside these little boxes scattered all around Australia.”

Lloyd very much feels that the Down Under environment affects artists whether they realize it or not. “Even people who paint abstract will say they were inspired by the landscape,” he says. “Australia is unlike any other place on earth. The scenery and nature really impact everyone. In America”—where Lloyd studied photography—“landscape is a place to pave over or make into a park. But in Australia you can’t conquer it. You have to live with the landscape and understand it.”

Or, in the case of so many Aussie artists, simply paint it. Five of them appear on the following pages, culled from the 61 who made it into the book, because they had an especially compelling story to tell, about their art and themselves.

GLORIA PETYARRE /Alice Springs, Northern Territory
Petyarre is the most renowned of the Utopia artists, although the place she hails from—dusty, fly-ridden Utopia Station, a desert community more than 300 miles beyond Alice Springs—is anything but nirvana. Petyarre started out 30 years ago as a batik artist, eventually graduating to acrylic on canvas, and she has etched a reputation as one of the grand masters of Aboriginal abstract painting. McDonald says that her paintings often generate powerful optical effects: “One thinks of the wind sweeping through long grass,” he says, “or perhaps some great cosmic effect in the heavens.”

Petyarre’s images are steeped in local landscapes and traditions, incorporating anything from living things such as the yam and the emu to the designs that Aboriginal women paint on their bodies for traditional ceremonies. Like many indigenous artists, she goes to Alice Springs to work at “painting sheds” operated by local art dealers—hers is called the Mbantua Gallery. Clad in multihued, flecked, and patterned outfits that often resemble her art-work, Petyarre spends hours sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of a large canvas, working on another desert masterpiece, carefully rendering her feathery dots.