ARTIST Dee Jones lives at Port Willunga, drawn there by the beach, the sea, and the stunning McLaren Vale vistas. For the past half century she has painted the orderly landscapes of the farms, the almond and olive groves, and vineyards framed by the hills on one side, the sea on the other. Her paintings, naive in style, always include the farmers.
"The best landscapers are farmers," she says. "They somehow, unconsciously perhaps, arrange the landscape in those lovely patches and squares and oblongs, to produce really beautiful patterns. And McLaren Vale, because it is in a vale, has the background of the hills, and it's just got everything so far as I am concerned. It's visually very, very beautiful."
Dee Jones grew up on a vineyard and almond grove when you could still find such farms in today's suburban Oaklands. She moved to McLaren Vale after her marriage to the local chemist. But much of her childhood was spent at Port Willunga. Her uncle, hotelier Ralph Parsons, owned the big house overlooking the beach, and she would go fishing there with her father and grandfather.
As children, she and her cousins knew the famous artists who lived and painted there, like Ivor Hele, Horace Trennerry and Kathleen Sauerbier, but through their eyes they were just eccentric old people. "We as little kids used to think Horace Trennerry was an old drunk," she says. "We didn't know he was sick (with Huntington's Chorea)." She remembers him living still in "old Mrs Polkinghorne's house", the stand-alone house on the southern side of the beach that is today preserved as a ruin. It features in some of Trennerry's most evocative paintings.
Kathleen Sauerbier lived on the Old Port Road, and the kids were amazed to see her one day pruning the ivy wearing nothing but a towel around her waist. Dee's cousin Ralph breathlessly reported being witness to a huge argument between Sauerbier and Trennerry when his mother Lorna asked him to drop something off from their kitchen. Young Ralph confided he had learned some new swear words.
Fisherman Bill Howe would sit on the cliff watching for fish and call down to his sons Geoff and Kevin when he saw a school. Dee remembers the sea turning pink with blood as the Howes gutted a net full of salmon trout, with two sharks lolling in the water nearby. That was the same Geoff Howe, she says, who posed nude riding his horse bare-back along the beach for Ivor Hele.
Landscape artists have been deeply attracted to the Fleurieu since Colonel William Light first painted it, but the McLaren Vale region has had a particular attraction, and within that region, Port Willunga has been like a lure, a muse, if you like, of the artist's focus. Instantly recognisable landscapes of South Australia are the misty gums of the Adelaide Hills, the rugged purples of the Flinders Ranges, and the McLaren Vale: undulating straight dirt roads through farm country and the beaches and parapets of Port Willunga.
The early modernists like Sauerbier and Trennerry used it to define their painting styles in the 1920s, Ivor Hele used it for its muscular textures, and a new generation took over when they left off. Dee Jones was deliberately naive, Geoff Wilson and the late David Dallwitz took to it with their flat formalistic palette, while David Dridan, Brian Seidel, Hugo Shaw and many others were constantly drawn there.
Artist, caricaturist and art teacher Hugo Shaw remembers the primitive Port Willunga of the 1940s, when his father Richard, the SA manager of Johnson and Johnson, first started renting a local cottage. "We had an ice chest, drip safe, no electricity, and a chip heater shower," he recalls. He has spent much of his life there since the age of six. "I knew Ivor Hele very well. John Dowie painted there, and Anton Riebe. I don't know what it is but when you are there and you look at the colours and dirt and the clay and the rocks and the sand and the sea and it's always changing and moving, with this huge sky, and it's part of you as a person growing up. But it has more than that. It looks easy to paint and draw but it's blindingly difficult I find. I must have painted the jetty 200 times but every time I go back it is more difficult than the time before." He would meet Hele once a month, after drawing studies of himself in the mirror, and Hele would correct and advise him in the academic manner. "He actually just taught me to see, in simple terms."
Port Willunga was a kind of epicentre for a landscape art movement that extended across McLaren Vale and down the Fleurieu Peninsula. Heysen painted along the Bluff at Victor Harbor, and Dorrit Black painted along the western side of the peninsula. Robert Hannaford paints there still. Artists Geoff Wilson and Dave Dallwitz became familiar figures in the McLaren Vale landscape in the 1970s. They could be found painting en plein air in the time-honoured fashion, where artists stand at their easel and paint the landscape before them. Wilson, now in his '80s, paints on.
"In 1949 ... I caught the Briscoe's bus down to Aldinga. I had rented a room at the Aldinga Hotel and then (fellow artist) Brian Seidel came down and joined me and we used to walk down Old Port Road to Port Willunga." No one had a car at that stage, although by the early '50s, Seidel had the ice truck from his Glenelg ice round; perfect for carrying artist's gear. "I think once you got to the top of Tapleys Hill after that, it all seemed to be rolling farm country with hamlets like Reynella and Morphett Vale. There was no suburban development at all. Someone said it was the only landscape they had ever seen where golden wheatfields hit the shore against the blue sea."
Those pristine landscapes that Wilson remembers from the 1940s are long gone, but he hopes the area will interest rising new generations of artists.
The Fleurieu Art Prize, which opened last night, is the world's richest landscape art prize, and a celebration of a long history of landscape art in the region. Its $50,000 main prize, and $10,000 associated prizes are supported by wineries and other businesses in the region. Wineries like Wirra Wirra, Hardy's, d'Arenberg, Fox Creek and Chapel Hill are hosting exhibitions until December 5.
The main prize is to be announced on November 12 at Hardy's Tintara Winery. Details at artprize.com.au
by: Tim Lloyd
From: The Advertiser
November 05, 2011 12:05AM
