In April last year I travelled to Gallipoli with a group of artists from Australia and New Zealand, following in Lambert’s footsteps. The landscape was still strikingly beautiful, even though its most severe features had mellowed over time. The Sphinx, for instance, which appears as a rocky outcrop in early paintings and photographs, was badly eroded but instantly recognisable.
The bones of the fallen that lay scattered across the peninsular are now concealed by layers of earth, yet the sheer scale of the slaughter means that even today one may uncover fragments of skeletons and other pitiful remnants of the soldiers who lost their lives – and their identities – in the confrontation. A comprehensive archaeological dig would unearth tonnes of material, but who would propose such a project? The memories are still too raw. The peninsular is a vast graveyard and it would be considered obscene and sacrilegious to treat the dead as museum specimens rather than war heroes.
We crossed these battlefields trying to imagine what it must have been like, 98 years ago, as soldiers struggled to traverse a narrow strip of land, bayonets poised, without a bullet in their rifles. Most were killed by machine gun fire from a distant hill that struck them from the side while they faced a line of Turkish defenders. Although the grass has grown back over the muddy earth, the landscape bears scars that will remain for many hundreds of years. Even in the midday sunshine it is impregnated with death. The new vegetation seems like a cheerful mask intended to disguise the funereal nature of these hills and slopes.
For the artists on last year’s Gallipoli trip, the plan was to work en plein air, looking for new ways to paint that blood-soaked landscape. It wasn’t an easy assignment, partly because it is very hard to improve on the work that [war artist George] Lambert did, but mainly because everyone knew the historical importance of this site. Was one permitted to make it look pristine and bucolic, even if that was the first impression one took from many parts of the peninsula?
The three New Zealand-based artists, Michael Shepherd, John Walsh and Stanley Palmer, showed a deep concern with history, in works populated with the ghostly figures of soldiers. Guy Maestri, who struggled to find his rhythm on the trip, has produced a striking series of symbolic still life paintings, incorporating skulls, dead birds and wattle branches.
Deirdre Bean, known as a botanical artist, was never expected to paint conventional landscapes. Instead, she concentrated on the minutiae of the battlefields, picking out flowers and insects, and eventually discarded bullets.
The other artists – Steve Lopes, Euan Macleod, Idris Murphy, Michael Nock, Amanda Penrose Hart, Luke Sciberras, and Jonathan Throsby – stuck gamely to the landscape, although their approaches were predictably diverse. Sciberras and Throsby embraced forms of abstraction, albeit with obvious roots in the physical world. Lopes, Nock and Penrose Hart took a more naturalistic course.
Macleod and Murphy, arguably the most experienced artist-travellers in the group, also created the most individualistic work. Murphy’s landscapes, whether of Gallipoli or the Australian bush, are never purely observational. He reduces the features of each scene to a series of crudely drawn signs; his colours are chosen for their emotional resonance. Murphy has produced a set of introverted pictures that make no concessions to the picture postcard views we encountered, and no overt references to the battles fought. Yet they skillfully capture the atmosphere and ambiguity of those sites.
ANU Drill Hall Gallery
10 April to 17 May, 2015
Canberra
S.H. Ervin Gallery
17 April to 24 May, 2015
Sydney
artistprofile.com.au/yourfriendtheenemy
Euan Macleod, Above Ari Burnu, 2014, oil on acrylic on polyester, 84 x 120cm
Courtesy the artist, Watters Gallery, Sydney, and Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
