DRAWING Carolyn Fitzpatrick

DR AWING C A R O LY N FI T Z PAT R I C K

Published 2021 © Carolyn Fitzpatrick 2021 ISBN: 978-0-646-83601-0 Catalogue essay: Peter Haynes, Curator, Writer, Art Historian and Heritage Advisor Design: 2B.com.au, ACT All artworks © Carolyn Fitzpatrick. www.facebook.com/CarolynFitzpatrickAustralianArtist All rights reserved. Apart from any fair dealing permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopied, recorded or otherwise, without permission in writing from the publisher Front cover image:

Image right:

After rain (1–4) (detail), 2019 inks, wax, pastel, watercolour/watercolour paper 41 x 29cm (ea.)

The big dry, 2009 inks, wax, watercolour, pastels/watercolour paper 153 x 110cm

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Walking home, 2018 inks, wax, pastel, watercolour/ watercolour paper 153 x 110cm Photo credit: Andrew Sikorski

DR AWING Drawing in the 21st-Century has grasped the potentialities and flexibilities incipient from the 1960s when artists began in earnest to question and push the accepted distinctions between mediums. Drawing as something not subsidiary to other mediums (chiefly painting and sculpture), came into its own as an independent medium of artistic expression. Drawing can no longer be limited to any single element and its multifaceted and various iterations give it a fluid dynamism and vitality that mark it as a hallmark of contemporary visual arts practice. Drawing’s ability to embrace and encompass a multiplicity of expressive creative media imbues it with a democratic and universal aesthetic. Its resistance to rigid definition gives it contemporary relevance and hence its particular popularity among artists and art consumers. Drawing’s potential for transformation is inherent in its (modern) history. Its invocation of the processes of the artistic imagination however remains integral. This, in combination with the simultaneous articulation (through multifarious guises) of modes of thinking and observation, maintains drawing’s aesthetic edge.

Drawing’s flexibility allows it to embrace various guises and continue to recognise, incorporate and celebrate its history and the essential relevance and ongoing authenticity of the role of mark-making.

The use of the mark is traditionally associated with the visualisation of the processes of seeing and looking and of the transference of these onto a surface (usually paper). The mark is seen as an immediate expression of the creative process – unfettered, unadulterated, personal. It is the result of the elision of the seeing eye and the seeing and thinking hand filtered through the artist’s observational and imaginative strategies. Carolyn Fitzpatrick wholeheartedly embraces the continuing validity of the mark as her essential expressive tool. For her it enables a direct transference of her own sense of union and harmony with the natural world to be conveyed to her viewers.

The following discussions look at a selection of Fitzpatrick’s works from 2009 to 2020. It is clear from the works examined that for the artist the meaning of the work lies in its making. This does not mean that subject-matter is not important. On the contrary the landscapes depicted are regularly sought and (often) repeatedly visited. Her experiences of place are integral to, and integrated with her modes of making. One informs the other and each exists as equal partner in the visualisation of the artist’s real and concomitant imaginative encounters with place.

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After rain (1–4), 2019 inks, wax, pastel, watercolour/ watercolour paper 41 x 29cm (ea.)

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Lake Mulwala, 2018 inks, wax, pastel, watercolour/watercolour paper 110 x 153cm Photo credit: Andrew Sikorski D R AW I N G C A R O LY N F I T Z PAT R I C K

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Barmedman Creek, 2019 inks, wax, pastel, watercolour/watercolour paper 110 x 153cm Photo credit: Andrew Sikorski

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The big dry (2009) is a commanding image of a parched rural landscape. The hilly environment’s faded ochre palette captures the dryness that results from long periods of drought. The hills move back into the pictorial space in a rhythmical composition of layered, recessive folds, visually broken by the sere band of sky across the top of the picture plane. The underlying ochre of the hills is populated by sharply contrasting groups of trees that are placed variously around and through the landscape. The verticals of the trunks allied with the organic bunching of their foliage and the essentially black colouration add tonal density and formal variety to the mass of the background hills. The viewer is moved through the pictorial space in ways not unlike those in traditional Chinese landscapes; directed by the diagonal placement of the various stands and groups through the recessive planes formed by the alignment of the hills. The contrasts of the limited palette imbue this powerful image with a starkness that speaks of the harsh realities of drought in the Australian bush.

A series of small landscapes from 2015 – Bungendore landscapes 1–4 – demonstrates the artist’s ability to capture through very limited means (ink and wax) the varieties of surface textures and topographies that give identity to individual aspects of the landscape. Fitzpatrick’s use of line while seemingly free and spontaneous, holds a sureness that provides structural integrity to each of the four works. The limited palette and intimate scale here offers not just pictorial contrast but invests each image with atmospheric warmth and intimation of the solace Fitzpatrick finds in her direct experience with nature.

Walking home (2018) exemplifies the artist’s physical closeness with her subject. Her wanderings through environments known to her allow her to discern those qualities that give essence to place.

Here the scraggy trees and other foliage that characterise the Australian bush are exemplary not only of the insistent materiality of nature but also of the poetry innate in the landscape. The artist’s clever insertion of the beginning of a path through the bush quietly places the viewer as active participant in this beautifully evocative image.

The use of a path (here a road) as a means of moving the viewer into and through a work is powerfully introduced in Tracing history (2018). This very graphic image, full of spare contrasts, stark geometries and empty space, offers a pictorially simple yet thematically dramatic vision. The trees bereft of any foliage reach up into the empty space of the sky. The trees’ blackness gives them a striking presence that captures that strange and sometimes savage beauty that is so often a characteristic of our idiosyncratic

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landscapes. A similar feeling of loneliness and isolation is seen in Lake Mulwala (2018) where a very different environment shows the ravages of our climate. Using a low viewpoint and a light pastel palette Fitzpatrick shows a desiccated topography with leafless trees pushing back deep into the horizon in a flattened recessional movement that envelops the picture plane, broken only by the distinct white band of the sky.

After rain 1–4 (2019) is a series that takes as its motif different views of tree trunks after rain.

The singularity of each image sees trunk as living surface with the vestiges of nature’s markings forming the focus of the artist’s investigations. The grey-white of the trunk is activated by streaks of maroon red that flow like traces of blood down the crisp verticality of the trunks. There is an incipient anthropomorphism in the trunks’ resemblance to a human torso, reinforced by the presence of arm‑like branches. The dark background underscores the prominence of the centrally-placed trunks and adds a clear dose of three‑dimensionality to these mysteriously seductive images.

Barmedman Creek (2019) presents another view of a landscape experiencing the devastating effects of drought. The central creek, its bed populated with blackened branches and marked by a surface pockmarked by the lack of water, moves through the picture plane in a diminishing curve.

It is lined on either side by trees whose drooping branches echo the serpentine movement of the bed. The ubiquitous presence of gum trees with sprouting foliage alludes to the cyclical nature of our environment, a reference cleverly and subtly stressed by the contiguous appearance by the glaringly empty creek and the scattered black branches dispersed throughout the overall image. Fitzpatrick’s use of black both as outline and as form is astute and nuanced and indicative of her control of her expressive means.

Towards the Murrumbidgee (2019) is a sumptuous and embracing image. The viewer is introduced to the sweeping vista by a band of ochre brown grasses that are at the very front of the bottom edge of the picture plane. This provides both visual and conceptual stop before we are dropped into the deep space of the background hills and valleys. The anthropomorphising that is present in much of the artist’s work is seen here in the generous gestural sweeps she uses to delineate the various topographical entities that make up this landscape. The vista is broad both laterally and perspectivally, but circumscribed by a nuanced spatial configuration that binds the composition together.

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Bungendore landscape 1, 2015 inks and wax on watercolour paper 270x270cm

Bungendore landscape 2, 2015 inks and wax on watercolour paper 270x270cm

Bungendore landscape 3, 2015 inks and wax on watercolour paper 270x270cm

Bungendore landscape 4, 2015 inks and wax on watercolour paper 270x270cm

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Towards the Murrumbidgee, 2019 inks, wax, pastel, watercolour/watercolour paper 110 x 153cm Photo credit: Andrew Sikorski

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On the way home 1 and 2 (2020) are beautiful atmospheric meditations on the poetic confluence of light, landscape and place. The subtle variations of light and their play on the elements of a landscape are imbued with a lyrical sense of ambiguity and mystery that illustrates the artist’s subjective experience of landscape while simultaneously opening that experience to her viewers. .

The final works under discussion are all from late 2020 and speak of the regenerative powers of nature.

We have seen these exemplified before in the artist’s work but in these Regeneration works they are imbued with a singular pictorial authority that is striking in its immediacy and directness. While these qualities are foremost there are also present intimations of the subjective character of the artist’s response to the ferns etcetera that constitute her subject-matter and the emblematic properties ascribed to them in her visual articulations of that response. The power of nature to renew in the most catastrophic of circumstances is embodied in these works. This is particularly evident in Regeneration, Cabbage tree palm, Mount Agony Road, Regeneration Tree fern, South Coast, and Regeneration, Xanthorrhoea, South Coast. The monumentality of the individual motifs so beautifully captured, coexists with an intimacy that illustrates Fitzpatrick’s especial relationship that she establishes with the landscapes that constitute her peripatetic practice.

Drawing for Carolyn Fitzpatrick is part of a continuum not only within her practice but as part of the wider art world. It is the necessary tool for her to express her deep connection with the natural world, with landscapes visited and revisited, with places that establish continuity with us and our world and which demand expressive and imaginative response from the artist.

Peter Haynes Canberra February 2021

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On the way home 1, 2020 charcoal, spray pigment/watercolour paper 29 x 39cm

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Regeneration. Xanthorrhoea, South Coast, 2020 charcoal, pastels/ watercolour paper 100 x 70cm Photo credit: Andrew Sikorski D R AW I N G C A R O LY N F I T Z PAT R I C K

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Regeneration. Cabbage tree palm, Mount Agony Road, 2020 charcoal, pastels/ watercolour paper 130 x 78cm

Regeneration. Tree ferns, South Coast, 2020 charcoal, pastels/watercolour paper 75 x 60cm

Photo credit: Andrew Sikorski

Photo credit: Andrew Sikorski

Regeneration. Tree fern frond, South Coast, 2020 charcoal, pastels/watercolour paper 75 x 60cm

Regeneration. Tree fern, South Coast, 2020 charcoal, pastel/watercolour paper 95 x 77cm

Photo credit: Andrew Sikorski

Photo credit: Andrew Sikorski

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Jan Brown for the inspirational teaching that has informed my drawing for decades and for being my mentor and friend.

Thanks to Strathnairn Arts for their work hosting this exhibition and to Peter Haynes for his curatorial expertise.

Thanks especially to my life partner, Martin, who has been endlessly encouraging and supportive particularly in my foolhardy endeavors to travel out into the landscape to make large scale drawings on paper.

Tracing history, 2018 charcoal/paper 74 x 110cm Photo credit: Andrew Sikorski

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