An artist regards a group of her own works differently from a viewer who comes to it fresh and unawares. The artist brings layers of experience with her: of technical struggles or triumphs with particular canvases, yes, but of moods, thoughts and events that coincided with their creation, too. For the artist, compartmentalisation may be achieved for as long as it takes to get a show together; but looking at a body of work some months on, something apparently tangential may seem to bear strongly upon it, float up and fix in the artist’s mind as fundamental to it.
Looking at these tempestuous skyscapes of hers, Amanda Penrose Hart thinks of dragonflies.
From the beginning of 2023, Amanda inhabited a house in Duffys Forest, Sydney that teeters above a timbered gully. Over summer, she observed the acrobatic insects, hovering, darting in and out of her space. She noted facts about them. She felt grateful to them for eating mosquitoes. She thought it was pretty funny that when they mate they make a heart shape. With their long tail sections they reminded her of the gliders she flew in her twenties, watching the horizon rise and tilt. Juveniles are wingless, and she thought of senior painters she knows, making their freest works late in their journey through life and art. Reading Tennyson’s poem about a dragonfly – a living flash of light – she fixed on the idea that an inner impulse would rend the veil of one’s old husk. She wanted that, as an artist. The little creatures kept her company until they disappeared around winter.
The paintings she worked on in the studio amidst the dragonflies were conceived in the open air. On the way to full realisation, they transformed from views of specific places into evocations of atmosphere. The clouds throughout are carefully placed, compositions forming and reforming on the canvas. While she made clouds from paint, Amanda thought about how real clouds enhance our lives, providing rain and shade, holding heat into the surface of the earth. As she painted permanent clouds, striving to evoke presence and immateriality at the same time, she thought about the changeability of real clouds, and of people. She thought about the inseparability of people and their so-called surroundings; we are never ‘out in the elements’, we comprise the elements ourselves. As she worked to bring the painted air, water and earth in her pictures into harmony within the confines of the canvas, she brooded on the idea of the yield point – the point of stress at which the structure cannot hold and deformation occurs, the catastrophic point of giving way.
Ah the insistent poetry of the language of weather, the words we use for clouds. The terms and phrases float across the brain, cirrus cumulonimbus stratus fractus; mackerel sky. Clouds roll in, they pile up, they scud, they sweep across the land, they billow, they are rent by currents. They loom, mass, threaten, they are fluffy or lowering. They conjure up creamy curds; cushiony puffs; streamers, wispy and ragged. Clouds are hard edged or blurred; sitting separate from sky, merging with it at a place that can’t be pointed to. Are they white, pearly, fringed with brilliance? They throw shadows on the land and water, turning it sulky and murky. But they enfold shadows, too; clean greys, dirty yellows, oyster pink and streaky mustard. And when the sun breaks through! Through torn holes of blue sky, light turns cracks and sheets of water glittering silver and gold.
Amanda caught her breath as she watched the dragonflies change levels in the hot air. She recalled her exhilaration as her glider dipped and soared and the horizon moved up and down. In her long career, grounded and analytical, she has allocated radically different ratios of canvas to sea, earth and sky. In many of these paintings the superb drama of the sky dominates the landscapes below. The hills, columnar trees, twigs, dry branches, ponds and rivulets anchor the skies in the pictures.
You cannot catch a cloud no matter how much you would like to. Yet in the end, the opposition of solid land and ephemeral, elusive cloud is not so great. In the flowering of scientific enquiry of the Victorian age, it hit home to philosophers that mountains, deserts and coastlines shift and transfigure over aeons. Seventeen years after he immortalised a dragonfly, in 1850 Tennyson reflected
The hills are shadows, and they flow
From form to form, and nothing stands;
They melt like mist, the solid lands,
Like clouds they shape themselves and go.
In paintings there is stillness. Looking at these ones, Amanda Penrose Hart sees herself looking for peace. As a painter and a person she says now
I want to go lightly yesterday today and tomorrow I want to go lightly as a meadowhawk.
Dr Sarah Engledow (former Senior Curator at National Portrait Gallery Canberra).
