Returnings home: David Keeling’s ‘Stranger’ at TMAG

/

David Keeling has been painting Tasmania’s landscapes for around 40 years. He sees an ancient land recently occupied where European settlement scars are still starkly visible. His view, and those of his Tasmanian contemporaries – I am thinking of Raymond Arnold, Tim Burns, Stephanie Tabram, Richard Wastell and Philip Wolfhagen – deny the benign bucolic of John Glover (1767–1849) and the sublime of Eugene von Guérard (1811–1901). These early colonial painters were conditioned by their histories: millennia of European landscape adaptation that revealed no memory of their lands’ first scars.

Keeling’s works have a quiet dignity, a stillness that should not be mistaken for a romantic or even a rational view of Australia’s conflicted possession. He has always shown us the reality we must face, with his work reflecting a gradually evolving relationship to place, the landscape slowly moving from object to subject. When our regard for Australia’s landscape is subjective, we value it more.

Many of Keeling’s late twentieth-century works puzzle over our relationship with nature and culture; our impact was defined by discord – with the original people, and the land. And he often looks to the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) collection in Hobart for reference. So it was timely, in his seventieth year, that TMAG recently mounted Keeling’s first retrospective, ‘Stranger’, which featured around 70 works across four gallery spaces (20 November 2020 – 14 February 2021).

In 1983, the year the Tasmanian Government was forced to stop damming the Franklin River, Keeling returned to Tasmania after studying art in Sydney. The damaged, objectified landscape was the focus of work painted during the 1980s and 1990s. In Young couple in developing landscape with panoramic views to distant hills (1988), the foregrounded dead Glover-shaped trees are ringbarked and the land is scattered with building rubble. But then in Nostalgia (1998), he refines his realisation and begins a gradual shift. He crafts a surreal scene of a man releasing (or chasing?) a bird in a pale evening sky. The work is held within a finely framed Georgian vitrine teetering on stilt-thin legs, giving the illusion of three-dimensionality. But as you look, you realise the image has flattened the vitrine of any pretence of depth or reality. The museum container promises an objective view, but Keeling is challenging that vanity.

In the early 2000s, Keeling returned home again, this time from an Australia Council-funded European trip, and you could see his focus intensifying as he got to know the landscape more intimately. The full force of his renewed interest gathered in the exhibition’s third gallery with a series of large-format works of Narawntapu National Park on Tasmania’s northern coast facing Bass Strait. The walls were steely coloured, each painting spotlit, with Keeling’s palette dappled with shadows: life-size casuarina trees golden, grey and brown. The branches are arterial, twisted and dense, pale and luminous, and yet never overwhelming. In some, the pigments have been combed, highlighting the tapestry-like weaving of the trunks and slender leaves.

Keeling never takes you beyond your environmental comfort zone; his explorations of nature are accessible to all. And while you are entranced, he delivers his counterpoint: even you, the stranger, can find Tasmania’s unique beauty and light – despite all that has happened.

Delia Nicholls, Hobart

Curated by Jane Stewart, ‘David Keeling: Stranger’ was on display at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, from 20 November 2020 until 14 February 2021.