Landscapes define identity
DAVID Usher is a Toowoomba based artist whose practice combines ceramics and painting.
He is currently head of ceramics in the School of Creative Arts at the University of Southern Queensland.
Usher’s paintings show landscape as a primal entity as well as a discrete environment.
In his ceramic vessels, linear details of foliage translate to decorative surfaces that clasp the shapes of bowls and vases to create a dialogue between form and function.
For Usher, the landscape nurtures and defines identity.
Trees and landform, shadow and light, shape location to assume a distinctive sense of place. But in Usher’s paintings landscapes are not pretty views.
They challenge the traditional genre that has informed Australian painting since our early artists tried to capture the exotic difference of an Antipodean Arcadia.
The depiction of the landscape has had a fascinating history.
When did clumps of earth, rock, and vegetation become a “landscape”?
When did snippets of representation turn into a landscape painting?
What is this desire to depict nature, to anchor it in time and space, and give it a degree of permanence?
Perhaps it is because we yearn to find in nature some solace for our own mortality.
Usher’s paintings certainly raise questions, but the answers may lie in our responses to his images and the personal symbolism that landscape holds for us.
Topography becomes familiar, reassuring, a safe haven that we defend and revere as ‘homeland’.
Landscape and its markers carry associations of myth, magic, metaphor, and allegory.
The tree of life, the river of destiny, the sacred mountain, and the forest of uncertainty are but a few legendary examples that carry cultural and spiritual significance.
Usher’s works interweave all these cues to deciphering environmental imagery, but they are not pictures of any single place, they are more landscapes of the mind capturing the experience of travelling through the countryside and recording mood and emotion.
Some are quick grabs of trees and leaves seen flashing past the car’s windows.
They are glimpses imprinted in the fleeting moment and remain as memories held in time.
The changes in scale and colour, the ambiguous spatial relationships, soft edges, and diffused details reflect the artist’s evolving perceptions of the familiar.
In Usher’s works there is little evidence of human incursion.
The intervention of the artist is reduced to minimal gestures of broad, loose brush strokes.
Swatches of colour patch the surfaces, holding the viewer at bay while also beckoning them towards an equivocal and illusionary space.
Usher is the mediator between what is seen and how it is expressed.
The genius loci, the elusive spirit of place, becomes predator and seducer in an earthly garden that is both sanctuary and battlefield.
David Usher is represented by the Alexandra Lawson Gallery, Toowoomba.