Artist Profile, Ian Robertson: A love of painting en plein air, global travels and regular volunteering at the Bundanon homestead provide Ian with an abundance of inspiration. You will find Ian in his open studio this Saturday 26 July 11am-2pm in Sanctuary Point as part of the monthly Jervis Bay Arts Trail.
Painter Ian Robertson likes to gather most of his source inspiration from weekly sessions of the Shoalhaven Plein Air Group, organised by Mark Rayment. “Normally I take an oil painting or a canvas out and just paint onto that direct and try to get as much down as I can in an hour and a half, two hours and then bring it home and work on it from photographs that I’ve taken on site.”
The group tends to gravitate towards the grand vistas of the South Coast. Ian says: “It’s the broad space landscapes that we go to rather than the more intimate ones. I love that light gradation from horizon down to the close up, that really impresses me. It always has, that idea of looking into a space and the light taking you into the space.”
Ian spends more time “out there” than at home in his office/ studio, because its undisturbed, dedicated time. As well as his plein air painting, Ian uses sketchbooks and visual diaries, which act to fix experiences in his memory. “When I’m out on my own just traveling, I’ve always got a little sketchbook with me. Some of my sketches are about immediacy, what’s in front of me right then, and others have broad landscapes.
“When I was doing the camping trip through Namibia, there was much more time to sit down and sketch but when I look back to things like Ireland when I was sitting in the passenger seat there’s a lot of roadways winding through hills and fence lines.”
Outside of the Shoalhaven, Ian says Paris was one place that stands out for him, with many streetscapes and architectural sketches in his books. But closer to home he says, “if, say, you’re down at St George’s Basin in amongst the she-oaks, it’s the shades and lights and variations of texture and a mottled bark on the trees.”
Volunteer Guide at Bundanon
Now retired from teaching primary school, Ian is a regular volunteer at Bundanon, in particular at the Homestead which houses an extensive art collection, much of it from members of the Boyd family. Ian guides visitors around, talking to them about the history of the homestead and works currently on show from the vast collection.
He mentions the view from the verandah towards the expansive paddocks that change into native bushland and the rocky outcrops above, are a constant source of inspiration. “You certainly feel that you’re in a place of inspiration, and it really is deeply moving,” Ian says of the properties. “I can be sitting on the verandah of [Arthur Boyd’s] studio, and it’s almost like he’s sitting there looking over his shoulder sometimes. Just concentrating on what you do.”
A few days after we spoke, Ian sent me a text from Bundanon: “I was standing on the river bank this morning looking at the reflection of bush sky and light in the slowly flowing water. I was pondering the question you asked me about what inspired me. The places that inspire me are where I feel deeply connected. That connection is between my history, my understanding of the location and the inherent spirit of place, the history the land has in its pores.”
Art and painting have always been an intrinsic part of Ian’s life, from childhood through to his teaching career, and then to a degree in fine art from ANU. He says, “I can remember being taught some drawing techniques when I was nine years old and then I wanted to go to art school in 1962-63 but instead I became a primary school teacher and I took art as a secondary study. I’ve always painted from that time on, so probably the last 50 to 60 years I’ve been painting on and off. But I took it up seriously when I retired.
“I went back to ANU, finished a degree course in painting. It was very inspiring, working with all those young people and their energy and their vitality and their risk taking, where they could just step beyond the boundaries of what people said you ‘should’ do and create their own images and forms. It certainly stretched me, it took me right away from representational painting and to exploring abstraction.”
Becoming a Picture Book Illustrator
Ian was invited to illustrate several picture books with Canberra-based writer Barbie Robinson, who met Ian as he was graduating from ANU. Barbie says, “I loved his work immediately and I happened to be running a gallery, so I was able to offer him an exhibition.
“I immediately not only loved his work but loved who he was. When I came to doing the books, I was looking for an artist who I knew could capture that kind of old-fashioned, Enid Blyton storybook look, someone who worked with materials on paper, not digitally, and who was also sensitive to human beings and sensitive to the stories I was telling.”
Barbie says Ian instantly understood her stories, which are “about human kindness, resilience, overcoming challenges and treating one another in the best possible way”.
“He told the visual story perfectly, and not just as a series of illustrations, but as a visual story that stood up in its own right. That to me is what’s really important about picture books… It’s a story that’s accessible to people who cannot access the words, and it tells its own story as well through the person who is drawing, interpreting my words, and putting their own story into them,” Barbie says.
The books are available online, including Phoenix & Ralph, which reflects climate disasters like the Canberra firestorm of 2003 and the Australia-wide fires of the summer of 2019-2020, and Charles the Gallery Dog, a heart-warming story of friendship and courage in the face of unexpected change, both $24.95.
Barbie owns one of Ian’s works, from an exhibition of paintings of Weereewa Lake George at the gallery she was managing. She explains that Ian “laid the canvases on the bed, which was dry at the time, of the lake and did the first painting actually on the lake. So you feel he was breathing up the country that he was sitting on and painting and observing. In that particular painting I have in my living room captures those clouds as they float across Weereewa Lake George. You can see that he was sitting on the land and drawing inspiration from it not just because he’s captured something which is observably there but because he’s captured the sense of this ancient place.”
A Move to Abstraction
Ian says it was a visit to Mungo National Park in far west NSW, where some of the oldest human remains ever found in Australia were uncovered, as well as Mutawintji National Park and to Lake Liaga that provided the impetus for that stretch.
He explains, “To see there had been continuous operation of that site for 40,000 to 50,000 years and … the fact that contemporary Indigenous people living there today have some connection to the places [where] they found footprints in the geological record there that they could trace back to some phenomenal age in thousands of years and contemporary Aboriginal people identified with the spots where that small travelling group had stopped and said, oh, they’re still yarning places, we still talk about those.
“That connection of being able to put something on a surface which represented that whole history and understanding of where we come from and connection to country was what I was working on.”
Ian mentions Waanyi artist Judy Watson, who sometimes spreads earth pigments on her canvases and overwrites another part of her story in finer lines connected to her land and culture, and artist/scientist John Wolseley who dragged surfaces through charred bushlands after fire.
“It was a fascinating journey following that through,” Ian says, “and also into the pathway of forgotten language, realising how significant loss of language is, because it was so important for people to get the full depth of understanding of their country, of themselves, their relation to each other.”
Ian says he is conscious of questioning his place. “I’d always felt a bit awkward because I didn’t have that connection to country. My connection to country started with the generation before me, who were immigrants from Scotland. I’m very aware of my status as a settler, a colonial background.
The Friday plein air group often meets at locations where they acknowledge the traditional cultures, such as Coolangatta near Shoalhaven Heads, which in the Dharawal language, is derived from the word “Cullunghutti”, which translates to “beautiful place” or “splendid view”.
“I like the realisation that I’m sitting there, on land that’s never been ceded, and I’m just trying to pick out some small part of the spirit of that place.”
On the Arts Trail
While Ian does most of his painting out in the landscape, he has transformed his garage in Sanctuary Point into a personal gallery, lining the walls with paintings that track his path as an artist from finishing art school to the present day. He says looking at his work in this way, presented for visitors along the Jervis Bay Arts Trail, has been “an interesting pathway to tread on again.
“Someone described to me once that, as a creative, you work on a rubber band, you’re always going back to a base level. I went into art school connected to what I was looking at and that sense of the sublime that the artist is somebody looking into the landscape and realising the awe that it inspires. I keep going back to that, no matter what other form it takes,” Ian says.
“I feel that inspiration through the skies or when working on Collingwood Beach, that’s really satisfactory to me so I can see those themes are still in my paintings from right in the beginning to what I’m doing now.”
Visit the open studios of the Jervis Bay Arts Trail this Saturday 26 July from 11am till 2pm, and every last Saturday of the month. Find locations of the artists and a map on their website.
