Clifford How: Ephemeral Light

I first encountered Clifford How and his work at Pelion Hut, a bushwalking hut in the Tasmanian wilderness. Despite the chilly winter morning, I found the artist on the open veranda, sketching the fortress-like Mount Oakleigh that rises up from the buttongrass plains. He was colour-coding the field drawing using a heavy bespoke paint swatch. It was a memorable and very Tasmanian introduction to How’s work and his process.

While Ephemeral Light continues How’s explorations with colour and light, the subject location is quite different to the myrtle forests and remote mountainscapes usually associated with How’s practice. The artist has instead focussed on the area within a ten-kilometre radius of his home and studio in St Leonards – a semi-rural outlying suburb of Launceston, ringed by the flood plains of the North Esk River and Rural Hills.

Many of the works in Ephemeral Light hint at human presence through the inclusion of a powerline, fence, path or road. They could be interpreted as symbols of connection, linking one landscape or person to another. However, they’re also indications that this place is not-quite-wild, imposing boundary lines across the rolling hills. The fence in Light Simmer separates thick bush from the grassy meadow, the seeding plants in the foreground indicating a rewilding of sorts. In Place of Lingering Thoughts, a lean-to fence follows the line of an ambling creek, a human boundary echoing the natural.

As the exhibition title suggests, Ephemeral Light focusses on the transition between day and night - the moment when shadows lengthen and the hills are bathed in a dusky pink. The resulting scenes are bucolic, almost European.  Starting as field sketches and constructed tonal studies, the final oil paintings are created quickly, with the artist capturing the fleeting light through the quick, gestural application of paint.

With the North Esk River and its tributaries dominating the local landscape, the reflective qualities of water feature prominently in this exhibition. As the Day Emerged celebrates golden hour light, a slight background haze hinting at a chilly morning. Soft pink clouds are reflected in the creek, contrasting with the spindly reeds and exposed spiky branches of an adjacent bush. Trails into the Light similarly emphasises the play of light on water, the pooling tracks illuminated against the dark ground.

In Translucent, the watery foreground takes up more than half the canvas, the reflection of a background tree occupying more space than the tree itself. The play of colour in the reflection, particularly the sharp contrast between reflected vegetation and sky reveals How’s preoccupation with the representation of light. Applied with thick strokes of a palette knife, the painted reflection is abstracted when observed up close, but from afar, captures the effect of light on an ever-moving liquid surface. By contrast, the water appears more ominous in Where Rising Water Meets the Setting Sun, where the darkened watery foreground contrasts with the rays of last light on the dry rise beyond.

The challenge of painting close to home has resulted in an exhibition that celebrates an area of Tasmania that is often underacknowledged and certainly underrepresented in art. Whether it is the remote wilderness or the modified environments seen in this current body of work, How’s paintings communicate a sense of place, capturing the island landscape in its varied forms.   

– Lucy Hawthorne