Our Animals. By Lucy Culliton and Anna Culliton. Beaver Galleries, 81 Denison Street, Deakin. Until November 27.
Lucy Culliton – working on the Monaro – joins a large group of mainly women artists who not only paint the animals that surround them, but are passionate about the animals that they paint. One needs only to think of Deborah Williams and Rona Green.
The great George Stubbs, the foremost animal painter in Britain in the 18th century, famously titled the paintings of a kangaroo and a dingo, which had been commissioned by Joseph Banks, as portraits. They were exhibited as A Portrait of the Kongouro from New Holland, and Portrait of a Large Dog, both painted in 1772. In some postmodernist drivel, arguments have been advanced that Stubbs was attempting some sort of subliminal self-portrait. In fact, it was not an unusual convention in 18th and 19th century animal painting to try to capture precise characteristics of specific animals and animal portraiture was regarded as a respected art form.
Lucy Culliton works within this tradition and produces portraits, rather than representations of the animals that surround her. She does not paint generic images of dogs, sheep, cattle or chooks, but portraits of specific animals, some with strongly expressed personalities. Invariably there is a degree of anthropomorphism in many of her representations, whether it be the forlorn greyhound in the masterful painting Mayday, a call to arms to save the animals under threat in NSW; the characterful sheep Kenny Wayne, Sophie and Lachlan Darling; or the bovine group portrait Pushy, Brocky and Bison.
Lucy Culliton was trained at the National Art School and, as with several of her peers, she is a gutsy figurative expressionist painter with a strong romantic predisposition. As is the case with impulsive painting, much depends on the freshness of inspiration, the emotive brushwork and the immediacy of touch. At best, these oil paintings convey the excitement of the moment, when forms morph into recognisable units and there is a prevailing freshness in the paint surface. More than occasionally the moment of inspiration is lost and the whole thing lands in a bit of a heap.
This 50-year-old painter has tasted some success, winning the Portia Geach Memorial Award in 2006, the portrait prize for women artists, and has become a regular in the Archibald circus of prizes. She reminds me of Nicholas Harding and Wendy Sharpe, but is yet to achieve their level of sophistication and consistency.
Anna Culliton is Lucy's younger sister and is a self-taught potter who specialises in funk ceramics and works in a home studio west of the Blue Mountains. If Merric Boyd, Australia's pioneering studio potter, allowed the local flora and fauna to creep into his work and to organically blend into his forms, Anna Culliton's pots run riot with possums and bandicoots as they start to inhabit the offerings of the garden. It is difficult not to be delighted by a piece such as Flora and Fauna with its glazed fecundity of polychrome offerings.
Compositionally the work is a little clunky with the stoneware props not always harmoniously related to the crowning inhabitants, but the variety of surfaces and richness of detail make these pieces a delight for the eye and are guaranteed to bring a smile to anyone in search of a slice of Australiana.
The Culliton sisters in their art celebrate the pleasures of rural Australia and, with compassion, depict both the indigenous and non-indigenous animal inhabitants.