ALBERT TUCKER

Albert Tucker's paintings are specially suited to a number of aspects of the Australian landscape and its flora and fauna. There are the craggy images of the Australian gothic, his explorers and pioneers as rugged as the country they traverse and seek to tame; form and colour suited to figure and topography.

But there is a further edge, a unique edge to his art, which goes beyond the atmosphere of dust and disaster and reaches into the very soul of the land and its inhabitants - of humans and animals alike. A central feature of this is his ability to introduce sound into his paintings. They capture, for example, the shrieks of parrots and shrill noises of cockatoos and translate them into paint, as in Landscape with White Cockatoos. Inspired by the Barmah Forest and its flooded forest of redgums beside the Murray River, the painting developed out of the slightly earlier, larger work, Cockatoos, Barmah, 1964 (National Australia Bank).¹ The more open composition of the latter work is now closer and denser, though they share tantalising textures. A lot of Tucker's art works on a high-pitched level. The trunks of the gums, entrenched in water, reach upwards in clamorous appeal for salvation, rhythmic gestures almost human in a typical touch of Tucker's inclination to anthropomorphism. Their contrast with the freedom of the flight of the birds is as striking as the contrast between their colours.

The sense of sound in painting is, today, probably best known in Edvard Munch's The Scream, 1893. It has, however, a tradition and practice much older and wider than that encompassed by artists of the past two centuries. A fascinating paradox at work in this and others of Tucker's paintings in which sound plays an important role is the contradictory engrossing silence, at times primordial, at others very much oppressively of the present. It conjures up time - time almost in the abstract - of now and ever before and after. There is something very much Australian in that - the ancient land which waits and speaks through its impenetrable silence. Australia is a peculiar country, and Tucker was one of the best at capturing and portraying its many peculiarities, combining forms, colours and execution to express senses beyond that of sight.

1. G. Fry, Albert Tucker, The Beagle Press, Sydney, 2005, p. 208