Geoff Wilson devotes decades to distilling quintessence of South Australian landscapes with built environment
Geoff Wilson’s Five triangles of the Barossa Valley, 2013, is typical of his love for interpreting the built environment – especially the decaying, dilapidated or rusting – within the landscape.
Geoff Wilson distilled quintessentially South Australian landscapes from 70 years painting, starting in the 1940s. Despite his longevity as an artist, Wilson has been called “one of the most remarkable stories of late 20th century visual culture in South Australia” because of official neglect of his paintings.
But Wilson’s influence on South Australian art has been as much through teaching, although in 1978 another South Australian artist Ivor Hele told him to get out of that profession and “just do it (painting)”. But Wilson said: “I never felt strongly enough about (painting). I liked to do it. Painting was pleasant work, but if I wasn’t doing it, it didn’t matter”.
Wilson did take a three-year break from teaching in Adelaide during the early 1950s when he travelled Europe where, in the tradition of British watercolourists, he filled sketchbooks with drawings. Another Adelaide artist Jeffrey Smart, as a teacher in the 1940s, urged his student Wilson in the mid 1940s to experiment beyond watercolours with oil painting and introduce pen and inks.
Wilson drew his images tightly at first, then evolved a more confident, freeflowing watercolour method until the late 1950s, before going back to tight, constructive painting compositions from the late 1960s when he dabbled briefly in abstraction while never letting go of an instinct to remain a figurative draftsman.
After retiring from teaching in 1982, Wilson teamed up with friend and fellow artist David Dallwitz. They had regular Saturday painting sessions out of doors, and Wilson was keen member of sketching trips further afield with other artists, including forer students and colleagues. These trips allowed Wilson to focus his visual language and explore his long-standing interest in interpreting the built environment within the landscape. Farms sheds, barns and agricultural equipment, especially the decaying, dilapidated or rusting, captured his interest.
Wilson thus found his niché between two other great local artists of the 20th Century who, like him, never left Adelaide: Hans Heysen and Horace Trenerry. Heysen projected a timeless image of the South Australian pastorale, echoing European masters of the past. Trenerry gave that vision a modern version with an authentic mood of existentialist isolation. Wilson added to their legacy with a dance between nature and the transient forms of human industry.
