Peter Davidson’s Petite Omomuki Paintings
For many years in western art, the landscape featured primarily as the back-drop for the subjects of paintings, whether portraits or history paintings. With a few exceptions, the landscape in art did not really escape its status as setting and scene, either for actors or viewers, perhaps until the post impressionists began to treat the landscape as an actor in its own right.
In the history of Australian painting by European explorers and colonists, the landscape was an actor from the beginning. It was still a setting and a view, but it was also an antagonist of sorts — an unfamiliar and exotic landscape within which the European settlers suffered hardship and sought mastery over and advantage from their environment. Along with the more recent recognition of Aboriginal art, Australian impressionism and antipodean expressionism have both contributed to an enduring notion that the most distinctive thing Australian art has to offer the world at large are distinctive depictions of its distinctive landscapes. So Peter Davidson draws on a rich inheritance in these little landscapes.
Much has been said about the influence of Japanese woodblock prints, ukiyo-e, on the French impressionists and post impressionists, but Davidson situates his practice in the Japanese landscape, as a foreign participant observer in contemporary Japanese culture. This is a very different perspective from the cultural appropriations of Japonisme and orientalism, and in a sense brings this chapter of western art history full circle. At the same time Davidson’s experiences as Australian in the Japanese landscape still feature the kind of displacement and unfamiliarity that allow for some of the wonder and instructive contemplation of the grand tourist or the explorer.
Davidson refers to these works using the Japanese term, “omomuki”, which he understands to mean “something with nostalgia and a warm feeling”. Some online dictionaries I have consulted translate the term as “tenor” or “gist” or “charm”. So these works are impressionistic works, and works that result directly and unapologetically from the artist’s sensitivity to the charms of a landscape. They are scenes depicted because of the warm feeling experienced on location, and reworked with the intention of sharing that warm feeling with a viewer.
Davidson explains that each of the works have their origins in a personal encounter with the landscape mostly during short trips from Nishi-Ku Kobe, where he lives, or Akashi where he has his studio and runs 2 Dogs Art Space. In a modern, time-saving variation on the practice of painting en plein air, Davidson documented his impressions through digital photographs. The paintings themselves were then executed in his apartment, using the digital photographs as an aide memoire, but also working in response to sensation from memory and during the process of painting.
One of the distinctive features of these landscapes is that they are not executed in a traditional landscape format. The petite omomuki works have been created on a nearly square paper of just 9cm x 9.5cm (WxH), while some slightly larger works are on portrait-format paper of 10cm x 14.8cm (WxH). These are works in which the horizon is not given a dominant role. Furthermore, in many images either cropping or a slightly elevated perspective is used that makes the foreground indistinct or a framing device, and makes a feature of the middle ground.
The scenes themselves are skilfully succinct compositions of line and colour wash. They are un-peopled landscapes, but in almost all cases the built environment intervenes or sometimes dominates the natural environment. But in these works there is no commentary or moral position. The bridge that cuts across the view, the factory chimney that occupies the sky, the air traffic control tower, the ubiquitous power lines — these are all integral parts of the warm feeling in place and key elements in the pleasure of making an image.
These works are not so much windows onto or souvenirs of places of note — they are not like the Venetian paintings of Canaletto. Like Haiku poetry, they capture and communicate brief moments and fleeting sensations of enjoyment, both in the landscape, and in the studio.
All images with kind permission and courtesy of the artist, Peter Davidson
