Life is linked to growth, but growth on earth occurs under enormous duress. Think of the pressures involved! Gravity, which, according to Einstein, is nothing less than the warping of spacetime. The sun’s nuclear fusion – light and energy streaming towards the things on earth they nourish – and the things they burn and desiccate – at a relentless velocity of 300,000 kilometres per second. Winds. Storms. Evaporation. Precipitation. Fire. Entropy. Time.

Walk through the bush attentively, and it’s hard not to marvel at how the trees around us achieved their current state. Bold muscular trunks, bent branches, cankers, knots and goiters, each twist and kink an index to struggle, competition, dearth of nourishment. Life seems to unfold in a state of permanent siege, a tussle characterised by recoil, retreat, and perseverance. There’s something heroic about it.

But wait… Isn’t it better described as nonchalant? When we describe things as having an “organic” quality, don’t we mean precisely the kind of casual, almost imperious disinterest with which natural forms grow? Waiting out dry spells, enduring the seasons, evolving, adapting: surely trees do all this indifferently, symbiotically? They adapt to the world not as individual beings stoically set against adversity – that’s the pathetic fallacy – but in the same way that water moves in water.

Better than any artist I know, Brett McMahon creates works that express both the strenuousness and nonchalance of the Australian landscape. The part of it he knows best is the Awabakal Nature Reserve just south of Newcastle.

“It's the bush land of my childhood,” he wrote recently, “populated with twisted gums and fringed with waist high heath, blasted and deformed by the prevailing winds, that falls down to rock platforms and beach sand. Bell and whipbirds, along with hot summer cicadas, provide the soundtrack.”

There is nothing fake or sentimental in Brett’s art, no human projection, no prettification. His art is ambitious in its very humility – its determination to escape false rhetoric and cliché. “Every time you enter the bush you discover something,” he has said. “I am usually on the lookout for eye catching relationships between tree trunks and branches.”

But as Brett draws in the bush, “using an old scratchy toothbrush,” his focus, he writes, “starts to wander from the linear network of gnarled tree lines. A tree whose bark has peeled up in blackened layers, scorched by the heat of a fire from a summer past, stands off just to the left of where I sit.” He notices, too, the weather, and how a “run of hot summer days” is “often abruptly ended by a Southerly Buster… The strong wind and the occasional cracking thunderstorm rips through the bush without favour, frisking debris from the trees and bushes.”

There’s no doubt in my mind that Brett has one of the most original, powerful and variegated bodies of work in Australian art. Whatever the medium, he is always attempting to find poetic equivalents – in material, form and process – for the environment which surrounds him.

When I imagine him back in his studio, I see him as akin to a dancer, someone using his body to work both with and against gravity, or a musician weaving sound waves. What he is trying to do, in other words, is not so much to make a picture but to harness and channel the energies, rhythms and processes he has perceived in the landscape he knows so intimately. 

His most recent paintings are marvels of unpremeditated responsiveness – attempts to commune with what Brett calls “a small pocket of rainforest, dense with lianas, tall gums, cabbage palms and strangler figs.” With oil paints, coloured pencils, oil sticks and scrapers, he uses human processes to evoke natural ones. Observe the way a flurry of olive green marks applied with a dry brush or oil stick sits roughly against the white ground. It evokes a spurt of leaves, but it does so almost arbitrarily – certainly before the word “leaf” or anything the mind has been taught to recognise as such has had time to form in the brain.

Over it, a dark brown branch – thin, but with a knobby, hard-looking bend, like an arthritic elbow. Below this, a rounded smudge with broken, spattery edges that might have been applied with a sponge. And around all this, dominating the composition, an overlapping tangle of thick branches in silver, white and brown, their lighter, blistered palette-knife effects revealing glimpses of darker paint beneath, as peeling bark reveals living wood.

You can feel both the dense force of growth in these thick, meandering branches and the airy, spreading delicacy of the leaves. “Canopy remnants blown from the storm are caught here amongst the low branches and looping vines. The gathered fallen fauna – long strips of bark, tangles of vine, seeds, twigs, sun bronzed leaves – all hang like a massive levitating ink drawing, marks of infinite variety and detail, drips succumbing to gravity. It's not an end however, just a suspended moment in the continuum. A spider has already spun a web, ants are crawling over everything looking for protein, and the seeds will eventually return to earth and shoot again.”

These paintings are what the French writer Georges Bataille called “mobile thoughts.” Thriving in iteration, they do not seek a definitive state. If a “philosophy is never a house,” always “a construction site,” as Bataille put it, Brett’s art is the same: an ongoing construction site, like the bush itself. His works forms are open and unpredictable. They expand in the imagination beyond their borders, encouraging in the viewer a sense of immersion.

More than that, they express (to me) a yearning for a lost intimacy with nature. They may be produced by hands wielding tools and paint, but these works shy away from instrumentality. The materials themselves appear to have a mind of their own – or no “mind.” They are just the residue of processes at once strenuous and nonchalant. A lifelong surfer as well as a bushwalker, Brett prefers a kind of boundary-less intimacy with nature to any claim to dominion over it. 

Sebastian Smee
Art critic for the Washington Post
January, 2025