Featuring Ian Smith, Ron McBurnie, Peter Hudson & Euan Macleod.
The visual sources for the four artists in this exhibition extend from the letter box to the cosmos. Ian Smith contemplates the social and emotional implications of the “unavoidable images” of women in underwear regularly delivered to him as junk mail from large chain stores. Peter Hudson ponders the systems that link land and animals. Ron McBurnie reflects on the potential for Australian landscapes to conjure that mood of the British romantic pastoral artists that reach back to William Blake. And Euan Macleod creates landscapes that are charged, not by reference to place, but by the psychological atmosphere created by introducing a figure. What brings them together in this exhibition is the fact that they all draw, although it is no doubt significant that three of the four are regularly identified as quintessentially Queensland artists, where they have spent the bulk of their lengthy careers and where they were all born; in Cairns, Townsville and Brisbane, respectively. Macleod was born in Christchurch, New Zealand and moved to his permanent home in Sydney in 1981.
Robert Mercer, the curator of Drawn In, taught at the Queensland College of Art throughout his extensive career where he championed innovative drawing practice. Ian Smith also taught at QCA during the 1970s and both Ron McBurnie and Peter Hudson studied there. For many years Euan Macleod has taught painting and drawing at the National Art School in Sydney, a bastion of rigorous drawing practice. Forgetting any predictable institutional nepotism, the association with QCA by the majority and Macleod’s role at NAS, is important in the context of this drawing exhibition because they all share a generational attitude to the value of drawing as a form of thinking about one thing or about everything.
Image: Ron McBurnie, First Morning (2009)
