Nothing But Blue Skies
Flinders Lane Gallery

15 October - 2 November 2024

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Davenport’s gestural paintings, speak of an intense relationship with nature and an intimate experience of the artist’s local environment. Her rich, painterly depictions represent the passing of time, the transience of the landscape and the ephemeral nature of memory itself. Coming from a long line of farmers in the Albury region, Davenport is deeply connected to this landscape and the farming community in the area. 

 

A deep sense of optimism about the local farming community and a reverence for the natural environment is imbued within her vibrant abstract images and they demonstrate the artist’s innate and keen sense of colour. While connected to the tradition of landscape painting, Davenport’s practice moves beyond the literal or representational, shifting toward an interior, felt response to the sensations of the landscape.

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Giving Back to the Land

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In a feature in Artist Profile magazine in 2020, Jo Davenport said “Now more than ever I want to create a visceral bond, a connection between the viewer and our sublime Australian landscape.” This was the summer that started with bush fires and floods and ended with coronavirus lockdown. Nowhere on this vast continent was guaranteed safe from these apocalyptic events, not even Davenport’s house and studio on a high ridge overlooking the Murray River and wetlands on the New South Wales and Victorian border. She has had many exhibitions since then, and the world has paused on its perilous path. Interviewing the artist
four years later about her stunning new body of work for Flinders Lane Gallery, she says “In these paintings I want to show the optimism I feel for the future. I want them to reflect the precious eco-system of the people who love and care for our land: the regeneration farmers, the landscape groups, and especially those with an indigenous knowledge of Country... we all need to give back to the land more than we take.”

 

Davenport has arrived at this point through being a constant experimenter. There is never a sense of formula or unthinking repetition about either the physicality of the paint she applies, or the ideas and emotions that she digs out of her psyche. She is, quite simply, brilliant at it. These attributes don’t arrive overnight, like a piece of IKEA furniture. They are hard won after years of hard looking, thinking, and feeling. These works are transformative, first on the artist, and later on we who are invited to share the outcomes of her research. It takes her a full year to complete each exhibition. On this journey of a lifetime, she has had influential encounters with a range of fellow travellers, past and present. The list begins with Turner, Casper David Friedrich, and Emily Kam Kngwarreye. It goes on, and grows as we speak: Rubens, Cy Twombly, and Sigmar Polke. Some of these artists deal with notions of the sublime, others with the physicality of paint and the roughness of canvas. All tackle the never-ending possibilities of colour. She embraces all of these.

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In our conversation we discovered we’d both seen a documentary by David Hockney where he unrolls a long Chinese scroll across an equally long table, and describes the story it tells as if it were a film unspooling. I like to think of each painting in this exhibition as a still from such an unfolding narrative, and of each exhibition, created day by day, and year by year, as similarly part of the same epic tale. For her MFA thesis at The Victorian College of the Arts, Davenport wrote eloquently about “The Space Between the Painting and then Viewer.” If you are reading these words while still in the gallery, I encourage you to think about that concept, and to occupy it.

 

She was also fortunate to have the great artist, writer, and academic Barbara Bolt teaching her. “She could convey a huge amount of information very concisely and in an almost Zen-like way,” Davenport tells me. “I’ll never forget she once came into my studio and declared

“Too much treble and not enough bass! And then she disappeared to the next student.”

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Barb would be proud of the way her advice has led to these pitch- perfect paintings. This anecdote prompted my final question about whether, as she painted, she listened to music? “Birdsong is all the music I need. From my bush studio I can hear it at all times of the day. Outside, the birds and the insects are carrying pollen... if you sit quietly enough and listen there is a hum, and you can feel in that moment that all is well.”
 

Catalogue essay by Dr Peter Hill, 2024
Artist, Writer, and Independent Curator
Enterprise Professor, University of Melbourne

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