CURATOR’S INTRODUCTION

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FACING NORTH: CUTLER FOOTWAY CURATOR’S INTRODUCTION

This exhibition reveals almost two decades of unseen work by a singular artist.

After a career as an art critic in print and broadcast media in Sydney, Bruce James returned to Ayr, his hometown in the Burdekin district south of Townsville late in 2003. There, aged 50, he resumed full-time painting, aiming to capture the landscapes and people of North Queensland. Working on a tiny, even timid, scale at first, and using his pseudonym Cutler Footway*, the artist steeped himself in the farmland settings and hinterland topography of the region. Burning sugar cane and blazing blue skies, framed by expanses of dry-tropical bushland, defined his compositions, flushed from time to time by a wet season overspill of vibrant greens. Remnants of agricultural and mill machinery emerged here and there to mark the area’s more industrial heritage. Figures, in some cases self-portraits, enlivened many of these initial works as the artist strove to restore himself visibly to the environments of his youth. As his confidence grew, so did the size and ambition of the paintings, resulting in a variety of northern-themed landscapes and views, few of which subscribed to the cultural prescriptions and artistic fashions of the day. (He even seemed to dispense with modernity itself: a sole, sad electric fan gets relegated to the background in a later composition.)

Memories of childhood and family, not without hints of anxiety and sexual questioning, haunt these provisional works. So too does a sense of the “literary imaginary” identified by Jonathan McBurnie in his thoughtprovoking commentary on the artist in this publication. As a lover of canonic novels and Metaphysical poetry, indeed as an established author, Footway is blatantly in thrall to literature.

In parallel to the foregoing, Footway explored the more neutral possibilities of interiors and still life subjects, inspired by European Post-Impressionists such as Gauguin and Van Gogh, but also by Australian Modernists Grace Cossington Smith and Margaret Preston - on both of whom he has published extensively. Indeed, the painter’s ties to Australian mid-20th century art movements are significant. As both an historian of and one-time dealer in Australian art he has a handson expertise in the field. His teenage encounter with original paintings by Margaret Olley, Donald Friend and Russell Drysdale in the then CSR collection at Pioneer Sugar Refinery was foundational in his pathway to art making. These artists, especially Drysdale, had strong links to the Burdekin and wider North Queensland. While not daring to rank himself in their number, Footway locates himself in modest relation to their tradition. For all the strength of this national affinity, a pervasive taint of Italian Mannerist painting of the 16th century still conspires to shape his style. This is evidenced in his elongated approach to the figure no less than in his sometimes strained artificiality of address.

Aiming to improve his drawing skills and to some degree cleanse himself of Mannerist attitudinising, from 2004 to the present Footway undertook an extensive programme of life drawing. He engaged models from amongst family, friends and itinerant workers. While not outrightly erotic in intention, the resulting anatomies are frankly sensual. A dozen effectively random examples are exhibited here. They make no claim to enduring resonance other than as evidence of the day-to-day activity of a working artist. His fingerprints, if you will. Four of these studies represent Marcus Leutscher, who appears in painted form elsewhere in the show.

Thus, several strands of artistic activity converge in a body of work of growing maturity, rooted in the local context yet gesturing to a globalist view. In 2019, Footway was invited to exhibit his Queensland paintings and drawings at Maitland Regional Art Gallery, NSW. Curated by that institution’s Kim Blunt, this solo show presented a miscellany of recent works that introduced the artist to a southern audience. Uniquely, because Footway rarely releases work for sale, Blunt was able to select from an almost undisturbed repository of canvases and panels housed in the artist’s Wickham Street, Ayr, studio. The present show has also been derived from this source, a body of work through which a lively narrative of mature-age creative reclamation could be told. With the exception of two pivotal panels, Burdekin Cane Fields 2016-17 (Cat. 19) and Large Still Life with Vase, Fruits and Frangipani 2017 (Cat. 20), none of the works has been publicly exhibited before. It is fitting to debut them here in Townsville: Footway took an arts degree from James Cook University in the mid-seventies and for two extended periods lived in rented accommodation on the flanks of the city’s landmark Castle Hill.

The title, Facing North, is a reference to the age-old European notion that north-facing light is the most desirable for artists’ studios. But in Australia to face north is not to look toward some weakly illuminating winter sun. It is to turn one’s gaze brazenly to the sub-equator and beyond, seeking but also risking solar

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extremes undreamed of in the studios of Europe. For Footway as well, the north − which for him is always North Queensland − is the location, spiritual as much as geographical, where he finds the faces and the figures that now fill his imagery.

Certain insistent themes are apparent. Landscape, as already suggested, is central to Footway’s output, although it would not be correct to call him a landscape painter. While he initially painted en plein air in the parks and pastures around Ayr, the bulk of his work is the product of long sessions of “not looking”. Or rather, of looking first in and at the landscape but then returning to his workspace to terraform his landscapes from memory. Contrarily, his still life and figural work is based entirely on the robust strictures of observed reality.

From those first tiny psychologically intense compositions with figures posed against Castle Hilllike cliffs and cane fields, painted between 2003-2006, through the more considered and calmer landscape compositions of 2006-2010 and finally to the fully resolved and epically-scaled vistas of 2011-2021, the exhibition divides clearly into three main chronological sections. Associated threads of still life arrangements, portrait subjects and life drawings weave into the main fabric of the show. It is worth noting that the inventory of furnishings, fabrics, floral elements and occasional tribal figurines depicted in the still lifes are readily identifiable by any visitor to the artist’s home and work space. They possess a ceremonial or ritual aspect, accentuated by their repeated appearances in the work. To spend time in the mustard-coloured rooms of Wickham Street is to be embroiled in Footway’s theatre of things, perhaps to become a thing oneself. His organisational instinct is as prone to the proper placement of human forms in an interior as to the positioning of pawpaws on a tabletop.

The major paintings, Markus Leutscher with Cane Fire, Figurine, Flowers and Skull, 2019-20 (Cat. 28) and Landscape After a Flood: the Burdekin 2021 (Cat. 34), stand at the end of a developmental line of artistic production which is tracked by this exhibition. The former work is an encyclopaedic artefact, uniting landscape, portraiture and still life into a gaudily summarising statement of the artist’s subjects and preoccupations. The young male sitter, a European traveller it should be noted, does indeed turn his head to face the north in this Footway map of the world. Viewers will note, and some will be disturbed, by the surface roughness of this particular work. It bears obvious signs of many campaigns of painting, indeed of previously completed images. Footway relishes this palimpsest quality, this texturing, so similar in its effect to the crumbled plaster of a Florentine fresco. So marked by its own history of making. So vulnerable, in short. And to view the reverse of a Footway canvas is commonly to be confronted by multiple cancelled titles and dates, a fever chart of the failures, the reconsiderations, the painterly misadventures, really, that nevertheless inform any ultimate image.

It remains premature to speculate on any standing Cutler Footway may claim in Australian art, but it is permissible at this point to argue for his individuality and, more pertinently than that, his sincerity. He is an authentic artist of the north. Footway is already that in a telling black-and-white snap taken in the late nineteensixties. It shows the then Ayr High School student in the louvered front room of the family home in Wilmington Street, aspirational palette and panel in his lap, painting a flowerpiece.

Gitte Weise

*Cutler Footway is the name of a pedestrian overpass linking Darlinghurst and Paddington in Sydney, NSW. It was traversed on an almost daily basis by the artist when he lived and worked in that area from the 1970s to the early 2000s. He first used it as a painterly pseudonym in 1983.