Featured Artist - July 2005 - John Campbell

John talks about this latest series of paintings, Home, his experiences as an artist-in-residence in Connecticut and his debt to the American artists, Grant Wood and Grandma Moses.

I didn't know much about Grant Wood until I was working as an artist-in-residence in the US in 2001. I was familiar with his famous twin portrait of an elderly farm couple, American Gothic, but did not appreciate how untypical of his work the painting was. Where I was situated was Connecticut, a green and pleasant state in the north east with a history and landscape more in keeping with the images of Grandma Moses. Her pictures appealed to me because they were all about her world and by looking at them you felt that you were in it with her. They also struck a chord with me because they depicted a rural environment that closely resembled my own in northern NSW.

I had been living in the hills behind Byron Bay for fifteen years and felt oddly alienated by the landscape painting of my own country. It was almost invariably flat, brown, harsh and dry. Australia was the desert. But Byron Shire is not like that. It is hilly, green and bountiful and the Pacific Ocean is just over there. Grandma Moses's paintings didn't concern themselves with struggle and vast spaces. They had no quasi religious intent, no need or desire to present themselves as epic manifestations of a nation's spirituality. They were just about the people and the land, which was enough for me. Her undeveloped drafting skills seemed irrelevant, it was the life that she poured on to the canvas that got me.

Then one day in the Boston Museum of Fine Art I saw Grant Wood's painting, The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere. It is a nocturnal piece, with the revolutionary horseman seen from high above, galloping through a township that is lighting its candles as he passes through with his message. A tall church steeple dominates the scene. In the background are the hills and streams out of which he has ridden and into which he will disappear. It is straightforward, simple, cinematic. It is also flawlessly composed and drawn. I spent all morning looking at it, marvelling at the movement and the stillness, and at the way it invited me inside, to be part of it. So I started seeking out Wood's paintings, the ones he did of the farmlands of Iowa, his home state. They are so lovingly observed, unpretentious and personal, humorous and piquant.

Wood's paintings made me feel homesick for my own little house at Goonengerry, for my own birds and cows and trees and creeks, for the patterns of nature with which I had imperceptibly been imbued since moving from the city. I have still never been to the mid-west of the US, but I knew the minute I encountered his work what Wood meant by his depiction of the place. It's about the wonder of the commonplace. He reckoned that all of his best ideas came to him when he was milking a cow. I liked that. Mine usually come when I'm walking on the beach at Brunswick Heads or weeding the tomatoes.

John Campbell - 2005

For Exhibition dates and further information, please enquire at Salmon Galleries.