Roger Kemp

The Estate of Roger Kemp

Christopher Heathcote, The Art of Roger Kemp, McMillan, Melbourne, 2007, see p 203 for ‘Landscape Through Symbols 3', 1972-73, acrylic on board, 137.6 x 167.6cm

The landscape featured prominently in the artist's early works of the 1930s, and throughout his later career, he would occasionally return to them - as a kind of 'back to base' exercise. His trees are often stripped back to their bare essentials; trunks and branches, with no leaves (a shape that often overlapped into his human figures with outstretched arms). When Christopher Heathcote asked Merle, the artist's widow, about the motivation for these 1970s landscapes she said he was casting his mind back to his childhood growing up in Eaglehawk, near Bendigo, and the bush at the end of his street which was alive with wildlife, notably kangaroos. They also reveal his awareness of the growing concerns of environmentalism and conservation. On a formal level, speaking generally about the works of the 1970s, Heathcote describes the artist's "coloured brushed line" and the symmetry of the compositions - two aspects we see in this painting. Of the abstract works, he describes the absence of depth; the figure-ground relationship is minimised with lines dividing the composition which is all at the surface. But in this painting, we get a sense of the volume of the tree trunks and the high horizon line offers a perspective into the landscape. The palette of this painting is also unusual in its lightness; purples, blues and whites were common in the decade, but not usually handled so sparingly as this. 
Our thanks to Michel Kemp and Christopher Heathcote for their help contextualising this work.