The Mage of Muse Hill:
The Magical World of Oliver Hunter
(Continued)

It is always fascinating to be able to glimpse the creative process of a working artist, in addition to enjoying the finished artifact of a painting, drawing, or sculpture. The following text excerpts are drawn Oliver Hunter’s many small journals, illuminating the magical, spirited, richly-textured world in which he dwells . . .

On Cocteau's fascination with angels in The Difficulty of Being:
These angels are a product of our ingenuity and our need to name everything; they represent a hierarchy of power descending in hermetically clean ranks from the lofty throne of God, dealing out judgment on the mortals below, and justifying the divinity of man by virtue of the human forms in which the clothe themselves. This view conceals one less clear vision of the spirit world, where entities follow no perceptible patterns codes, their inhumanity being a direct result of their imperceptibility. The angels here, my angels, are armed with Boschesque instruments of desire, clothed in jewels of the air and gifted with the malice of cats. Demons and angels are relative, as they always have been. A medium might say, simplifying and secularizing this system, "There are forces benevolent and malevolent." Of course, it is obvious that guessing a being's intent would render it, if not exactly natural, at least easier to perceive and categorize. It is comforting to know which side you are on, but such comfort is born from ignorance. (I am alternately ignorant and itchy.) I say, "There are forces visible and invisible, and maybe forces ludicrous, and also forces vague."

On Cocteau and the Invisible:
In a metamorphosis of states, the Invisible — a word, a character, a point of view — dresses ceremoniously in the garb of the visible as a disguise. Faery as an ocean is unfathomable; a strange and green ocean. Cocteau allies himself with the Invisible. He would have us believe, not only that there is an invisible existence, but that he too is a creature of this element. I may be writing this out of jealousy that my bones don't harbour as much, but then again, I don't necessarily want them to. I am content in my humanness, I don't trace my lineage in the hopes of finding mystics or demigods — it feels too uncomfortably melodramatic. My relationship with the invisible, with Faery, is one of carefully considered distance and respect. I don't presume to know its innermost facets; I know that such presumptuousness is delusion, a dangerous position in which I am liable to invoke the wrath of the unknown. But I also stress that neither is this relationship one of superstition, which implies that my attitude might be unreasonable and born from ignorance. I do not weaken the Invisible by dismissing its existence as nonsense, but nor do I demonically wrap myself up in its cape, laughing at the rest of the world in its petty mortal state. Quite simply, I take the invisible seriously. I attempt to meet it on its own terms. It is not such a silly thing to believe, as Ljerka once mentioned to me, in the 'connectedness of all things.'

Invisible connections, then what does this have to do with painting? I'm looking across the riddled treetops of Faery, hunting for something — not a secret exactly (not something to be made visible), but a sign, a directive to action. This is cheapened by giving Faery an opaque and fathomable character because it places the (human) author in an omnipresent position, which does not and cannot apply in the case of the invisible. The best ghost stories are written from a limited perspective, where the unknown retains its dignity by cloaking its motives (if indeed it has any at all) in darkness and doubt. The invisible maintains this essential invisibility even when disguising itself, as Cocteau points out, in the semblance of the visible. But underneath the forms of the faeries are leaf mold and moss (pigment, binder and canvas). These visible forms are like garments in that they contain clues for the human to interpret. We are wrong if we attempt to unveil the invisibles by these clues, for by nature they are consistently inconsistent. They are monstrously convoluted messages about ourselves.

On Pre–Raphaelite art:
I think I'm beginning, at least in part, to understand Ruskin's ideal of the importance of a return to the natural world. Nature is dignified, and it is owed this dignity. But nature is also pitiless, in a thoroughly Other way. When we represent this Otherness it is to acknowledge a presence greater than our human concerns. We are nature, in that we must follow its coded law, or break it at our own peril. Millais wrote of turning “the minds of men to good reflections.” The operative is reflection. How better to show this truth than to make such magical mirrors (art) that reflect each in each, allowing for animated gossip between people and leaves.

To a Canadian friend:
I know what you mean when you talk about Place being sacred to you — particular rocks and trees and patches of ground that stir the same feelings. They are intimate friends. Here, I follow little trails through the hills and think about stories; somehow its easier when you're walking. I see the same trails in Renaissance paintings, in Leonardo and Uccello, in Durer, and in Van Eyk, and in Aboriginal dot paintings that are like diagrams of the earth's central nervous system. You are right in thinking that I have an ideal forest, but I tend to think of it in terms of the horizontal contours of the hills rather than the height or closeness of the trees. Here the air and light is intensely clear. As Canberran artist G.W. Bot remarks, 'in Australia we live in the sky.' From where I am sitting, in the courtyard loud with bees, I can see the crest of Rhinoceros Hill peeking over the neighbor's roof tiles. Beyond that hill is a deep valley like a bowl, ringed by hills with boulders on their craggy heads, and filled with groves of blackthorn and eucalyptus. A creek runs through its middle, musical in this season with gushing water as it has rained frequently this past month. If you stand on the saddle between Rhinoceros Hill and the neighboring Castle Hill, and, facing the shaggy slopes of Mount Rob Roy, shout loud enough, it will echo exactly seven times from mountain wall to mountain wall, which is why I know this valley as Echo's House. I've seen hawks wheeling over its slopes hunting for smaller game, a pair of foxes barking to one another, wombats stumbling heavily into their burrows, and I've found the bones of birds and rabbits. I've been up to Echo's House when low clouds sat on the hilltops, cutting me off from the outside world and secluding me in a suddenly timeless world. It feels strange that I’ll be leaving all this soon for a landscape without horizons. I think that some part of me is always going to be running wild in these hills, talking to birds and imagining ruined cities in among the boulders.

It feels strange that I'll be leaving all this soon for a landscape without horizons. I think that some part of me is always going to be running wild in these hills, talking to birds and imagining ruined cities in among the boulders.

On Russell Drysale's depictions of the "tragic aftermath" landscape:
Drysale’s empty, haunting spaces could be Chicoro’s, but only momentarily, before we realize that the theatricality of the European is only partly adapted by the Antipodean for the sake of describing contemporary ghosts, whereas Chicoro's staring colonnades echo with the multitudes of the millennia. Ostensibly, Drysdale can only understand the dramas of people — his landscape is an unrevealing mask of mercilessness. Horizons are flat, nothing is intimate but the forlorn artifacts of human desolation: a cow skull, a dead tree, a corrugated iron shack with carefully arranged figures wearing won clothing. The land is hard and cruel, seemingly preoccupied solely with discouraging the mortal from even attempting survival. But perhaps this is because Drysdale grew up with the notion that the land is there to be battled with, rather than having a secret, full life of its own, of which the human element is but a tiny part (but not emphasized to idealize the uniqueness of man). And my thoughts turn now, of course, to William Robinson, and the land as it knows no bounds in experience, a landscape completely sensual in every stone and tree and star. Disaster is just as lively — for example, the Canberra bushfires. It seems that in much Australian art, the idea of deserts and wildernesses have been overexploited as metaphors for emptiness and absence, when it is actually the other way around. A slow, quiet acquaintance with these hills has made me aware of its subtle rhythms; its hieroglyphics. My landscapes will be sensuous tapestries encoded with meaning, tracks and pathways that recall lived stories, imagined 'other' worlds. So the question is then — how do I balance my heroes and heroines with these magical landscapes, who tend to upstage much of what they eventually become immersed in?'

On life, art, and magic:
I don't want to be decadent. I want to embroider everyday life with jeweled colours, to make beauty from everyday breathing, to stage picnics along median strips and shout into tunnels. I won't join in on the debate about art imitating life and vice versa — this question has been handled by thousands of minds far keener than mine and I think none have solved it quite yet, so . . . No, art for me is akin to seduction and enchantment. It is a magical mirror which both clouds what I thought I knew and reveals deep veins of magic beneath so–called mundane perception. All mere theory when I was still in school . . . but now as I go out into the world it's here that theory is put to the test. Here there is noone to nod approvingly or comment on a brushstroke or choice of subject matter or interpretation. Here in the desert of the 9–5, I discover that everything must be re–learned, re–seen, to be realized as magical.

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