Walks

The Artist's Walk

Hans Heysen – The Artist’s Walk

The walk relocates eleven of Heysen’s favoured painting localities on his property, The Cedars. Hans Heysen purchased the Cedars in 1912 from the proceeds of a highly successful exhibition of his work held in Melbourne that same year.

In 1938 Heysen purchased two adjoining properties, extending the acreage from the original 40 acres to just over one hundred and fifty acres. This investment was made for conservation reasons alone, in order to safeguard his beloved gums.

The land was not utilised for grazing or agricultural purposes but solely for the protection of the gums ensuring their future regeneration. The acreage still remains at the one hundred and fifty acres today under the ownership of the third generation of the Heysen family.

Heysen, indeed, was a dedicated conservationist and all his life remained a staunch protector of the gums of the district often paying quite substantial sums of money to landowners and council to ensure that the gums were not cut down for timber.

Subjects on his own property

As an artist he used his own property extensively for subject matter and many of his favourite trees were indeed located on The Cedars. Four magnificent specimens located on the ridge overlooking the village of Hahndorf were his particular favourites, his ‘models’ as he called them and he was to immortalise them in man a famous landscape.

Heysen used quite a measure of artistic license in order to achieve a satisfactory arrangement of balance and scale so the particular scene captured on canvas or paper did not always echo exactly the landscape spread out in front of him.

He would often reposition certain gum trees into other partnerships or localities, meander a road between or introduce grazing stock or a figure engaged in some form of rural activity. It must be emphasised that the aim of this exercise is not to reproduce faithfully the artist’s pictures in a perfect visual partnership with the scene as viewed from each locality. This is no longer possible.

Nature ensures that it is an ever changing scene and the ongoing regeneration of the bush serves to provide continually changing landscape. Besides, it must be remembered that many of the paintings were completed up to eighty years ago.

Love of Nature

Rather, the aim is to convey to the viewer, both visually and spiritually, the beauty of this landscape which the artist so passionately loved and which he so diligently utilised for his subject matter. The overriding motivation for all of Heysen’s work was his intense love for nature.

“I am only trying to paint as truthfully as I can and that which my eyes see and perhaps what I unconsciously feel. Truth to nature after all is the goal but truth interpreted through temperament – it all seems to become more precious and beautiful the older one grows – and more wonderful.

We are given all these marvellous gifts and yet what proportion of mankind really understands and appreciates that which we can have for nothing.” Hans Heysen

Colin Thiele says:

As Colin Thiele so succinctly and accurately states in his biography “Heysen of Hahndorf”:

“Hans Heysen was one of the great landscape painters of Australia. His superb draughtsmanship, his wonderful control of medium – especially watercolour and charcoal – his handling of light, his power of composition and his intense awareness of natural form and texture, combined to make him unique among the representational painter of this country. Nobody in Australia had studied the gum tree as he had, or analysed its singular character – the play of light and shadow along its bole, the tatters of loose bark hung to the wind, the stropping of mottles sunlight on leaves and limbs. That distinctive Heysen vision led whole generations of Australians to see the gums anew. Above all Heysen loved the natural world as he loved life itself. Again and again in his letters to his closest friend, Lionel Lindsay, he revealed an almost pantheistic reverence for nature, an intensely sensitive response to its finest nuances of form and colour. His, indeed, was one fo the longest and most distinguished careers in the history of Australian art.

Out of a long and unforgettable life it reflected as strongly as ever the essence of his personal creed: “Nature is inexhaustible. Life is wonderful””

With acknowledgements to : Colin Thiele, Sir Lionel Lindsay, Ian North, Alison Carrol, Julie Robinson.