Review: John Forrester Clack's Landscapes glow with inner luminosity

John Forrester Clack is an unfashionable artist - a religious artist - a theist who through his work celebrates the presence of God. In this he is similar to Brisbane-based painter William Robinson, whose much acclaimed immersive landscape paintings, if interrogated closely, are sometimes embedded in passages from Scripture.

Forrester Clack's present exhibition is dedicated to the landscape, many scenes loosely based on locations near Gundaroo, where this Welsh-born artist settled on moving to Australia in the late 1980s. The landscapes are in no sense literal transcriptions of topography, but are transfigured landscapes that glow through an inner luminosity that celebrates the Godhead.

The artist received training in the applied arts at the Cardiff College of Art, then the Staffordshire Polytechnic, and completed his Master of Arts at the prestigious Royal College of Art in London. However, as a painter, he is largely self-taught and has developed a marvellous technique of building up layer upon layer of oil paint and glazes on an impasto surface, giving a glowing luminosity to his paintings.

His landscapes verge on the non-figurative - somewhere between J.M.W. Turner's mystical visions and James McNeill Whistler's Nocturnes. The concern is not with the specific in the landscape, but with the spirit inherent in the scene and the sense of radiating majesty.

A small canvas such as Downpour in quite a literal way conveys the sensation of water cascading from the heavens and the earth becoming a fluid mass of dark tones. However, within this turbulence, a light seems to radiate from within the right-hand-side of the canvas, giving something of a mysterious glow. Although the artistic parallels that come to mind, including Turner and Whistler, may belong to the 19th century, Forrester Clack's work is not intrinsically anachronistic.

Perhaps one needs to keep in mind that the artist came to maturity in London in the 1980s when the place was in the grips of formalism frequently coming from American sources. The formalist, non-figurative aspect underlies much of his work and there is this mixture between a personal mysticism and the toughness of formalist painting. If you peer closely into the canvas, in the bottom-right-hand corner you can make out the word "AMEN" as an expression of gratitude to the Lord as well as a prayer.

In the large paintings at this exhibition, including Last Light measuring 137 centimetres by 183 centimetres, the grandeur of the concept is celebrated as a celestial conquest where above a low horizon the clouds make up more than three-quarters of the painting. The surface of the paint is allowed to glisten so that the landscape elements that may convey a degree of topographical actuality are dwarfed by the sparkling skies. His palette is rich and sonorous but, at the same time, subtle and subdued.

The painting celebrates something that is beyond the material and the physical and hints at a spiritual dimension that cannot be described but can only be evoked and celebrated. The majesty of nature emerges as a revelation and bears witness to something greater than its human creator.

Other canvases, including the majestic Deluge, may hint at something apocalyptic, as a mighty vision of a great flood that could threaten the existence of humankind. Again, the drama occurs in the heavens where the divine will is revealed.

Forrester Clack has over several decades been perfecting an artistic language where the divine in nature has been allowed full expression and where we, as viewers, are admitted to a perception of the revelation of a transfigured landscape where the sense of the divine is revealed to us.

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