ANDREW SAYERS REMEMBERED POSTHUMOUSLY IN CANBERRA WITH AN EXHIBITION OF HIS LANDSCAPE PAINTINGS

For almost three decades, Andrew Sayers (1957-2015) was one of the most influential and respected figures in the Canberra visual arts scene.

Born in England, he emigrated with his family to Australia in 1964 at age seven. In 1979, the year he completed his Fine Arts studies at the University of Sydney, the Art Gallery of New South Wales snapped him up and appointed him curatorial assistant.

In 1981, he took up the appointment as assistant director of the Newcastle Region Art Gallery for four years. In 1985, he became curator of Australian drawings at the National Gallery of Australia, a curatorial brief that quickly expanded to include watercolours and colonial paintings, and he also served as assistant director.

While still in his 20s, he had a string of important major exhibitions to his name, including the work of Albert Tucker, Sidney Nolan and James Gleeson.

Several major books followed, including Drawing in Australia (1989), Aboriginal Artists of the 19th century (1994), New Worlds from Old (1998) and Australian Art (2001).

After leaving the National Gallery in 1998, he was appointed inaugural director of the National Portrait Gallery, which he led for a dozen years, delivering a new function-designed building, establishing the collection, and creating a string of major popular exhibitions.

The late Gordon Darling, who, together with his wife Marilyn Darling, was the gallery’s major patron, told me that without Andrew there would not have been a National Portrait Gallery.

In 2010, Sayers became director of the National Museum of Australia, but three years into a five-year contract, he quit in a shock announcement to join his wife Perry and their three daughters, who had earlier moved to Melbourne.

In May 2014, Sayers was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died in October of the following year. It is impossible to view this exhibition of his landscape gouaches without still feeling the pain of the recent loss of an amazing friend.

Sayers was a ridiculously gifted individual. He possessed a brilliant scholarly mind; he was an outstanding curator and gallery director and a gifted painter. His dedication to his day job left little time to paint en plein air, and he produced most of his paintings after retiring from his curatorial duties.

This exhibition of 20 small-scale gouache paintings on paper was executed between 2014 and 2015, with the sole exception of Beach Evening, 2011, which, with its simple abstracted colour masses, is a highlight in the show.

Sayers exhibited his paintings for the first time in September 2014, as he would jokingly say, “off Broadway”, at Mister Jones in the heart of Bermagui.

In May 2015, a second, much larger exhibition was held in Melbourne and then, posthumously, in 2015 at the Beaver Galleries in Canberra. All these exhibitions were wonderfully successful in both sales and critical acclaim.

The exhibition at the Barton ArtBox brings to the fore Sayers’s lightness of touch, spontaneity, a breathing atmospheric quality and his gift of saying so much with very few marks on the paper. Pieces including Rock Platform, Coledale, 2014, Rocks Awash, Coledale, 2014, Two volcanoes, Mt Moorookyle and Mt Kooroocheang, 2015, and Mt Moorookyle I, 2015, are among the show’s more successful works.

Over many years, Sayers built up a knowledge of visual literacy and now applied it with freedom and ease, so the sketches appear to breathe and float over the surface of the paper.

His favourite medium, gouache – a slightly opaque, water-based medium sometimes called poster paint in Australia – suggests form without articulating detail. A floating lightness prevails throughout the exhibition.

We are emotionally too close to the artist’s passing to be able to stand back and objectively evaluate his contribution to Australian art. However, it is amazing how much he managed to pack into his 58 years, and it remains to be seen how he will be best remembered – as a scholar, an art gallery director and curator or as an artist.

Andrew Sayers: The Capital and beyond: The landscapes of Andrew Sayers is now open at the Barton ArtBox, 7 Young Street, Barton. It closes on 31 October and is open Friday to Sunday from 11 am to 5 pm.