"This landscape can be very alienating, gray and angry for days on end," says Scholes
It was Francis Bacon who observed some 400 years ago that "the subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding." Few artists would embrace this idea more completely than Lisa Falk. A bohemian, Falk produces astonishing representations of Tasmanian landscapes with colored pencils that look like those you'd find in a kindergarten. Each of her drawings — that's what they are, though they don't look like drawings, more like oils — takes several months to complete, multiple layers creating the rich depths that define her work. "Rivers play a far deeper role in my work than by way of mere appearance," Falk says. "I'm captivated by the metaphoric meaning of the river and the effect of this on the mind."
In variations of these feelings, she has plenty of company among Tasmania's creative elite. Some, like Falk, try to capture the beauty of the state's rivers in pictures. For others, water inspires their art in ways more obscure but no less profound. From the window of the small upstairs room in which Katherine Scholes composes her sweeping novels, there's nothing to see besides an enormous stretch of the Derwent River, including, on the southern horizon, its yawning mouth. "There've been times when the wind has been howling that I've felt the fury fueling my creative energy," says Scholes, whose more recent books — including last year's The Stone Angel, about a globe-trotting journalist who returns home to a Tasmanian fishing village when her father goes missing at sea — have hit their mark overseas, particularly in Germany, where sales exceed a million copies. "But mostly, for me, the river is a peaceful presence because it's so eternal."
There's a timeless quality, too, about artist Falk, who's in her 40s but could pass for 25. She lives in a cottage off a dirt road in Lucaston — near Huonville, south of Hobart — a sleepy place she suspects is being slowly taken over by more ambitious souls. She's doe-eyed and long-haired, with a short fringe she either chopped herself or might want to ditch her hairdresser over. On hikes that can last up to five days, she selects scenes she wants to capture and photographs them. "There are many sacred rivers in Tasmania from which I drink and draw my inspiration," she says, but her favorite spot is Cephissus Creek, which flows into the Narcissus River in the Cradle Mountain-Lake St. Clair National Park in the central west. She feels her work is evolving, that "an element of surrealism" is creeping into the detail. "I like to play with that," she says. "That's where I have the fun: I enter a surreal realm."
It's a realm where many others may feel lost. "My drawings are meditations," she explains in a little impromptu essay, "and like the water depicted therein they reflect my mind and the psyche, providing and producing both personal and universal spiritual revelations." Whatever the motivation, a Falk is a sight to behold and fetches up to $A10,000.
It would be hard to conceive of a landscape artist more different in approach from Falk than the veteran Roger Murphy. "If I don't paint three pictures a week I feel as though I'm slacking," says the gray-bearded, avuncular Murphy, who was 17 and working as an apprentice to a lithographic artist in a printing factory when his boss gave him "the best piece of advice I've ever been given." The boss, Roy Cox, was at the time continuing a strong tradition of watercolor landscape painting in Tasmania; he suggested to the young Murphy that he hop on board.