This was to emerge as the most colourful and pleasing experience in this era of my painting. After 4 years of developing this technique I could not remember a time when I had completed a painting with such a feeling of vitality and satisfaction. The elements were pleasing and this time I felt there was NO struggle with compositional elements – it was one of those rare times… ’when things just come together’..
The idea of a collapsing land when everything underneath has been exploited was probably central all along to what I was trying to create.
Also this was produced at a time when the problem of salinity was another 15 years away from us. So in that sense I feel vindicated and justified. For years dire warnings had been made about the exploitation of underground water reserves from the vast artesian basins that lie beneath the land.
In nature you can’t get anything for nothing! The exhaustion of vast underground water resources lowered the water table and the salt rose to the surface killing millions of square hectares throughout the Riverina and beyond. Even NOW we are in our infancy in dealing with it AND NO ONE KNOWS WHAT THE ULTIMATE COST WILL BE.
Why couldn’t a whole piece of landscape disappear if there was nothing left underneath to hold it up? Was this the logical (or illogical) end of days scenario that had always been prophesised? And why does destruction always have to come from above in the form of comets or rogue asteroids – ever thought that it could come from below?
The elements in this composition are more finely balanced. The line work is more exact and the colour representation has more harmony. The tension of the collapse on the left as the depleted ‘water’ is spewed out is balanced in part by the large ‘funnel Excavator’ on the right. In fact this particular ‘monster’ is almost ‘jigsaw’ in it’s shape but it is impossible to find the matching part – particularly because amid all this chaos, there isn’t one.
In it’s greedy search for riches or bounty it just carves out more room for itself than it ever needed. Ultimately though the cavity needed to house itself puts ‘it’ out of reach of everything around it! A ‘chain’ is spurted out to find more nourishment but in reality all it can find is another one of it’s own kind but at an earlier stage of development.
Taking more than is needed in this sense then becomes the ultimate in greed - a ’self destructive’ act that will only speed it’s own destruction and that of it’s own kind. Ultimate greed then spawns ultimate sin!
There is another level below this and perhaps below that and so on.
As with ‘Fatality’ there is a civilisation above but it is starting to collapse on itself (in more ways than one!) The chains and the funnels are now more structured as the ‘land’ above becomes completely undermined and begins to slide into the caverns deep below. Perhaps the mass of the ‘continent above’ will fill the void and provide some nourishment for the hope that is still pushing up from the lower right hand side depicting or suggesting ‘villages’ or ‘dwellings’ that will create some sort of new age civilisation.
Time and cycle, death then life, the sequence goes on – but do we ever learn from one generation to the next?
At this time this one painting DID cause such intense interest at a Gippsland Artists Society Exhibition that it was hung on loan in a local hospital for about 2 weeks. I later retrieved it amongst mixed criticism - one child later said to me .. ’Gee Mr. Smith don’t we look horrible on the inside’… Trust a Grade 5 child to make such a valid assessment without realising the accuracy of her criticism! Yes! It is horrible only when you look to deep!
It was here that this series of paintings finished at this time, perhaps to be revisited at a later time.
They did however provide the ‘medium’ to embark on my first series of social commentaries – ‘The Joe n’ Edna Series’.
