Nature swims with life in Dale's walk-in paradise

By Dewi Cooke
December 4, 2004
Pamela Dale in her studio.

Pamela Dale in her studio.
Photo: Rodger Cummins

A decade divided between Australia and Europe has nurtured Pamela Dale's appreciation for life's more beautiful moments.

From the south of France to Victoria's Mornington Peninsula, she has sat, painted and absorbed her surrounds. In her current series of large, intricate oil paintings, created over two years, Dale has opened windows to a paradise in which barn owls sit surrounded by blooming sunflowers; where rosellas and cockatiels nuzzle each other on the branches of backyard trees. Her detailed depictions of wildlife and lush landscapes would verge on the photo-realistic were it not for their deliberately constructed nature.

"These works aren't actually located in any one culture and so I'm going after the universal," Dale says. "I think one of my jobs as an artist is to shine the light back on beauty, whether it be natural beauty or something else. Because, in fact, these are highly artificial."

At 42, Dale's exposure to the European way of life has rubbed off on her. Her city studio is sparse, clean and neat. Her workbench has a single chair behind it and underneath her provincial wash-basin hangs a gingham curtain.

Awarded the Keith and Elisabeth Murdoch Travelling Fellowship in 1993, she went to Europe, mainly France and Holland, where she was known for her printmaking and works on paper before her painting skills came to the fore. Despite 10 years of living intermittently overseas, Dale enjoys working in Australia. She grew up in Melbourne, her birthplace, and country Victoria. The city made its impact on Dale but her eight years in the country wielded the greatest influence. "We had incredible freedom to roam and explore and, of course, we had plenty of animals."

Although Europe has some of the world's most famous greenery, Dale says it was two rooms painted to look like gardens in Paris' Musee de Cluny that brought her more joy than anything else she saw in her time on the continent.

"When I went in to those two rooms they made a huge impression on me, it was just like that flood of joy," she says.

"In the middle of this huge city in Europe you go into these rooms and there's this transformation, just because of an idea. I think that when you're overseas you do feel disconnected from nature, whereas in Australia you're still very connected all of the time. In a way there's a response to that (in my work)."

Dale says her paintings, executed in blue, are "lived" pieces. Stretching canvas across her studio wall, Dale paints directly on to them. No sketching, no outlines, just paint as she places it. It's a process that Dale describes as very different from her previous work, though no less time consuming.

"These take more than a month to create, so you've actually got to live in that space while you're creating. They're 'lived' in the sense that, imaginatively, I can go anywhere in the world on this canvas."

Her process allows for exploration and innovation but little room for error. Dale embraces these "happy accidents".

"They're incorporated," she says. "I'm not kidding you, you really are fully in the zone when you're making them. Some days are quicker, some days slower, but as I said, you live it. In a way, they direct themselves and there's very little separation between you and what you're doing at that time."

The detail of the paintings - plumage around a bird's eye or pollen on a flower - are reminiscent of some of Dale's prints, although the artist says the scale of the works are what sets them apart.

"Generally I'm trying to get a feel of the walk-in paradise, so to speak. Because these are large scale, you actually walk into them in a sense. You can get sucked into one of the flowers, but when you're creating them it is like an organic development of shape upon shape and it also has echoes of how nature creates itself, the replication."

Although some works have backgrounds of yellow or rose, the fine blue paint Dale works with also evokes the intricate detail of a delft tile. Her representations are often so faithful, there is a sense the leaves in the painted scene might slowly unfurl and the birds will flap their wings and fly away. Even though the image is still, it's as though the movement and life of the scene have been held for a moment, not captured. The word "paradise" gets bandied around a lot and Dale says her work strives to discover it.

"I think it's really worthy to look for paradise in the nooks and crevices of our contemporary life," she says. "We don't have much connection with mythical places or we're trying to hold on to what little we've got, so in a way there's a response to that, in a way they're the opposite to hard-edged consumerism."

White Tiger and the Magic Garden is at Spacement Gallery until December 11.