Exact Illusions
Donnalyn Xu on Clarice Beckett
Clarice Beckett, The Yarra, Sunset, c. 1930, oil on board, 30.5 x 35.5 cm. Private collection, Melbourne.
I am reading Kobayashi Issa’s The Spring of My Life when it occurs to me that I have never attempted to write a haiku poem. In childhood, it was taught as a fun exercise, almost entirely focused on formal structure and syllable count—five-seven-five, unrhymed, exacting, short. Distinct from its original Japanese form (which doesn’t have syllables but phonetic ‘sounds’ called ‘on’/‘音’), the English haiku can feel overly prescriptive, the numbers arbitrarily assigned. Yet there is something poetic about restraint, the way options are deliberately limited in order to remove anything excessive, leaving the words and spaces between them unadorned. When I read haiku, I tend to focus less on each line and its meaning, and instead find myself drawn to isolated words, their strange and distinct arrangement, like detecting patterns in a song.
In this private and porous act of reading Issa’s haiku poems, my desire to follow the threads begins to unspool.
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January 2023. It’s my first day on Kaurna Country, and in the early afternoon, when the sun is at its strongest, the southern heat is unbearable: dry and sleep-inducing. I have some time to spare before dinner, so I leave the botanical gardens and make my way towards the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA). Wandering aimlessly from room to room, I encounter each painting accidentally, too exhausted from my morning flight to register any interest in artworks that are both familiar and new to me—some learned about in a classroom many years ago, or found in the pages of a heavy artist’s book. As I move through the vibrant gallery, I photograph the edges of a blue plate and an eggshell-coloured detail in a painted cloud, zooming in to capture its thick impasto brush strokes.
At first, I almost walk past it. Unlike the other rooms, which are decorated with an embellished floral wallpaper, the paintings hang in a cluster on a plain grey wall, small and unassuming beside other Australian modernist landscapes: Hans Heysen’s dry bushlands, John Russell’s speckled pointillism. While Heysen and Russell paint the Australian landscape with striking colours and techniques that I can easily recognise through art historical terms as being Pastoral and Modernist, the paintings I have just stumbled across feel different. The soft melting colours seem unearthly, yet the images are still anchored to the physical world, capturing all its quiet strangeness.
When I pause to look at the canvases in their haphazard mix of gold and black frames, I think of the reproductions and postcards taped above my desk back at home; how I never bother to remove a second-hand print from its original frame to match the rest, sentimental about it arriving to me in that particular condition. These paintings have the same auspicious effect.
Positioned above eye-level, I must strain to take a closer look. The Melbourne streets and beaches listed in the object label are unfamiliar, but as I look more closely at the paintings I feel as though I have been to these strange and luminous places before. Some of the titles are not site-specific, but short descriptors: Beach Scene, Solitude, Sea Drift, Passing Trams.
Although I have never come across this artist, I instantly feel a desire to know who they are and why they have painted these intimate yet impersonal scenes, devoid of any recognisable features or faces. Alongside my unknowing, their story feels obscured, with no hints left on the canvas. I take a picture of the artworks and the wall text beside it, making a note of their name in my mind—Clarice Beckett.
Clarice Beckett paintings, exhibition view, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide.
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The only souvenir I bring home is a postcard print of Beckett’s Wet day, Brighton (1928) from the gallery shop. I keep it between the pages of a paperback, and forget about it until the rainy grey scene falls onto my lap one morning. Unlike the framed paintings hanging high at the gallery, the postcard, with its slightly bent corners and plain white border, has a fragile and human materiality. The note on the back cuts a life down to a brief sentence: ‘Clarice Beckett, born Casterton, Victoria 1887, died Melbourne 1935.’ The material is listed as oil on board, and the rhythmic assonance of this unremarkable description evokes a sturdy and bodily image of the artist at work.
In Wet day, Brighton, Beckett’s traces linger in the painterly brushstrokes that seem to melt into each other, looking as if the paint is still wet. The limited palette of browns, greys and whites is indicative of the tonalist movement that Beckett was part of in the 1910s, but a bright orange warmth flickers in one corner of the painting—like the edges of a flame, it is echoed in the surrounding air, faintly blended into the horizon line. This orange is suggestive of surprise and delight: evoking the orange of a hazard sign, a warning, a sunset bursting through a smoggy landscape. Our eyes are pulled towards it, and its high contrast against the cool grey asphalt disrupts the overarching atmosphere of silence, indistinct and out of focus.
Clarice Beckett, Wet day, Brighton, c. 1928, oil on board, 17.4 x 22.2 cm. Courtesy: Art Gallery of South Australia
This style of tonalist painting involves placing more emphasis on value and tonal relationships—the dark and the light—to draw out spatial depth. It often features brushstrokes that are broken and soft, yet still loyal to what the painter sees and experiences. A blurred body is still a body, even if it is only made known through the vague shadow of a silhouette. It’s unsurprising, then, that tonalism has often been compared to the haiku form, due to its minimalist approach in how it captures the essence of a particular moment in time. In his speech ‘The Question of Works in Haiku’, Paul O. Williams observes: ‘Haiku is often a poetry written around the edges of the consciousness of the poet. And haiku helps poets extend the borders of their attention to notice what is going on at the edge of the eye.’ ①
In Beckett’s paintings, movement frequently occurs right on the edges. Bodies emerge out of the fog, cars sink into corners, life is continuously pushed against the frame. This recurs throughout the painter’s entire body of work. As Williams notes, this mode of creation extends the borders of our attention to what lies outside our direct field of vision, a gesture that reminds us that the outside world still exists beyond the brief and momentary image that we are faced with at any given point in time. In a 1924 exhibition catalogue, Beckett wrote that she sought to create ‘as nearly as possible an exact illusion of reality’. ② It must be emphasised that she did not intend to simply create an illusion, but an exact illusion. It is a visualisation that is as precise as it is deliberate, entirely consistent with her body of work. But our reading of it opens up new questions—for whose reality is she referring to if not her own?
It is interesting to note that in the National Gallery of Australia’s Know My Name publication, novelist and art critic Jennifer Higgie claims, ‘Clarice Beckett didn’t care about detail: hers is an in-between art, as much an evocation of mood as a description of place.’ ③ Echoing William’s suggestion that the writing of haiku is an almost unconscious act written on the edges, both critics seem to look past the careful and meticulous observation involved in these expressions of the everyday.
This perspective firstly overlooks the long history of haiku as the opening part (‘hokku’) of a longer form called ‘renga’, which was understood by Japanese poets in the medieval period to be more akin to a literary game with several specific rules than what we currently understand to make up the genre of poetry, at least in English and within western traditions. In a similar way, we might trace the history of Tonalism to consider why this style of painting emerged in Australia in the 1920s—was this an unintentional and unconscious act, or a deliberate response to the artist’s environment at the time? When art lacks an explicitly political theme or narrative, it is often regarded through interpretations that are neutral, abstract and dehistoricised. Yet, how we choose to render the everyday—the quietude and quotidian—is inherently political, even if the intention to be political was not present in the first place. It speaks to what has been negated to the borders of the artist’s consciousness, the careful act of focusing on it for one brief and sudden moment.
Rather than attempt to reconcile the cultural and material differences between tonalist painting and haiku however, the interferences that arise allow us to trace the tactility of language, and the shared enquiries that have drawn them into relation. One question that often emerges in discussions of haiku is whether it can exist in languages other than Japanese at all, though critics such as Hiroaki Sato suggest that the English haiku has become its own form of poetry and should be analysed in its own right. ④
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Beckett painted the Yarra River many times between the 1920s and 1930s, continuing to do so until a few years before her untimely death in 1935. In my favourite rendition View Across the Yarra (c. 1931), the time is early dawn, and the cityscape across the river is only a faint reflection in the water, its shadow obscured by wintering trees in the foreground. Lights flicker in the distance, a pale yellow that isn’t sharp enough to be pure white. Depicting the same location through changing seasons and alternating times of day, hers is another story of return, reflecting the misty and foggy landscapes in its original name.
The Yarra River is called ‘Birrarung’ in the Wurundjeri language. Loosely translated to mean a ‘place of mist and shadows’, the river holds a special significance for the Wurundjeri people: before invasion, it was a fresh running river, verdant and teeming with sea life. In Beckett’s painting of a misty morning, the view across the river is barely a wraith in the distance.
Clarice Beckett, View Across the Yarra, c.1931, oil on pulpboard, 34.5 x 45.5 cm. Courtesy: Malvern Fine Art Gallery, Melbourne.
Here, a melancholic emptiness evokes a certain experiential atmosphere. More significant than narrative, however, is mood—by limiting her tonal reference and rendering the sharpness of reality into loose gestures and shapes, Beckett has not only painted a portrait of a landscape, but a portrayal of an inner life. She dissolves form but maintains an allegiance to what she sees, conveying a sense of distance and space.
Looking at View Across the Yarra now, I am reminded of Issa’s poem ‘The world of dew’. As one of his most famous works, it is notably absent from The Spring of My Life, but appears in the collection’s introduction by translator Sam Hamill due to its longstanding significance:
The world of dew
is the world of dew.
And yet, and yet—⑤
Written after the death of his child, Issa’s short poem is deceptively simple. After all, an overt repetition of a single sentence is at times a realisation that one comes upon during a time of mourning and grief. The world of dew / is the world of dew. Separated by a line break, the single word—‘is’—stands between the two phrases, like glass between a reflection. The final line echoes this repetition, although it adds an additional shift through the inclusion of punctuation marks to signal a pause, or a breath. ⑥ There is a small anguish in the perfect softness of the ‘And’ in ‘And yet’. The em-dash suggests an unfinished thought. Can something so inexpressible ever be explained? Is it enough to draw the shape of a feeling into existence, to hint at its recurring and insistent presence in life, even without answer?
Hamill goes on to note: ‘Much of what passes for haiku, or the translation of haiku into American English, is not really either … [they] have often been reduced to fragmentary English bearing little resemblance to the music, meaning, or syntax of the original’. Rather than trim the language into a precise syllable count, Hamill makes use of interpolation to fill in these spaces in his translation of Issa’s haiku, stating that his primary concern is ‘to say what the poet says without rearranging the original order of perception’.
The order in which we notice things can be just as significant as what we are seeing. Although ‘The world of dew’ has the conceptual features of haiku that many might expect—contemplation, seasonal change, careful observation—it also contains a sense of restlessness that is present throughout its concise structure. A similar sentiment can be gleaned through Beckett’s work, even if that is not necessarily a reflection of form or technique but a distinctly personal inflection; what we are seeing are her brushstrokes, her impressions. Perhaps this can only be interpreted as attempt—by both Beckett and Issa—as they begin to carve the shape of something they consider to be disappearing: the disappearing self into the ephemeral world, the artist into the genre that has been ascribed. How can we read ourselves otherwise?
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Beckett never married, nor did she travel overseas or leave her home state of Victoria. Due to her domestic obligations as a caregiver to her parents, she was only able to paint in the early mornings and evenings. Denied a studio in their home, she worked in the kitchen, and transported her paintings and equipment in a small trolley to paint street and coastal landscapes en plein air. She left no diaries and only two letters.
Most of the literature on Beckett begins from a point of recovery. Her father burnt some of her surviving work after she died, thinking they were unfinished. Other paintings were lost during a bushfire in 1944, or left forgotten in an open-sided rural farm shed. The discovery of this shed in the 1970s by curator and art historian Rosalind Hollinrake led to the public resurfacing of Beckett as an unknown and forgotten Australian woman artist. Like the myth of the artist as genius, the woman artist is a recurring narrative in the western art canon.
Every year, I teach Linda Nochlin’s ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ to first-year art history students. I studied this same essay when I was in my first year of university, and I recognise the awe and wonder in their faces when we begin to unpack the central question Nochlin poses: how theory often challenges us but also reaffirms our thinking, especially as it teaches us new ways of articulating what we have always known.
In this central text, Nochlin argues that it was institutional rather than individual barriers that prevented women from succeeding in the western art world. As Nochlin suggests, it may seem straightforward to view the discovery of ‘unknown’ women artists as a way to rectify their absence in the canon; to make a claim for their underappreciated ‘greatness’ and skill by arguing that it has always existed. However, our reliance on simply widening the canon to include more underrepresented voices is, as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o reminds us, another way of simply ‘moving the centre’ rather than challenging and changing our methods. The inclusion of Nochlin’s essay in the university curriculum reflects how even criticism becomes normalised, and how we might read against this by being open to more personal and curious discussions of art.
It is difficult to analyse a work of art without retreating to discipline. Embarking on an analysis feels like exercising a muscle: to assess a light in the corner, give a certain painter a name, a story. Yet, when I read other writing on art, I am really looking for the moments where an author slips and deviates from their argument to point out the jagged edge of a sculpture, or the velvet staircase that leads to the main exhibition room. Across Beckett’s paintings, these small distractions are like secret indulgences, present and scattered. Through her work, we still find vivid ways to describe colours as we encounter objects such as a stained wine shadow or the buttery yellow sky.
Much like in writing, walking through a gallery requires meandering. You don’t know where you’re heading, even if you’re there for a specific exhibition; you inevitably pass by other works in the entrance, the foyer, beside the entrance to the bathroom. You can’t preempt how you’ll feel, what you’ll discover. Reading relations into things requires a distracted attentiveness—a type of looking that involves little thinking. However, when you see a colour that evokes a specific feeling—a shock of orange, or a sliver of white paint around the edge of an object—it stuns the self back into a certain embodiment that would not occur otherwise if not for that simple highlight, always so endearing and expansive.
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After my initial discovery of Beckett’s work at AGSA, I realise that I had missed the 2021 major exhibition Clarice Beckett: The present moment in the same venue. Luckily, there is digital documentation. An online and interactive virtual exhibition, we begin by entering a room where there is a domestic kitchen installation, referencing her makeshift studio space. A large window opens to the next room, which contains a model sink and paintbrushes sitting in a cup, as if they have been left there to be washed. This setting allows the viewer some insight into the creation of Beckett’s work, yet also manages to instil the sense of interiority that Beckett’s paintings evoke even though for her the act of painting itself often takes place outdoors. It is of looking at nature from inside—sometimes literally—but often, out of necessity to turn inwards and make space, that evokes a certain self-effacement and introspection.
These vestiges are what make Beckett’s work an exercise in close looking. It is a way of reading into things, leaning into surprise and delight. Her paintings have a surreal and hazy quality that is difficult to ascertain but becomes more apparent each time you return. It is a softness found in dreams—one that leaves a vague and momentary impression. It is not unlike the shape of a lone blurred figure on the side of a quiet road, their silhouette suddenly lit by the headlights of a passing car; a realisation, however unremarkable and brief.
In a similar sense, while the speaker isn’t often the focus of a haiku, their presence is revealed through an interior reflection. Following a particularly intense period of suffering and poverty, and as he was nearing the age of fifty, Issa wrote:
O moonlit blossoms—
I’ve squandered forty-nine years
walking beneath you
As the poem introduces an image of nature as its entry point, it is inviting the reader to not only see the world, but to see into it. ⑦ The environment outside is understood through the narrator’s melancholic gaze, informing our own sense of living and being in the world. The haiku is rarely confessional, but still relies on that interiority to reach the reader. This is much like how we look for parts of ourselves in artworks, for parts that are seemingly absent.
What does it mean to explore what follows unknowing? This question is particularly resonant when we attempt to trace the entangled threads, and when we begin to come upon varying realisations as stories become narratives and then singular truths. Perhaps it is enough that Beckett’s artworks, for me and many others, signify a moment of rest. That looking deeply at a painting for the first time can make us feel changed somehow, even if we don’t have the language to understand how or why in the moment. It is only when we step out of the museum and into the streets, or open a window to a familiar morning view—when the image seeps in, and the connections make themselves known to us.
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Works Cited
✷ 1. Paul O. Williams, quoted in On Haiku, Hiroaki Sato, 2018.
✷ 2. Clarice Beckett, ‘20 Melbourne painters’, 6th Annual Exhibition Catalogue, 1924, quoted in Frances Lindsay, ‘Foreword’, in Rosalind Hollinrake, Clarice Beckett: Politically incorrect, The Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne, 1999, p 19.
✷ 3. Jennifer Higgie, ‘Clarice Beckett,’ Know My Name, edited by Natasha Bullock, Kelli Cole, Deborah Hart, and Elspeth Pitt, National Gallery of Australia, 2020, 42–43.
✷ 4. Hiroaki Sato, On Haiku, 2018, 18–19.
✷ 5. Kobayashi Issa, The Dumpling Field: Haiku of Issa, translated by Lucien Stryk with the assistance of Noboru Fujiwara, 1991.
✷ 6. Translated from the Japanese by Lewis Mackenzie in Autumn Wind: A Selection from the Poems of Issa (1984), pp. 5. The punctuation and syntax of this poem may vary depending on the translation.
✷ 7. Sean Wiebe, ‘Writing the Self Through Haiku,’ in At the Intersection of Selves and Subject: Exploring the Curricular Landscape of Identity, edited by Ellyn Lyle, 2017, 71.
Donnalyn Xu is a writer, poet, and artsworker living and learning on Dharug land. She is interested in the entanglement between art and language, particularly as a shared mode of enquiry and care. Her writing has been published in Voiceworks, Liminal, Peril, Cordite, and elsewhere.