Rosslynd PIGGOTT

Australian 1958–

Between 1987 and 1988, Rosslynd Piggott spent four months in Italy, describing the experience as ‘complex, dense and still unfolding’. This painting was made during her residency at Il Paretaio, a Tuscan farmhouse established by Arthur Boyd that became a site for Australia Council studio residencies. It reflects her intimate response to the landscape: ‘I felt as though I were living inside a Renaissance painting. Perhaps those hills over there had not changed since 1450? Everywhere was evidence that this was a full, round place that people had lived in and built over generations and generations without much contradiction or change’.

During 1987 and 1988 Rosslynd Piggott occupied a studio at Arthur Boyd’s house, Il Paretaio, in Tuscany, Italy. At the time, the Boyds made their traditional farmhouse available for Australian artists through the Australia Council. Piggott stayed there for four months, during which time she filled numerous sketchbooks with material to develop into paintings. At this early stage in her career, Piggott drew on certain aspects of European art history in the development of her imagery and palette. The surrealist and poetic tendencies in her thinly painted, translucently veiled pictures recalls her reading of Breton and Rimbaud, while her palette and painting process evokes the surfaces of Italian quattrocento painting and the works of Piero della Francesca, the Lorenzetti brothers and Simone Martini.

Piggott’s memories of Il Paretaio are much like the scene of the painting, Italy, 1988: an undulating landscape bathed in and softened by golden light, and steeped in cultural history. The proximity of Il Paretaio to Florence enabled Piggott to regularly immerse herself in the collections of the Uffizi, and Italy draws especially on the opulent and mesmerising visual power of Simone Martini’s The Annunciation with Saints Ansanus and Margaret and four prophets, 1333, and the depiction of the lily as a metaphor for purity.

Italy was the first work painted upon Piggott’s return to Australia in 1988. The artist’s scrutiny of church frescoes and the historical construction of visual narratives remained an important part of the development of her imagery after her return. Figuration predominates in Piggott’s paintings of the mid to late 1980s and, just as the paint is applied in veils of luminous pigment, so too the images themselves mask aspects of autobiography and personal experience with layers and forms that are simultaneously enigmatic and emblematic.

Jason Smith