Vision splendid: Robert Brownhall’s Brisbane
Robert Brownhall’s beautiful paintings of Brisbane City Hall are a fitting tribute to an architectural icon.
It’s only fitting that Brisbane City Hall features so strongly in Robert Brownhall’s latest exhibition at Philip Bacon Galleries.
For a start, he did a residency at the Museum of Brisbane (Level 3, City Hall) in 2023 and wanted, I guess, to pay homage to the historic building where he was based for a short time.
But there’s more to it than that. Brisbane City Hall looms large in his mind and his career because it was here where, as a young aspiring artist, he met the late great Lloyd Rees, who was born at Yeronga and started his career sketching on the streets of Brisbane.
Which is kind of what Robert Brownhall does. So, there’s a lovely synergy there. Rees is one of Brownhall’s artistic heroes (his former art lecturer William Robinson is another) and he was lucky enough to meet Rees one lunchtime at City Hall. Brownhall recalls lining up with a gaggle of ladies of a certain age.
“I was dressed in my Goth gear back then,” he says. “I lined up to meet him and when I did I asked him – have you got any advice for a young artist? He said – always paint what you feel not just what you see. I have never forgotten that.”
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Brownhall has gone on to become one of our premier painters and an artist who chronicles our cityscape and coastal regions. As a keen surfer it’s not surprising to find the usual smattering of coastal scenes including Afternoon skyscrapers, with waves peeling off in the foreground and the Gold Coast silhouetted in the background. There are also works of retro beach architecture and Red tanker is a passing ship glimpsed from a park by the seashore.
The stars of this show for me, though, are the visions of Brisbane city. Very few have painted our cityscape as beautifully as Brownhall has. His works leave a legacy of what the city looked like at a certain point in history.
There are atmospheric scenes by day and ambient nocturnes with the lights of the city reflecting in the Brisbane River, as in Regatta Lights, which depicts a famous local pub at night. Broadway Hotel in morning light also pays homage to a heritage pub, although there is only the façade of this one remaining after a devastating fire.
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Robert Brownhall’s Morning clock tower
I’m circling back now to the star of the show – Brisbane City Hall. For my money it’s the most impressive of all the city or town halls in this country. Brownhnall paints it lovingly, as no-one has really painted it before. Morning clock tower is the vision splendid, City Hall and its clock tower bathed in gentle sunshine with attendant shadows.
It’s in the shadows that Brownhall finds himself intrigued and one of the hero pieces of this exhibition is Shadows on the columns, which features the facade of Brisbane City Hall with palm trees and shadows falling across the neoclassical columns.
Then there’s the fantastically purple vision in Night clock tower, a view glimpsed from the nearby building where Brownhall went to sketch during his residency.
Robert Brownhall’s On the ladder
These paintings, of one of our most beloved architectural treasures, one we all share in various ways, are important and compelling paintings by an artist whose role models – the late Loyd Rees and William Robinson (also one of Philip Bacon’s artists) – would be so proud of him.
In a sense, this is a full circle moment for Brownhall, taking him back to that early encounter with Lloyd Rees at City Hall. Decades later, with the advice of Rees still ringing in his ears, Brownhall has turned his attention to the architectural icon at the centre of Brisbane and he has immortalised it in a way only he can.
People have painted Brisbane before and many are still doing so, but nobody is doing it quite as splendidly as Robert Brownhall.
Robert Brownhall, Philip Bacon Galleries, Fortitude Valley, until March 29.