Author Ella Baxter’s column Fever Point joins artists in the thick of their creative process and asks them what this obsessive, rigorous moment feels like for them, and just how they plan on sustaining it. For the first instalment, Ella Baxter meets Zak Tilley.
I stand in the middle of Zak’s studio while he makes us peppermint tea. In person, his landscape paintings are electric. Some are up to my chest or taller. Violet rocks. Baby pink riverbeds.
Alongside the western wall of his studio are his materials. On the top shelf are bottles of paint, their labels faced out. In front of these, lie tubes, organised in colour from warm to cool. Below them are tins, pulled to the front of the shelf, the colours written on their lids; seven veils, bogle, wild spring.
Next to his studio there are two lounges. We sit and I start the recording. “Tell me about colour,” I say, “How do you mix the colours. Does a colour haunt you?” I am haunted. The paintings are wild.
“I’m actually colourblind. Yeah, so colour’s not huge in my life,” says Zak.
“There’s colour I see and there’s colour I’ve learnt to see as well. If I was to look at a field of grass, grass has always registered as orange for me, but I’m never going to paint it orange. I’ll always paint it green… Because I just know it’s green.”
In his first year at art school, during a class on colour theory, Zak asked a teacher to help him with colour mixing.
“There were all these tubes of colours with all these random names for blue and yellow and green I had never heard before. I couldn’t figure it out.”
The senior lecturer continued naming the colours. Eventually she told him she couldn’t help him any further because it would be unfair to the other students.
“I can’t really tell the difference between warm and cool colours, at all… She asked me why I would choose to pursue art if I was colourblind.”
Zak’s use of colour is startling. “I almost glaze over when people talk about how my work looks… I can’t join them in that experience unless it’s about composition.”
After a sold-out solo show, followed by three subsequent shows in the space of a year, Zak began to question his process. He wanted his landscapes to explore something more than what he saw.
“I had ethical issues with it. It felt extractive, it felt absent of narrative and accountability.”
During preparation for his show FERALS, Zak researched invasive species, particularly cats. The feral cat issue in the Northern Territory expanded into the mythology of black panther sightings in Australia, which led to exploring identity theory, and what it means to be an outcast.
“I guess that happened naturally through a conceptual idea of like, am I the feral animal?”
Along the outskirts of Western Sydney, where Zak grew up, there have been over 500 reported panther sightings. The area is also home to Hillsong, the evangelical megachurch, and the Penrith Panthers Rugby league team. The enduring folklore of panthers slinking around local bushland, led the NSW Department of Primary Industries to commission four reports to determine whether the creature actually existed.
“People are obsessed with it and they’re looking for it… but they are unable to capture it…I likened the experience of the panther to me as a child, who was queer, growing up in that area…I was feared. Queerness is feared and people obsess over it.”
The inspiration for Zak’s latest works come from landscapes that have been described from witness statements posted to a Facebook group devoted to panther sightings. The testimonies are dense with geographical specifics. An example: “This evening, around 5:30pm on the Dukes Highway approx 7kms south east of Wirriga…’
Zak paints the landscapes from the descriptions. He then hides a panther in each of the works.
“Queer people have been seen as predatory, and I found it interesting to see myself as a queer child in that area, kind of being hunted.”
“Sometimes I forget where I put it… It’s kind of built into the compositions, built into the landscape, so it can sometimes be a part of the mountains, it can be a part of the stream, sometimes it’s more obvious than others. And it’s funny when people look for it, they’re like, oh, I can see it – and they show me and I’m like, ‘oh, that’s not it.’”
I stare at his paintings, scanning for panther shapes, looking for black. The more I search, the more the colours fade. I’m squinting at valleys, looking closely at dead trees, cliff faces, boulders, and roads. I’m studying each mountain. I start again from the top.
