Nude in a Starry Field is a paean to the power of nature, sex and painting, all touchstones of Michael Illingworth’s art. It belongs to a body of whimsical anthropomorphic landscapes started in the late 1960s which banish Illingworth’s familiar cast of bewildered and neutered suburbanites beyond the frame. Illingworth turns his gaze away from the evils of modern culture, fully devoting his art to the wonders and majesty of the natural world.
Recognisable landscape forms are refigured through imagined or magical elements, with heavy sexual overtones. The centralised hill becomes the breast of a living landscape, whose sweeps and curves are echoed in the pulsating organic shapes that writhe in orgiastic ecstasy beneath it. These are the potent and majestic deities of nature who, Illingworth insisted, were appreciated by Maori but were being driven from the land through Western materialism and the inhibited and restrictive behaviour it encourages.
Nude in a Starry Field can easily be read through the social criticism for which Illingworth is best known. Bourgeois Western culture is condemned through its absence and distance from this scene of natural harmony. But, for Illingworth, these landscapes were primarily about seeing, experiencing and conveying the full power of nature. He argued that art itself had its origins in these elemental forces, and must “come straight from the heart, the primeval being”¹. Here a back-to-earth nature philosophy merges with a romantic faith in the artist as a visionary or seer who can experience the world more sensitively than can most, and whose role is to convey these experiences through art.
This painting demonstrates Illingworth’s solution to this difficult task. He liberates his landscape from the demands of realistic representation, with its appeal to surface appearances. The organic sexualised forms serve as flat strips or bands of colour that extend across the picture plane, and are layered to eliminate spatial depth and emphasise pattern and colouring. Heightened colour and stylised forms further remove the scene from ‘the real’, while making connections to the art and vision of children which Illingworth valued for their potential to reconfigure the familiar in new and unexpected ways.
Illingworth borrowed Paul Klee’s term ‘poetic imagery’ to explain the impact a painting like Nude in a Starry Field should have on the viewer. This is an art that seeks to bypass the intellect and reason. It is designed to arouse the sensory and the imaginative: qualities Illingworth believed were crushed in modern society, but could be fully restored through the ‘return’ to older and more meaningful ways of experiencing the world. Nude in a Starry Field acts as evidence of Illingworth’s own communion with these forces and as an invitation for us all to experience this way of being. AARON LISTER ¹ ‘Interview with Michael Illingworth’, Barry Lett Galleries Newsletter, 19 August 1965.