Landscape artist Jo Bertini has spent the best part of four decades working in remote, arid parts of Australia abroad.
Jo Bertini barely pauses as she walks through the lightly timbered landscape of Turraburra station northeast of Aramac in central western Queensland. Sketchbook in one hand and paintbrush in the other, Jo is a veteran at recording what she sees as she moves through the bush. As an expedition artist, she has decades of experience painting and walking across country way more inhospitable than this former cattle station. The land has recently been purchased and is being regenerated by Suzanne Thompson, matriarch of the traditional owners, the Iningai people, and Jo and her partner, Thomas Studer, have joined a group of visitors to learn about the plans Suzanne has for sharing traditional knowledge of this ancient landscape and its rock walls and caves covered in her ancestors’ paintings and engravings.
It’s a privilege to see Jo in action as she incessantly records her experience of the landscape in watercolour and gouache, dipping her brush in the water-filled capsule that fits neatly over its tip, allowing her to perform the artistic equivalent of walking and chewing gum and fill sketchbooks with immediate reactions to what she is seeing. At the end of her trip, Jo will return to her studio and develop works in oil paints on a larger and more detailed scale.
Jo’s ability to record the moment while walking across inhospitable terrain has been honed over many years. “I’ve been doing it since I was a child,” she explains. “In the desert, there are always water restrictions, so I developed the technique of using minimal amounts of my drinking water and refined it by using watercolours, gouache, crayon and pencil.”
Jo comes from a long line of artists and scientists — her mother was the sculptor Anne Ferguson and her aunt, the New York-based painter Judy Cotton. Her grandfather, Robert Cotton, and his cousin, Olive Cotton, are well known photographers, while other family members include flower painter Ellis Rowan and the ornithologist and bird painter John Cotton. Jo studied fine arts at The University of Sydney in the early 1980s, then headed overseas where she lived, worked and studied in France and Italy and by correspondence through The Open University in London for a decade. “Having a natural gift will only take you so far,” she says. “You need good teachers to show you the short cuts and refi ne your technique. I was fortunate that I started doing medical drawings for money. I’d sit in on surgical procedures, mainly maxillofacial and oral operations and draw the bits cameras couldn’t photograph. That gave me money to travel and find good teachers, but also the ability to draw and paint anything. I’d change hats between being a scientific painter and a creative artist. I didn’t understand how much of a skill that was, but I now appreciate it.”
Returning to Australia, Jo studied printmaking, life drawing and painting at Sydney’s National Art School. She also put her scientific training to use with a decade working as an expedition artist for Australian Desert Expeditions, a group of experts from national universities, museums and scientific institutions undertaking ecological, archaeological and Indigenous research into the most remote and inaccessible regions of the Australian deserts. “The Simpson, Strzelecki, Tirari, you name it, I’ve walked them all,” she says. “We walked with camels carrying our supplies. The scientists need someone to draw maps and record the fossils and plants — the parts you can see and what you can’t see under the ground. When an expedition needs an artist who knows how to light a fi re, boil a billy and not wash for three months, I’m your woman.”
Jo has been a finalist in numerous art awards, including the Wynne and Sulman Prizes at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Portia Geach Memorial Award, the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize, the Blake Prize, the Fleurieu Biennale Landscape Prize, Salon des Refusés and the Mosman Art Prize. She’s received public commissions, grants and artist-in-residencies from the National Museum of Australia, Brisbane City Council, the Bundanon Trust, Bathurst Regional Gallery, Hill End, Taronga Zoo, Murray Art Museum Albury, ArtStream Albury, Albury Regional Gallery and, internationally, in India, New Mexico and Colorado, USA.
Her work is represented in public, corporate and private collections in Australia and internationally and, in 2014, her book, Fieldwork, an archive of a decade’s paintings from her sketchbooks, was published by Zabriskie Books. Most recently, she exhibited a suite of works celebrating the beauty and biodiversity of wilderness environments called Elsewhere at Sydney’s Arthouse Gallery.
Jo holds an American extraordinary ability visa, which allows her to live and work on projects in the deserts of northern New Mexico. She divides her time between Australia and the home she shares with her partner, musician and builder Thomas Studer, in the native American Tewa village of Abiquiu in Rio Arriba County. While Jo paints, Thomas works on his music and spends time on pro bono construction projects. They are also site stewards for the Chaco Culture National Historical Park, which preserves one of the most important pre Columbian cultural and historical areas of the US, and spend a lot of time helping to preserve the extraordinary collection of artefacts and artworks recording the Indigenous history.
“I love the landscapes in New Mexico and I could spend another lifetime painting there,” Jo says. “Thomas and I lead a very quiet life on acreage — we call it a ranch — surrounded by the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. It’s high desert country with spectacular geology, the country is pink and rich red with layers of different-coloured ochres. When I come to the city, I suffer from sensory overload. I need isolation and silence to work and weeks and months of it. We spend a lot of time in the wild. It’s much more benevolent than the Australian desert — the summers are not so hot and in winter there’s snow on the cactus.”
Jo and Thomas’s home is in the least populated state in North America with the highest number of native American pueblos and reservations where the locals lead a very traditional lifestyle. It’s just along the river from Ghost Ranch where American landscape artist Georgia O’Keeffe found inspiration and ended up seeing out her amazing 70-year career in a small house in the Abiquiu village.
This extraordinary CV led to the National Portrait Gallery asking Jo to paint a portrait of author and “camel lady” Robyn Davidson. “At first, I turned the commission down because they wanted me to do it in Canberra,” Jo says. “I said: ‘She’s a desert woman, I’d only want to paint her in her environment’. So, a year later, she was doing another expedition and I went along. At first, I could tell she didn’t want a bar of it, as she kept avoiding me. She just wanted to be in the desert on her own with her camels. So, I decided to abandon the idea and just go off and paint landscapes. Then one afternoon, I climbed up on a sand dune and was sitting there sketching when Rob came up and sat with me. She watched me work and eventually said ‘I wish I could do that’. I said ‘I wish I could write’. And from there, we became friends and we’re still friends.”
Jo’s affinity for deserts started almost from birth as her family came from Broken Hill in far-western NSW. They moved to Oberon just west of the Blue Mountains in NSW and, as an adult, Jo owned a property in the Kanimbla Valley. In 2010, she purchased 50 acres (20 hectares) of “goat country” at Peelwood bordering the Abercrombie River National Park in the NSW Central Tablelands. She moved in with just the wild pigs, kangaroos and wombats for company and is gradually regenerating the land and restoring the homestead. “I bought i because it was what I could afford,” she says. “It was very run down, but it had a huge old woolshed perfect for a studio and the remnants of a once grand orchard, so I could see its potential.” Slowly, slowly and hands-on at anything she could manage, Jo has made the homestead habitable. A timely commission from the National Museum of Australia paid for a new roof, but most of the hard yakka has been done by her own hands on a shoestring budget.
In 2015 and ’16, Jo travelled to Rajasthan and Kutch in India’s north-west, sponsored by the Indian government and the Australian High Commission, to raise awareness of the plight of herders in the most remote parts of the country’s north and show the value of their culture. “They are the most endangered people in the country,” she explains. “I had all the vaccinations possible, but I was still sick as a dog and it was challenging living the nomadic tribal life.” The sojourn culminated in a solo exhibition at the Indira Gandhi Centre for the Arts in New Delhi, which is still touring the world and hopefully will come to Australia in the future. “The thing I’ve learnt from almost 40 years working in the field is that desert people share a common devotion to their lands,” Jo says. “It’s what draws me to remote places and is why I will always return to the desert.”
