For 60 years, artist Trevor Vickers has remained faithful to hard-edged abstraction, making perception visible with his chromatic colour field painting. But during an inventory in his Fremantle shed recently, a series of quieter works emerged, enough for their own show, casting his oeuvre in a more subtle light.

In their whites, greys, pale blues and yellows, these quiet paintings could at last be exhibited without being overwhelmed by the bolder canvases. Some have never been shown before.

“A lot of the works were considered too extreme in their time,” says Adelaide-born Vickers, 81, seated with curator Felicity Johnson at Art Collective WA in Perth. The colours work on the viewer’s retina, he says, and reward time spent contemplating the flow of the brush strokes. “I’ve always felt my paintings were hard to hang, because three or four of them on the wall together will fight each other for attention.”

“A couple of works needed the best natural light we could get,” adds Johnson. “There’s one work hanging in the front window, and it’s just amazing when the light hits it; it changes throughout the day.”

Vickers is a mostly self-taught artist, but while he was based in Melbourne during the 1960s, artist friends Mel Ramsden and Peter Booth taught him how to stretch a canvas and what to avoid when mixing paints. He shared a house with several other painters, “which was almost an art school in itself”.

In 1964, Vickers saw his first hard-edged painting, by the artist Janet Dawson, in the basement of a Russell Street hotel, defying the city’s figurative tradition. “I’d not heard of hard-edged painting,” he recalls. “I just liked the fact it was pure painting, as against being illustrative or trying to describe a scene … especially in Melbourne, there were wars against anything moving away from figurative painting.”

In 1968, Vickers was invited to exhibit canvases in The Field, the inaugural exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria’s then new premises on St Kilda Road, alongside the likes of other Australian artists Sydney Ball and Robert Jacks.

Vickers says The Field artists were by then well down the path of hard-edged abstraction and colour field work, yet the erroneous myth emerged that the Australians had been heavily influenced by the travelling exhibition Two Decades of American Painting, seen in Melbourne and Sydney in 1967. “That show was talked about as though it was stuff from outer space,” he laughs. “It wasn’t, it was mainly Pop or illustrative and a couple of abstractionists.”

How important was The Field to Vickers’s own career? “I’ve never thought about that. There was such a backlash from The Field, and the couple of pieces of mine selected for it were considered quite extreme, in terms of abstraction. You weren’t supposed to go that far. The backlash went on for years. It seemed to still be going on [in Australia] when I came back from Britain, after spending 20 years there … they were saying, ‘this isn’t art’.”

Six decades on, what is it about hard-edged abstraction that continues to draw him in? “I quite like the way chromatic colour can scientifically vary because of the ingredients of the light during the day, which changes all the time. The fact that our eyes can perceive the slightest variation. These things don’t have to be stopped in time, like you would with a still life.

“You have an active involvement with the painting. This varies depending on what you bring to the painting, as well as what I put in; I’ve spent my life looking at things, and I try to bring it down to basics, keep it as simple as possible. That’s the major difficulty: to get rid of unnecessary complications.”

Perth, where Vickers has been based since 1995, offers “absolutely fantastic” light for a painter, he says, continuing to paint every day. “The trouble historically with painters here is they’ve tried to calm it down. The light is extreme, and the variation in the light during the day is extreme, and that’s just a wonderful thing for anyone who works with colour.”

Quiet Paintings
Trevor Vickers
Art Collective WA
On now—26 October