Out of the Orchard- Cecilia Cairns

By Jaynie Anderson

In April 1966 I interviewed Douglas Cairns about his lifelong friendship with Sidney Nolan. As a teenager I had known his daughter Cecilia at Merton Hall where Yvonne Boyd taught us painting. Cecilia had been brought up on her parents’ apple orchard at Merricks on the Mornington Peninsula. Aged twelve she went to school in Melbourne. She lived in a household where music and art were always present.

The lush beauty and values of the Cairns apple orchard were celebrated by artists whom Cecilia had known as a child, notably Merric and Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan, John Sinclair, and John Yule as well as others. A photograph of Cecilia, aged two in 1946, taken by Sunday Reed, with her parents, Douglas and Anne Cairns, shows her holding a doll made by Sunday.

One of the most important experiences for Cecilia the teenager was Arthur Boyd’s Swan flying through an Orchard (1959) which she watched him paint. The materiality of the wooden boxes in the foreground of the picture Arthur was creating, evolved before her eyes, as they were made with just a few strokes. Cecilia painted with a ‘dancing brush’, thrusting marks with the impasto, that characterizes her paintings. Works like her Picking Quinces (2004) were inspired by Arthur Boyd’s total immersion in the Merricks landscape, each painterly touch bringing alive the sensation of the bush.

The apple orchard has been a source of continual inspiration for Cecilia. Letters record how the Boyds felt at ease there, relaxed by the Peninsula air. Cecilia’s oil painting from 1962, of the Beach at Shoreham demonstrates the freedom children enjoyed and still enjoy in this landscape of unspoilt beauty. Some of the Banksias that Merric Boyd drew could be still flourishing on Merricks beach.

Douglas Cairns friendship with Nolan began in June 1940 when he visited Nolan’s famous abstract exhibition at his studio on Russell Street, the only visitor to buy a painting. Nolan and Cairns were inspired by a mutual admiration for Søren Kirkegaard, each always travelling with a selection of Kirkegaard’s Journals, in the belief that a single protagonist can assert his identity against society. They were equally passionate about music, especially song. Cairns had a beautiful voice that Sunday Reed admired when he sang songs by John Dowland. Cairns, a conscientious objector, and his wife, bought an apple orchard at Merricks North in June 1942. Neither parent came from a farming family, but they chose to become farmers as a wholesome and morally acceptable lifestyle.

Cairns retreated from Parkville to Merricks, giving Nolan the key to the loft he had rented in Parkville (behind 34 Gatehouse Street), allowing Nolan to escape from the hothouse atmosphere of Heide, and the Cairns (Douglas and Anne) to immerse themselves in the rural paradise of Merricks with visits from the Boyds and other artists.

As in her painting Truck Shed, Cecilia celebrates her love of rustic living in pictures in small dimensions that recall the classic shapes of the Heidelberg School. A picture from the 1980’s reveals her love for the Shoalhaven River, painted at Arthur Boyd’s property, near Bundanoon, for her a continuation of Merricks.

Cecilia studied with John Brack at the Gallery School for several years. I remember Brack in 1966, whom I also interviewed about Nolan’s time at the Gallery School. He was a charming and witty man. Unlike some of the other teachers Brack was inspirational and concentrated on bringing out an individual talent and style. Brack, then painting nudes on Persian rugs, gave weekly lectures on technique as well as individual critiques when he would comment on a student’s work. Even so he was bound to technical best practice. Cecilia remembers how she learnt to make Black Oil, as a medium. The paintings she produced at the Gallery School are influenced by Brack in motif and technique. Cecilia’s Still life with an Asparagus Tin, has flowers in jars painted on a Persian rug, while the ever-present orchard is glimpsed through the window.

This very positive experience of teaching remained with her forever. She taught at Preshil, a co-educational progressive school for ten years and continues to teach from her studio at Merricks on the Peninsula, an experience which is recorded in her painting of the Art Class at Shoreham. There she continues the Brack tradition of teaching by commenting on the student’s work and their technique, nurturing different styles. Cecilia won several prizes at the National Gallery School for portraiture and still life, and on the Peninsula, received local art prizes.

From 1976 to 1980 Cecilia was an assistant to Arthur Boyd in England, working in his London studio, preparing copper plates, stretching canvas, and assisting with lithography. The Australian poet, Michael Dugan, described work in her exhibition at the Bookshop Gallery in Hampstead in 1979:

“Cecilia Cairns’ paintings and etching hold a peculiarly haunting quality of their own created by the artist’s extremely personal vision of the world she inhabits. Her images are familiar ones – landscapes of town and country, remembered scenes from childhood and interpretations of immediate domestic environment. In her pictures we see our world through the eyes of a gentle, though not uncritical, observer of the situation in which we live.”

A constant theme for Cecilia is the beach whether walking along the shore at Merricks in the winter, or at Shoreham. She depicts beach scenes that are nostalgic for those of us who grew up on the Peninsula, that convey a wonderful melancholic feeling of walking along the sand on an unspoilt beach.

When she was a kid, her family never had a car but used to travel in a horse and cart. Cecilia’s observations on the traditions of the orchard is a moving tribute to the customs of the Peninsula, an old way of farming apples, brands like Democrats, and of rustic living, one that inspired creativity among special artists, and still does today. Following Kirkegaard, like her father and Nolan, she is an individual who stands out against the banal conventions of society, as does her art.

The orchard continues with Ceci’s sister Eve, and Douglas Cairns’ granddaughter, Lisa Cresswell’s Seven Oaks Cider.

Opening Night

Tuesday 29 April, 5-7pm