Andersch, Joerg Etchings of Tasmania The Mercury 11 August, 2007

Painter and printmaker Jeffrey Makin continues in his search for the very essence of the Australian landscape, as revealed by his work at the Colville Street Art Gallery .

Like the late, legendary Fred Williams, Makin excels in the art of printmaking, yet both of their reputations rests on their painting prowess. Similar to Williams, Makin's search for the essence of our landscape has become a magnificent obsession, and the benefit lies with the public.

In this exhibition we find a two-fold display: the Australian Felix series and the purely Tasmanian work.

The Australian series is a portfolio of 10 etchings made up of images the artist identifies as being quintessentially Australian.

There are 14 etchings in the Tasmanian series of what the artist sees as typical of our state and, unlike the mainland series, there are quite a number of coastal aspects.

Makin, like Williams, has the wonderful ability to elicit the essence of a scene with an absolute minimum of marks. His light touch is remarkable, yet he will take the same plate through several processes to deepen tones and offer a totally different mood from the same scene.

Australia Felix . Landscapes by Jeffrey Makin
MacMillan 2002
Extracts

‘Owls Wood’ for Jeffrey Makin 28 Sept 02
Dear Jeff,
I received your fax this morning & there you were making another of your ‘visitations’. This time at Western Victoria sitting with easel & canvas viewing that jagged, fasinating sea rocks we know as the ‘Twelve Apostles’. The weather at this time of year is bleak; threatening blizzard like rain, rolling in from the southern ocean; then your compulsive fixation on the landscape as being a shorthand experience, a subject conveniently viewed from a Melbourne or Sydney penthouse, was plainly speaking by your obsessive self a ‘copont’.
You responded warmly when I mentioned Robert Graves’ notion that certain landscapes have magnetic fields, Devja in MaMorca where the poet lived and where you & I stayed certainly had that. But then in this quest you are much more compulsive than me.
Take Etrctat in Normandy/France where not only Courbet but Monet, Matisse, Boudin, Braque as well, etal, unusual as that coastline is, there is a linkage, a handjoining experience that confirms the fascination to ‘a sense of place’.
It is the mystical archetypal, which engulfs you, a mystery of place that constantly evades. Yet as a plein artist, it has interested you to make visitations to Scottish waterfalls, to Goredale Seat where James Ward & Turner painted absolutely fabulous pictures.
In these landscapes there are ‘always ghosts’ you remark. Then you report that on the seacoast of the Twelve Apostles there are no ghosts, a contradictory position that places you in a quandary that period & style have nothing to do with it.
“Have I ever seen a post-modernist type ?” Yes I have, the attempt was absolutely awful.
You always make your pictures blunt & emphoric, no smart garmi, no sensual sauce allowed, I suppose its because you have a wish for emblem a sense of image that impact’s the mind.
You are rare, very rare, the way you have given yourself to landscape and off hand I know of no Australian artist that has done so with such singular passion. With best wishes John Olsen

L’education Sentimentale Christopher Heathcote p.13

Australia is the driest continent. Clean running water has a special significance here. Most prized by Australian, as the foreign tourist soon finds, are waterfalls. No matter how slim or sporadic the flow of liquid, waterfalls are inevitably marked out on maps, sign-posted on roads and treated as important points marking out the landscape. And we treat them as such, stopping the car, then tramping ridiculous distances on broken tracks through rough country to see threads of water running over rocks, and, of course, stripping off our clothes during sweltering weather to stand under the cool pour. Every Australian has felt a connection with at least one waterfall. I wonder how many of them we have visited, and how far we have walked to see or bathe in them? (I speak here as one who spent several days hiking thirty-odd kilometers across the Jagungal Wilderness to see the unspoiled and near inaccessible splendour of Valentine’s Falls.) Even Australian towns testify to the imaginative power of waterfalls. In Melbourne, for instance, a city founded by John Batman and John Fawkner at the YarrowYarrow Falls, there was a few years back much public unrest over the removal of a block-wide artifical waterfall in the city square, and then over suggestions that the waterwall might be removed from the entrance to the national Gallery of Victoria. Notably, the architects of Melbourne’s casino complex tried to make it more agreeable by erecting along its forecourt monolithic blocks down which water trickles and drips. Falling water remains an emotively powerful image in Australia.

To me it seemed Makin has not only locked into this image, but found his allusive direction when he painted his first waterfall. Of course, there where considerable view paintings, particularly of those lush fecund valleys reclining against the ranges of North Eastern Victoria – they clearly were evocations of Australia felix, as Major Mitchell named the grassy plains when he crossed Victoria in the 1830s. Yet it was with Makin’s 1990s waterfall images that the artist found a subject at which he increasingly excelled. Sometimes the painting was all thrust and power, the energy of a rushing river cuttings its way through a forest, oblivious to all obstacles. The irrepressible forces of nature in action. At other moments he just traced the arching silvery line of falling creeklets, bouncing and tumbling from ledge to rock in an otherwise arid wilderness. Nature clinging on in unwelcoming conditions. The artist was grappling with a motif that was bigger than the immediate view. The paintings seemed to speak of the ebb and flow of living, about our steering a course between contrary pressures, about enduring against all odds. Jeffrey Makin has found his symbol.