8º of latitude

Abstract perspective: Jules Sher’s great gift.

I’ve always had a soft spot for emigrés. Well, to vary the scope and reach of showgirl and model Mandy Rice-Davies’ excellent point made under duress in 1963, I am one, so I would. Emigrés add piquancy to whatever melting pot it is in which they’ve chosen to live; they provide a yeasty zest to counter enervating local presumptions of national antisocialism, and a balming vesper of freshness; and they are a prophylactic against groundhog day effects or a catatonic week (or, worse, two) in Skegness or Muizenberg. Or Surfers Paradise.

So it was lovely, the other evening, to run into the South African-Australian artist Jules Sher, at an art show opening deep in the Dunsborough-Yallingup money belt.

We live outside that Pale, but it’s only a 25-minute drive from home when, rarely, the Distaff and I fancy feeling well-heeled.

It was also Sher’s 90th birthday, which added perspective and a cake to the occasion. And it was his art show opening: A Brush With the Past. As indeed it was, for me, personally. Sher’s work first entered my field of vision in 1992 – it’s hard to comprehend that that’s 32 years ago – in Toowoomba, Queensland, at that year’s Downlands College art show.

One of the works on show this time particularly caught our eye. It’s a delightful oil on canvas abstract, Burnt Field and Salt Pan – the Nullarbor. It captures the immensity of the land and sky and seems to promise more, magically unseen, beyond the horizon.

Sher explained, when he trotted over for a chat, that he’d seen the field and a salt pan from an aircraft window and, as was his practice with artistic prompts, had photographed it. It made me think of an occasion 12 years ago now when I was on a late afternoon flight from Perth to Canberra. To the south over the coast and the Great Australian Bight the sky was a cold, curiously pale but powerful yellow. The ice, three thousand kilometres away to the south, I imagined. 

I didn’t take a photograph. And in any case I was enjoying a tub of Maggie Beer’s unmissable burnt fig and vanilla ice cream at the time. It was the last time I flew business class, where you got such treats.

But in my shoes Sher might have shot the scene. And perhaps have been inspired to immortalise the Great South Land’s symbiotic relationship with the cold Southern Ocean and its other, icy, distant shore.

JULES SHER: A BRUSH WITH THE PAST, The Studio Gallery, 7 Marrinup Drive, Yallingup, WA, 9-25 February 2024.