Catherine Hunter | Ben Quilty film | Painting the Shadows

Ben Quilty, Evening shadows, Rorschach after Johnstone, 2011, Art Gallery of South Australia

“ Quilty unflinchingly investigates our culture and our history.”

Nick Mitzevich, Director - National Gallery of Australia

Ben Quilty - Painting the Shadows

Ben Quilty, Self portrait, After Afghanistan, 2012, Private Collection, Sydney

A fascinating exploration of the creative process, Quilty - Painting the Shadows, follows one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists as he completes one of his most challenging art works. The film documents the most recent shift in Quilty’s art which is a growing interest in our national history and the dark corners of our past. With the permission of the Gamilaraay Elders, he travels to Myall Creek in Northern NSW. On the afternoon of Sunday 10 June, 1838, 12 stockmen brutally slaughtered a group of 28 Aboriginal men, women and children who were camped peacefully at the station of Myall Creek.

This massacre had special significance because it marked the only time in the colonial period that white men were, arrested, charged and hung for the massacre. The film follows Quilty’s exploration of the subject over many months.

“I am looking for symbols of the beauty of the place, the sadness of the place, the incredible violence of this place.” Ben Quilty

An artist with a profound commitment to social activism fuelled by a boundless curiosity about the human condition, Quilty won the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize in 2009 and his remarkable portrait of Margaret Olley won the 2011 Archibald Portrait Prize. In March 2019, a survey exhibition of Quilty’s work opened at the Art Gallery of South Australia (later touring to Brisbane and Sydney). Using the assembly and hanging of the exhibition as a fluid framework for her film, Hunter explores the journey of the artist from that of a young man obsessed with Holden Toranas to the one who brought, through his art, the full spectrum of the Afghanistan tragedy to public consciousness.

Ben Quilty, Car (Torana) 2004. Private collection

Quilty – Painting the Shadows follows the making of a major work about the Myall Creek massacre over a number of months from its beginnings as a series of drawings to the creation of one of his signature Rorschach paintings (where an original painted image is both damaged and duplicated by pressing one panel onto another while the paint is still wet).

I’m interested in the fact that it’s the landscape that he submits to the process of Rorschaching, if that’s a word. It’s actually the landscape that he paints and then destroys and in doing so, he moves landscapes as a genre into history painting. He invites us to think about how we are positioned within that story. Just as Hermann Rorschach would invite his interviewees to look at the ink blot test, Ben Quilty invites us into his paintings to find ourselves to intuit what’s going on, to make meaning with what’s happening in the painting. Lisa Slade, Assistant Director, Art Gallery of South Australia.

As Sally Scales, Chairperson, APY Executive Board Council says in the film, “There's a way to learn history through art, there's a way to have conversations about devastation through art and that's what Ben does so beautifully. “

Director/ Catherine Hunter, Cinematography & Editor/ Bruce Inglis, Producers/Shelley Maine & Catherine Hunter, Script editor/John Muldrew. Indigenous consultant/Fabri Blacklock.

The soundtrack Quilty – Painting the Shadows features the music of composers Amanda Brown and Damien Lane with performances by Chris Abrahams, Hamish Stuart and Jonathan Zwartz. The soundtrack was released through Lillipilli.

REVIEW| Graeme Blundell, Critic’s Choice, The Australian, 16/11/2019

“In the beguiling Quilty: Painting the Shadows, director Catherine Hunter creates an open door into a world of great artists that is unavailable to most of us, a highly specialised place of somewhat arcane systematic procedures and complex technical knowledge developed from years of practice.

Given a great deal of access, Hunter follows Ben Quilty, one of Australia’s most popular and acclaimed painters, known for his activism and social involvement as much as his art, as he researches and then creates a major work about an early colonial atrocity known as the Myall Creek massacre…. Hunter has crafted a film that is engrossing from the start but that builds to something more emotionally encompassing when Quilty’s final painting is revealed.

It’s not only filmed with style by (Bruce) Inglis but beautifully scored by composers Amanda Brown and Damian Lane, their soundtrack spontaneously recorded to represent, in their words, “the textural layers, melodic fragments and abrasive flourishes” of Quilty’s paintings.”

The filmmakers would like to acknowledge the people of Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands in remote South Australia and the Gamilaraay people of Northern NSW. We pay respects to their Elders, past, present and emerging leaders of the future.

Quilty – Painting the Shadows was produced in association with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and financed with the assistance of the National Gallery of Australia, the Margaret Olley Art Trust, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery of South Australia and Queensland Art Gallery|Gallery of Modern Art. It was produced in association with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The Producer acknowledges the support of Screen Australia through the Producer Equity Program.