The quest for truth has led David Hume to art, as Chris Boyd discovers.
Twenty years ago it was possible to do an honours degree at Monash which combined philosophy and pure mathematics. The combo for the nineties would have to be physics and theology.
There are more physicists writing about God than poets. Stephen Hawking and Paul Davies are a couple of the high-profile physicists on first name terms with He Who Must Be Obeyed.
Like Hawking and Davies, and Jacob Bronowski before them, artist David Hume's studies in physics started him on a quest for something beyond theory. For Truth.
If a physics teaching position had not come along, says Hume, he would have started a degree in philosophy. "When I'd heard philosophy people talking, I'd think: Christ, go and get yourself a science degree first, and then you can talk!"
But Hume's search for Truth didn't lead him to religion. It led to art. "I became fascinated by the 'undeniable quality' and 'truth' in great paintings. The quality of a line in a Cezanne or a Matisse. What made it so Good?"
At that time, Hume took a holiday job shifting tables at a children's art school. Unexpectedly, the maths-science man found himself giving drawing demonstrations to boys and girls. If there is such a thing as artistic intelligence, Hume has it in spades. Painting isn't a career. Perhaps it's not even a calling. It's a way of solving problems. It is a field of exploration. More than that, it is an adventure playground.
In his first drawings and watercolours, Hume strove to capture the artistic "fifth element" he had seen in paintings by German artists Emil Nolde and August Macke.
In Venice, Hume saw several masterpieces close up; close enough to see brushstrokes. But Hume wasn't overawed. Like many Australian artists, Hume only became interested in the Australian landscape after seeing Eurpoe.
His paintings of the Flinders Ranges, he laughs, were a weird mixture of Heysen and Nolde. Hume soon traded his watercolours for acrylic paints, and turned from paper to - of all things - galvanised steel.
Seeing a sign painted on the bonnet of a derelict car in outback South Australia got him wondering. Must do an exhibition of work painted on bonnets, he told himself. Hume hasn't tackled car bonnets, so far, but he did start painting metal. And the galvanised steel that he used is as much a part of the Australian landscape - in sheds and corrugated iron fences - as abandoned cars.
Hume's latest works shows the landscape as if from the air. Many of the ten works currently on display have topographical details gouged into the paint. Some also have cut-out strips and dots of thin vinyl applied to the surface.
Up close, the spatter of colourful atoms in Lake Gemmell looks like a hugely enlarged photograph. Across the painting, in perfectly straight dashes, fluorescent aqua strips trick the eye, like an after image, or a mirage.
"I want to capture textures and colours," Hume says.
But Hume also wants to give viewers a taste of the density of features in the landscape, both natural and artificial.
"This (recent) work started when I went up to the centre of Australia. My grandfather told me stories of his travels up to Andamooka, where he made films in the '50s and '60s. Other relatives settled down on Hindmarsh Island, down near the Coorong. So this is the land that we come from." So what has Hume learned from his decade of artistic R & D? "Art is about play and ideas, and doing something you find intensely satisfying and important. And making things!"
David Hume's exhibition Coorong to Kimberley - Australian Landscapes is at A.R.T. Gallery Eden Collins place from July 4 to July 31 1998.