The pioneer 1904

Frederick McCubbin made "The Pioneer" at an unknown date, but looking at it, I can almost feel the grit and patience it took to build this image piece by piece. The whole thing is a symphony of greens and browns, like the bush itself exhaling onto the canvas. It’s a triptych, so there’s a sequence, a before, during, and after. On the left, the woman sits, lost in thought, a tiny fire burning. The second panel shows a man, and a woman looking into the distance, perhaps dreaming of what comes next. On the right, another man busies himself building something. You can feel the weight of the eucalyptus trees and the way the light filters through, almost like a promise. McCubbin, like many painters, was probably thinking about how one mark leads to another, building a world that feels both real and imagined. He, like all of us artists, was in conversation with the likes of Constable and Corot, thinking about how we might create the feeling of a place.