Fertility

In this oil painting by Michael Illingworth the landscape is represented in terms of male and female. Under the plain that fills the centre of the image is a sinuous form that evokes the human body. The relationship of this figure, with breast and penis, to the rest of the composition is ambiguous. Does it lie on top of the land or flow beneath it, like magma? The figure is linked to the landscape by the visual similarities between it and the band of cloud that sits over the mountain range, the swell of hills, and the curve of beach. The anthropomorphising of the landscape not only suggests an important opposition in Illingworth's art - between city and civilisation (bad), and country and nature (good) - but also draws parallels with Māori cultural ideas of the land as Papatūānuku (Earth mother).

An imaginary realism
Fertility is a good example of Illingworth's approach to landscape. While he provides a recognisable representation of landscape, he often introduces imagined elements, which transform his paintings and make them quite different to other painters of the 1960s and 1970s. Illingworth's work was included in a 1971 exhibition called Earth/Earth at the Barry Lett Galleries in Auckland, along with work by Colin McCahon, Don Binney, Michael Smither, and Toss Woollaston, but his approach was rather different. As Mark Young suggested in a newspaper review of 1967, Illingworth was involved in 'the creation of an imaginary landscape to express more fully one's philosophy'. The work, Young went on to say, draws on 'the berserk world of Hieronymous Bosch to the whimsical fantasies of Paul Klee and Joan Miro'.

Figures and landscapes
There is a complex relationship between Fertility and Illingworth's personal philosophy. The male/female figure in this painting has evolved from his Adam and Eve paintings, the first of which was painted in 1965. In the paintings, Adam and Eve belong to the landscape - their nakedness and prominent genitals a sign of their purity and honesty. Fertility is like a visual shorthand, in which the truth represented by Adam and Eve is located in the land itself.