These days, few painters feel that the institutions of art – the museums and the mags, the critics and the curators, the Biennales and the surveys – pay them much attention. Edmund Capon, Director of the AGNSW and not one to look away from a fight, boldly asserts: ‘the art of painting, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, continues to be of profound and emphatic significance to the artistic imaginations of this country.’

Most of us have experienced the sometimes amusing and stimulating, frequently numbing and tedious surveys of contemporary art populated by videos in darkened rooms, installations of sometimes more and sometimes less random matter, hermetic objects on walls, and mile after mile of mute photography. It forms the new International Gothic of our times, found in Seattle or Sydney, Melbourne or Mönchengladbach.

Painting of any substance is an accumulative art. There are no shortcuts. Brilliant beginnings are fine, and Australia has had them from Streeton to Whiteley, but the long haul is the painter’s lot. You have to look at a lot of other paintings and paint your way to your own voice. In that respect, painting is the enemy or the opposite of ‘the last five minutes in art’, the lingua franca of contemporary art.

Walking to Jan and Helen Senbergs’s, you wind through the bluestone, cobbled lanes of North Melbourne, with its mix of erstwhile light industrial and residential, very much part of the altstadt. Jan’s capacious studio, formerly a jazz club, contains the usual mix of old and new work, although much of his current work is away at Rex Irwin’s. His map-like paintings and drawings of Melbourne and Sydney show him in a buoyant mode. Sydney, in particular, is bathed in a golden glow and Melbourne as a river-encircled city of towers and bridges has drive and energy. They remind me of Kokoschka’s cityscapes, especially the London views and seventeenth-century map-scapes. They combine both the pleasures of particularity – you can’t mistake the circular hotel at the base of the Sydney Harbour Bridge or the Cox and Carmichael bridge to Southgate – with the full-bodied response to the city as subject.

What a contrast these city pictures are to Jan’s slightly earlier Otway landscapes where the heat and claustrophobia of the bush blocks the way to the promise of blue water, golden sand. In a corner of the studio, he has pinned a much earlier polyptych drawing, four large sheets densely worked in charcoal, looking from his window in North Melbourne to the Catholic church and school in Victoria Street to the looming towers of Melbourne behind. Matter abounds: the rough-hewn bluestone, steel and glass. Claustrophobia isn’t quite the right word – horror vacui, perhaps – for this extraordinary drawing. The grit and oppressiveness of Melbourne are there.

My daughter, Kate, takes us to see a young sculptor, Robert Bridgewater, whose work I have never seen before. His studio is just off Chapel Street. As with other Melbourne sculptors, it seems to be part of a communal shed packed with small workshops. He is a carver, faceting and shaping logs so that their surface is composed of a web of diamond-like forms. The procedure looks so simple yet it transforms his material so completely that one admires both the hand and the touch. How does he avoid the merely decorative look given his faceting technique? There is both a primitive and a highly sophisticated feeling for sculpture at work here. It reminds one of African carving and of a hand-wrought minimalism. Placed either upright like totems or horizontally like barriers, they remind you of the scales of beasts or the intertwining patterns of acanthus leaf. Yet Bridgewater reins in the allusions, never quite succumbing to the potency of the imagery, keeping the memory of Brancusi and abstract sculpture alive. Very impressive, very original.

Peter Corrigan, the architect and stage designer and one of my oldest, most unshakeable friends, takes us to see Philip Hunter in his warehouse studio in North Carlton. Corrigan arrives festooned with bottles of red wine.

It’s a year or so since I saw Philip’s work and it has flowered astonishingly. At first, it gives off that deeply heartening effect of being hard to like. You know your conventional taste is being challenged. The large pictures appear to be light and dark melodramas, the smaller works sketchy and repetitive. But then, as the eye steadies in the light, Philip’s Wimmera landscapes take on their layered look. They offer for the most part nocturnes – the dark landscape of memory and history. Philip marks the landscape with emblems. Tractor tyre marks become a spectral, Celtic interlace. He has made much of recent Australian painting and emerged with a distinctive voice. There are memories of Fred Williams, notably in the larger effects where Philip paints the extensive landscape in a vertical format. Philip is one of the few who has been able to assimilate the insights as well as the compelling look of central desert painting. Standing in Philip’s studio, you feel, as you do in Jan Senberg’s, the impetus that has fired modern Australian painting from Sidney Nolan and the Angry Penguins down to Peter Booth and Howard Arkley. They are deeply engaged with place, with the world of art, with their own work.

Vera Muller works in an adjacent studio. Life scientist turned sculptor, Vera Muller’s work is a good comeuppance to me. It has a rococo-like playfulness and poetry. Miniature forests of totems and organisms turned into artificial landscapes speak of a new sensibility in Australian sculpture.

The next day we are bound for Robert Jacks in Harcourt just north of Castlemaine. ‘He is our Monet at Giverny,’ Peter Corrigan tells me. I remember visiting some years ago and having lunch in a gazebo overlooking a pond complete with water lilies and a boat. Although it is mid-winter, Robert and Julie apologise needlessly for the state of the garden – dense, jungly, maze-like. The place is magical. Sandwiched between orchards, overlooked by the rocky escarpment of Mount Alexander, it is one of the most stirring places I have seen in Australia. The nineteenth-century cottage itself rambles romantically from one book-filled, painting- and drawing-lined room to another.

Years ago, when Robert was having a one-man show at Robert Lindsay’s gallery, I happened to be in town, found the exhibition quite remarkable, and bought a big painting for the Wadsworth Atheneum, only just resisting buying a sculpture to boot. (Tower-like constructions in painted wood, they were among the best things he has ever done. He tells me at lunch that he sold nary a one.) When I bought the painting, Robert Lindsay, an old friend and colleague, remarked that the painting surely came out of Jacks’s nocturnal walks in the orchard, the moon rising over the ridge.

Led into the studio this time around, I am astonished by the extraordinary output of sculpture over the years. Jacks is quick to tell you that he originally enrolled as a sculptor at RMIT at the age of fourteen and got into painting sideways, largely under his own aegis. In the studio at Harcourt, sculpture teems from every pore. There are Henry Moore-type maquettes from his teenage years to his infatuation with Brancusi to the constructions of later years and the painted wall reliefs of comparatively recent date. Suddenly, you realise how little you know. If Robert Jacks had never lifted a paintbrush, he would have had a good career as a sculptor. The winter afternoon draws in. Robert gives Donna a lovely early bronze; we part with much warmth. Almost the first review I wrote for The Age way back in 1966 was for Robert’s vivid first one-man exhibition at Gallery A. We coincided in New York in the early 1970s, formative years for both of us. As we drive away, I have an overwhelming sense of gratitude for the marvellous day, for the years.

Melbourne and Sydney parodied themselves that Friday in July. We left Melbourne in rain, wind and fog and arrived in a sparkling, sunny Sydney. I wanted to meet the new director of Curtis Brown, see the Guillaume pictures from the Orangerie, and have lunch at the Royal in Five Ways, the best place for lunch in the entire world.

I didn’t even know about Phenomena until we walked upstairs, admiring and delighted by the AGNSW all over again. Is it the only art museum in Australia that seems constantly alive, busy, restless?

To my delight and surprise, I knew only three of the fourteen exhibiters in Phenomena: the peerless Robert Hunter, Kevin Lincoln and, much more distantly, Howard Taylor. My astonishment deepened when I saw from the catalogue that most of the painters were in their forties and fifties. How could I have missed them before?

Michael Wardell’s sensibility is all over the exhibition. Although there are a few nods towards the landscape tradition and some ‘rhubarb rhubarb’ talk of Husserl and phenomenology, with quotations from Mondrian and Ouspensky, the exhibition deals with post-minimal painting where the grid is the guiding principle. The master of the exhibition and the mode is Robert Hunter whose faceted panels trap the most complex variations of light filtered, refracted and reflected from and into the surface. The most original of the rest was Judith Wright, with large works on paper that strove to emancipate themselves from the grid. Phenomena may not represent a new turning in Australian painting, but it does possess an extraordinary lightness of being.