A contemporary of Brett Whiteley (1939-1992), Sidney Nolan (1917-1992) and John Olsen (born 1928), Michael Johnson occupies a vital position within the history of abstract painting in Australia. Born in Sydney, Johnson attended the Julian Ashton Art School followed by The National Art
In 1997, Imants Tillers made the impulsive, ‘not completely conscious and considered choice’ to move with his family from Sydney to Cooma, a small town in south-eastern New South Wales.1 This fundamental shift from the urban to regional offered rich new topography to probe the art
Alongside art, Robert Dickerson’s enduring passion was undoubtedly horse racing. The two go hand in hand throughout his oeuvre, with horses, jockeys and punters among his most sought after subjects. Remarkably, his career as a full-time artist owes its inception to a wager on a horse: in 195
Born in rural Queensland in 1919, Hugh Sawrey was the son of a shearers’ cook and teamster, who died when Sawrey was just three years of age. At fifteen, he left school to support his widowed mother during the Great Depression, working as a drover and shearer throughout Queensland, the North
The life story of Ivan Pokhitonov is as rich as the paintings he produced in a long career. Born in the Ukraine to a family that had been granted patents of nobility in the 18th century, Pokhitonov began drawing and copying while at school. Although he later stud
Dated on its stylistic similarity to Falls Bridge, Melbourne 1882 in the National Gallery of Victoria, Cows Crossing McCauley Creek, Looking towards Melbourne c1882 provides a striking example of Frederick McCubbin’s early mastery of the melancholic moment in his narrative paintings
A letter written to his friend and fellow artist Lionel Lindsay (1874-1961) in 1936 by Arthur Streeton conveys something of the artist’s mood and outlook after a lifetime as a central figure of Australia’s art world:
I
At the start of the third decade of the 21st century many Australians are feeling destabilised and concerned about their lives, both in the immediate and longer term. The current conditions help put into persp
Although Garry Shead could be broadly described as a republican and his Royal Suite paintings promptly entered the Australian republican debate of the late 1990s, this was not the primary intention of the series. It had been a long time in the making, in fact abou
The mid-1950s were a defining moment in the development of Charles Blackman’s art. Having relocated to Melbourne with his wife and muse Barbara in 1951, Blackman achieved early critical notice with his 1953-4 Schoolgirl series of paintings. Following a series of Avonsleigh landscapes in 1955