Art Reviews

1977 proved to be a fruitful year for Brett Whiteley’s landscapes. It was the year he first won the Wynne Prize for his master work The Jacaranda Tree (On Sydney Harbour) and the successful culmination of a decade spent largely rediscovering the Australian environment after returning…

Lloyd Rees’ longstanding association with Bathurst began with his marriage in 1931 to Marjory Pollard, whose family had settled in the area in 1886. The couple visited Bathurst regularly, and it was during one of these stays that Rees painted Autumn Evening, Bathurst. Rees described his…

Sam Fullbrook discovered painting while serving in New Guinea during World War II, via supplies sent to the troops from the Army Adult Education. Upon his return to Australia, he studied at the National Gallery Art School in Melbourne through the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme.…

The depiction of solitary and coupled figures in nature is something that Arthur Boyd returned to often throughout his career. The central character is often Yvonne, Boyd’s wife, whose nude disposition connects us to Western visual traditions of the naked figure caught unawares in the natural…

The depiction of solitary and coupled figures in nature is something that Arthur Boyd returned to often throughout his career. The central character is often Yvonne, Boyd’s wife, whose nude disposition connects us to Western visual traditions of the naked figure caught unawares in the natural…

Russell Drysdale was popularly regarded in the 1960s, along with Sidney Nolan and William Dobell, as one of the ‘big three of Australian art’.¹ According to his contemporaries, Drysdale had successfully graced the world stage, been honoured by a retrospective exhibition in his home…

In the mid-1980s, when William Robinson first began to paint the subtropical rainforests of southeast Queensland, he signalled a major departure from the two dominant paradigms of Australian landscape painting: the pastoral landscapes of Arthur Streeton, Hans Heysen and Elioth Gruner in the…

In 1971, Arthur Boyd received a prestigious appointment as a Creative Fellow at the Australian National University, Canberra. During the residency, Arthur and Yvonne Boyd looked at properties to purchase around the Australian Capital Territory and at Nowra, in southern New South Wales. Boyd’s…

Appearances are distracting. What you feel about a thing is important, not what it looks like. I don’t want to teach people to see. I want to get them to feel.¹

For some time now, painting and printmaking have played off each other in my work. Frustrations in one area are often solved through investigations in the other … drawing from experience of the processes involved in printmaking – for example, often helps me think again about how I might make a…