Art Reviews

Now, I am not interested in ornithology … not even particularly in birds. But what does interest me is MOOD, a force I find as difficult to understand as the existentialism in a gnat. The sudden peculiar plummet of an atmosphere in a room. Or weather? Or the thing that keeps friendship…

Ray Crooke is celebrated for his quiet but intensely poignant landscapes of people and their environment. The images of Thursday Island Crooke created in the late 1950s remain amongst the most evocative images in his oeuvre. These compositions have a keen sense of locality, and describe with…

John Perceval’s Mordialloc Creek 1946 tells the story of a close friendship and an evolving artistic style. Perceval was only twenty-three years of age when he painted the work which brims with the talent and confidence of youth. The focus on a small portion of nature; implied human…

Arthur Boyd is well known for his love of the Australian bush and his long association with two historic pastoral and bush properties along the Shoalhaven River, near Nowra in New South Wales. Less well known is that when Arthur and Yvonne initially purchased Riversdale, and later Bundanon, Boyd…

At Serengeti the great herds in migration are just like the walls of Lascaux come alive … These animals have a message for us in that they are unique – the message will become fossilized as the species die out. One comes to view them as works which will not be repeated again; the fascination of…

Margaret Olley’s Duxford Street terrace house was brimming with collected objects used primarily for picture-making. The endless array of fruit bowls, ceramic jugs, lamps, vases of flowers, painted plates, woven baskets and glass bottles were acquired by Olley specifically to be included in her…

Native Flowers and Geebungs 1938 dates from a critical phase of Margaret Preston’s career, when the artist consolidated her reputation as a leading exponent of Australian modernism.  Since the early 1920s, Preston had regularly exhibited with Sydney’s Society of Artists, whose audacious…

A painting by Jeffrey Smart might begin with a sudden epiphany, a flash of inspiration found by the side of the road. Smart would make a quick sketch, and maybe a snapshot, then store the motif on an imaginary shelf, awaiting its day in the studio. At this point, the hard work would begin. An…

The first of these Kelly pictures was painted between 1945 and 1947 … The scale is large, and the execution ‘naïve’: a ‘primitive’ treatment that seemed, at the time, to be a somewhat systematic and artful way of achieving an atmosphere of ‘folklore’ in these pictures. Mr Nolan has told me that…

Lloyd Rees is one of the most published Australian painters of his generation. From the first major monograph by Renee Free released in 1972, many more have followed, focusing on his paintings, drawings and prints – one of the most recent being a 2013 catalogue raisonné of his representation in…