In November 1970, Margaret Olley suffered the loss of her friend and fellow artist, David Strachan (1919-1970), when he was killed in a car accident at the age of 51. Having met during the 1940s as students of Jean Bellette (1908-1991), Olley and Strachan forged a lifelong friendship.1...
Slide Show
Art Reviews
By BRETT BALLARD
03 Mar 2022
To understand the paintings of Jeffrey Smart is to enter the world of signs and symbols and to acknowledge a language that is entirely Smart’s own. Jeffrey Smart left Australia in 1963 but it is the period prior to this that forms Smart’s thinking and marks his mature style. By the middle...
By Ashleigh Wilson
03 Mar 2022
This is a large, sprawling country. Without a car, forget it. Distances shrink behind the wheel, but highways never end. If you live in one of the capital cities, you can make a life for yourself with public transport and running shoes, but there are limits. Town planners recognise the problem...
By Rodney James
03 Mar 2022
Voyage within you, on the fabled ocean,
And you will find that Southern Continent,
Quiros' vision—his hidalgo heart
And mythical Australia, where reside
All things in their imagined counterpart.
It is your land of similes: the wattle...
By Rodney James
03 Mar 2022
Eltham Dam 1959 is a fresh and generously painted canvas that reinforces Arthur Boyd’s reputation in the late 1950s as Australia’s leading landscape artist. Central to the work is a unique understanding of the Australian bush and a love of secluded semi-rural farms and still-...
By John McDonald
03 Mar 2022
Vasari tells us that when Uccello’s wife called to him to bed, he would mutter: ‘Oh what a sweet thing this perspective is!’ and keep working. One can almost imagine Jeffrey Smart emulating the old Florentine in singing the praises of geometry and perspective, but it’s unlikely he would sit up...
By Sasha Grishin
03 Mar 2022
By John McDonald
03 Mar 2022
It would be possible to do an entire exhibition of paintings by Jeffrey Smart featuring buses and trucks. Yet where the back of a truck usually appears as a bold geometric shape – a red square on grey asphalt, the buses are treated more playfully. In The Traveller 1973, a bald-headed...
By Rodney James
03 Mar 2022
Gordale Scar (Grey) 1910 is a lively response to a striking cleft and canyon captured while on a walking tour of the Yorkshire Dales in North Yorkshire, England.1 Painted outdoors, in front of the subject, it is one of a pair of paintings Arthur Streeton produced of the...
By Catherine Baxendale
03 Mar 2022
An excellent example of shadow treatment is shown in the canvas “En Deshabille.” A lovely young girl in lilac underwear sits at a window in the shade of a closed shutter, the fair head thrown back in the armchair.
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