Art Reviews

Many Australian artists have taken the landscape and stamped it with their own image … Arthur Boyd’s Shoalhaven pictures give us a new depth of understanding of the landscape, a new set of forms and vistas to look upon. Pulpit Rock, the turtle-shaped outcrop of sandstone that looms above the…

The long and illustrious career of Lloyd Rees – painter, printmaker and consummate draughtsman – was distinguished by his talent for reinvention. Nowhere is this more evident than during the last two decades of Rees’ life, which saw a profound shift in the style and substance of his art. Rees’…

After spending five years in London, Fred Williams returned to Australia in December 1956 as a 29-year-old with fresh eyes for his homeland. The Australian landscape struck him as peculiar after so long abroad, and he became determined to capture this peculiarity. To paint the Australian…

An alternative title for this painting might be Edward Hopper Goes to Bondi Beach. Jeffrey Smart’s admiration for the American artist is well known, and they share many of the same compositional devices. Like Hopper, Smart stuck to his guns as a realist painter in an era in which…

With exhibitions in Sydney and Melbourne, and painting outdoors at Kew, Kosciuszko, and Werribee, the years 1975 and 1976 were busy ones for Fred Williams. It is from the paintings that Williams completed at Kew that Kew Billabong 1976 comes. Williams began the series, over thirty in…

In the early 1970s, John Olsen began travelling to remote locations with friends such as filmmakers, Bob Raymond and Ken Taylor, and naturalist, Vincent Serventy. This provided a relief from the stressful business of finishing his Sydney Opera House mural, Salute to Five Bells, but it…

The frog is one of John Olsen’s greatest motifs and has become a much loved and admired aspect of his oeuvre. His first interactions with the creature arose while on the set of Wild Australia in 1971 where his eyes were suddenly opened to the diverse nature of Australia’s ecosystems.

Besides a brief period at the National Gallery School, Melbourne, Joel Elenberg was a self-taught artist. It was his numerous visits to Italy and to the city of Carrara from 1976 that fortified his skills and stimulated his acclaimed, mature output of work. Known for its quarries of white marble…

Few artists have captured the beauty and sheer luxuriance of the Australian rainforest as successfully as William Robinson. While we associate Australia’s best-known artists with their convincing representations of the scrubby bush or sun-bleached rugged coast, it is Robinson who stands above…

Arthur Boyd’s Potter Dreaming of Gold is a subject that presents a thought-provoking depiction of the preciousness and precariousness of human existence. A central theme of Arthur Boyd’s oeuvre, the preciousness/precariousness duality, so often commented on by other writers,^1…