Art Reviews

John Perceval’s maritime scenes, which capture the chaos and joy of the docks at Williamstown, are considered the pinnacle of his eminent career. They are among the most jubilant depictions of the Australian landscape, which is more often portrayed as vast and desolate. Instead of endless…

Tim Maguire’s signature flower paintings are no more about flowers than those of such earlier painters of the motif as Georgia O’Keeffe and Andy Warhol.

[My work] also attempts to embody a sense of presence; it gives a direct experience to the viewer … it is always that direct relationship you have with the viewer that causes something to stir.¹

The year of 1941 proved to be a watershed in the development of Russell Drysdale’s art. Drysdale relinquished a long-held desire to work the land and instead chose to focus exclusively on painting and drawing. He produced his most significant pictures after moving from his family’s property near…

Columbines 1962 dates from a critical phase of Margaret Olley’s career, when she first achieved recognition on a national scale.  In 1962, Olley was heralded by the Courier-Mail as Australia’s ‘top woman painter’ following a sell-out show at…

Now that Cressida Campbell has so completely emerged and has achieved her place as one of Australia’s most important contemporary artists, it would be impossible to conceive of another painter so involved with the lived environment. She is both painter and…

I think the pleasure of painting is the manipulation of this solid body - that it's pushed around into a kind of structure - the thickness of paint or impasto, not for its own sake but the physical pleasure…

It’s a rare occurrence in Jeffrey Smart’s work that we find a figure in motion – let alone the strenuous, spectacular motion of a gymnast. Smart built his art on stillness, the kind of stillness found in the paintings of Piero della Francesca, as celebrated in monographs…

The major elements in Coburn’s work … are simplicity, order, colour, a concern with elemental subjects and a reduction to their symbolic essentials.¹

To comb through the letters of Brett Whiteley is to encounter a spirited commentary on politics, relationships and many of the major developments that have gripped the art world from the Renaissance to the present day. The topics shift in turn with the currents of…