Dated on its stylistic similarity to Falls Bridge, Melbourne 1882 in the National Gallery of Victoria, Cows Crossing McCauley Creek, Looking towards Melbourne c1882 provides a striking example of Frederick McCubbin’s early mastery of the melancholic moment in his narrative paintings.
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Art Reviews
By Timothy Abdallah BA
10 Jun 2020
A letter written to his friend and fellow artist Lionel Lindsay (1874-1961) in 1936 by Arthur Streeton conveys something of the artist’s mood and outlook after a lifetime as a central figure of Australia’s art world:
I don’t...
By Gavin Fry
10 Jun 2020
At the start of the third decade of the 21st century many Australians are feeling destabilised and concerned about their lives, both in the immediate and longer term. The current conditions help put...
By Caroline Jones BA, MA (Art Admin.)
10 Jun 2020
Although Garry Shead could be broadly described as a republican and his Royal Suite paintings promptly entered the Australian republican debate of the late 1990s, this was not the primary intention of the series. It had been a long time in the making, in fact about...
By Rodney James, B.A. (Hons.), M.A
10 Jun 2020
The mid-1950s were a defining moment in the development of Charles Blackman’s art. Having relocated to Melbourne with his wife and muse Barbara in 1951, Blackman achieved early critical notice with his 1953-4 Schoolgirl series of paintings. Following a series of Avonsleigh landscapes in 1955,...
By Ken Wach
10 Jun 2020
Jeffrey Smart’s major painting Outside the Ministry of 1970 is a harmony of parts. The painting pulses with what might justifiably be called “visual alliteration”. That is, it has a range of “optical melodies” that run through and serve to both form and inform the built-up composition...
By Catherine Baxendale B Phil Hons
10 Jun 2020
Grace Cossington Smith’s radiant still lifes and interiors of the 1950s and 60s are broadly considered to mark the culmination of her career. Animating the entire surface of her paintings with ‘confident, square touches of pure colour,’1 Cossington Smith fulfilled her long-held...
By Ken Wach
10 Jun 2020
There are times when Brett Whiteley’s paintings are unusually lyrical. Certainly, Whiteley is one of Australia’s most lyrical artists, generally in the free use of his easy, languorous lines and particularly when they describe a curve, an arm, a thigh or a tree trunk. However, in paintings such...
By Ken Wach
10 Jun 2020
Sir Russell Drysdale was one of Australia’s most remarkable artists. He held seventeen solo exhibitions and participated in fifty-five group exhibitions. Drysdale’s works are rare and his output was comparatively low as he produced fewer than three hundred paintings. However, his undoubted...
By Jane Raffan
10 Jun 2020
Yorta Yorta artist Lin Onus has been described as a ‘provocateur who believed that there was no distinction between the...
