Man Walking (Shoalhaven) 1998

ROBERT DICKERSON (1924-2015)

Man Walking (Shoalhaven) 1998

synthetic polymer paint on canvas
90.5 x 120.0 cm; 106.0 x 136.0 cm (framed)
signed lower right: DICKERSON

Provenance:
The Estate of Robert Dickerson, New South Wales
Thence by descent, private collection, Sydney

Estimate: $35000 - 45000

Result Hammer: $44000

In the briefest possible terms, I find two things in Dickerson’s paintings which account for their great power. The most immediate is the revelation and realisation of what I would call an immensely powerful creative vision. By this I mean a vision, which in his case penetrates to the roots of our most everyday acts, and presents them in all their elemental truth: a man’s casual placing of his hand on his own foot; the crossing of one leg over another; the figure of a man stretched out on a bench; people sitting on a wall; a child walking down the street.(1)

No less an observer than John Reed, one of the most significant patrons of modern Australian art, penned these words of endorsement for Robert Dickerson’s practice in a prescient 1955 article titled ‘A Statement on Bob Dickerson: Painter’. Reed’s early recognition of Dickerson is telling, on two fronts. Firstly, that a child of working-class origins who strived to escape the drudgery of factory work through his art could attract the attention of Reed, who was comparatively urbane and privileged, speaks to the incisiveness of Dickerson’s early painting. Secondly, Reed’s proximity to and support of the young artist placed him firmly within the vanguard of Australian modernism alongside Sidney Nolan (1917-1992), Albert Tucker (1914-1999), John Perceval (1923-2000), Charles Blackman (1928-2018) and Arthur Boyd (1920-1999). 

Dickerson’s early work typically depicts post-war, inner-city Sydney and the diffident and enigmatic characters which inhabited this world. These paintings are constructed with flat planes of subdued colour, or shrouds of chiaroscuro, which serve to emphasise the features of his protagonists. Dickerson lent animation, and dignity, to common, working-class people going about their everyday tasks.  This is amply illustrated in Stable Boys 1957 (University of Western Australia collection, Perth) and The Bank Clerk 1958 (Holmes a Court Collection, Perth).

The present painting, Man Walking (Shoalhaven) 1998, was created during the artist’s mature period where his focus had shifted to more uplifting, often bucolic subjects. In late 1991 Dickerson and his wife Jennifer moved to Eumundi on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. This heralded not only a rich array of outdoor subjects to mine, but a serious return to ‘figure in landscape’ painting, as Jennifer Dickerson describes it. Some contemporaneous examples in this same mould include Tourist at Noosa 1993, Burning the Cane 1993 and The Artist in the Landscape 1993.

Shoalhaven is idyllic region on the South Coast of New South Wales, some 200 kilometres from Sydney. It encompasses fifty towns and villages, is bordered by mountains, coastal plains and beaches, and is synonymous with Australian Art as the home of Bundanon, an historical estate and now art museum where Dickerson’s contemporary Arthur Boyd spent the last 25 years of his life.

In Man Walking (Shoalhaven) of 1998, which makes its auction debut, we observe the hallmarks of a classic Robert Dickerson picture: an enigmatic figure, framed by planes of colour, and cast against the Australian landscape in high summer.

Footnotes:

1. John Reed, quoted in Dickerson, J., Robert Dickerson: Against the Tide, Pandanus Press, Brisbane, 1994, p.52

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