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27 MARCH - 14 JUNE 2015

Artists A to Z

MARY ABBOTT (NEE ROBERTS) 4JAN ALEXANDER 5RICK AMOR 6JEAN APPLETON 7TULLY ARNOT 8DAVID ASPDEN 9JOSEPH BACKLER 10GEORGE BALDESSIN 11LIONEL BAWDEN 12RICHARD BELL 13JEAN BELLETTE 14CHARLES BLACKMAN 15LES BLACKEBROUGH 16ARTHUR BOYD 17MERRIC BOYD 18JOHN BRACK 19EVELYN CAMPBELL 20

REGINALD EARLE CAMPBELL 21JUDY CASSAB 22JOHN COBURN 23WILL COLES 24MARTIN COYTE 25ELIZABETH CUMMINGS 26GREG DALY 27LAWRENCE DAWS 28ROY DE MAISTRE 29ROBERT DICKERSON 30RUSSELL DRYSDALE 31RUBY EAVES 32RACHEL ELLIS 33JOHN FIRTH-SMITH 34EDITH MARY FOX 35DONALD FRIEND 36MERRICK FRY 37

HECTOR GILLILAND 38JAMES GLEESON 39GWYN HANSSEN PIGOTT 40JOHN HARDMAN LISTER 41JESSE JEWHURST HILDER 42MARGEL HINDER 43FIONA HISCOCK 44DAVID JAMES 45JONATHAN JONES 46HERBERT KEMBLE 47PETER KINGSTON 48ROBERT KLIPPEL 49GEORGE WASHINGTON LAMBERT 50GEORGE FEATHER LAWRENCE 51LIONEL LINDSAY 52PERCY LINDSAY 53MATILDA LISTER 54WILLIAM LISTER LISTER 55

JOANNE LOGUE 56SIDNEY LONG 57GRAHAM LUPP 58FRANCIS LYMBURNER 59ELWYN LYNN 60ROSEMARY MADIGAN 61SHEILA LETHBRIDGE MCDONALD 62CLEMENT MEADMORE 63FRANK MEDWORTH 64DANIE MELLOR 65JOHN OLSEN 66DESIDERIUS ORBAN 67JENNY ORCHARD 68ALAN PEASCOD 69ADELAIDE PERRY 70THEA PROCTOR 71PIERRE JOSEPH REDOUTE 72NORMA REDPATH 73

LLOYD REES 74WILLIAM ROBINSON 75JO ROSS 76JOAN ROSS 77ANTHONY DATTILO RUBBO 78HUI SELWOOD 79WENDY SHARPE 80ANNEKE SILVER 81ERIC SMITH 82GRACE COSSINGTON SMITH 83EUGENIE SOLANOV 84TONY TUCKSON 85ROSEMARY VALADON 86PRUE VENABLES 87GREG WEIGHT 88NICOLE WELCH 89BRETT WHITELEY 90FRED WILLIAMS 91

DAVID BRIAN WILSON 92TIM WINTERS 93ROSWITHA WULFF 94

MARY ABBOTT (NEE ROBERTS) (1916 - 1966)

Cocktail Bar

Mainly educated at the Sydney Commercial Art School and the Julian Ashton Art School, Mary Abbott’s talents were wide ranging. In addition to teaching, she was highly interested in commercial art and studied fine arts in the areas of painting portraits and landscapes, jewellery and fashion artistry.

In 1958 Abbott relocated from Sydney to Bathurst where she became involved in the local art scene through the Bathurst Society of Music and Arts.

In “Cocktail Bar”, she has used one model as the basis for the three figures.

JAN ALEXANDER (1927 - 2012)

The wrath of sinful man restrain. Give peace, O God, give peace again

Jan Alexander was an artist active in Bathurst for thirty years from the 1970s to the early 2000s. She was a committee member and a long term supporter of Bathurst Regional Art Gallery Society during these years. She advocated that art was for everyone.

Jan grew up along the Lachlan River west of Forbes. She moved to Bathurst with her young family in the 1960s.

Jan said in 1996: “In all my work, I try to extend and explore the mysterious language of creativity to produce personal images that question and challenge. Inspiration comes from a life experience, a brush with people, a news flash, a musical note or a bird’s song.”

Jan’s art – painting, sculpture, mixed media and drawing – expressed her concerns with social issues and the events of everyday life. She worked in a range of media including inks, charcoal, chalk, woodblock printing, acrylic, oil and watercolour, and liked to experiment with unusual materials.

Jan exhibited in five solo exhibitions and her work was included in numerous selection-prize exhibitions including the Bathurst Art Purchase, Maitland Drawing Prize, Mornington Festival of Drawing (twice), Print and Drawing Show Swan Hill (three times), Portia Geach Memorial (three times), and the Blake Prize Exhibition.

Jan also exhibited in joint exhibitions with fellow Bathurst artists Jo Ross and Lyn Denman in ‘Three Bathurst Artists’ at the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery during September and October 2000.

Jan studied and worked with a number of artists including Mary Abbott, Michael Winters, Jo Ross and David Wilson.

Jan tutored children in art through the Young Ideas Program and in private lessons. She believed strongly in encouraging children to study art to enrich their lives and heighten their powers of observation.

Awards include Parkes Contemporary Painting Prize, Orange Drawing Prize, Orange Print Prize, Mudgee Drawing Purchase Prize, and Faber Castell Drawing Award. Jan’s works are held in private collections in Bathurst, Sydney, Melbourne, Canada and the UK.

Compiled by Wendy Alexander 30/3/2015

RICK AMOR (b. 1948)

Maquette for “Figure in a Landscape”

Rick Amor (born Victoria 1948) has been a quiet presence in the Australian art scene for more than 30 years. In 1965 he completed a Certificate of Art at the Caulfield Institute of Art and from 1966 to 1968 studied at the National Gallery School, Melbourne.

An equally talented painter and sculptor, Amor is perhaps better known for his paintings. Since the early 1990’s, Amor has ‘blown hot and cold with sculpture’, creating mostly bronze figures which he moulds in his studio and then sends to a foundry to finish the process. In 2007 Amor’s sculpture Relic won the prestigious McClelland Award for Sculpture, placing him firmly within the ranks of Australia’s best sculptors.

His works all deal with the concepts of mortality and the human condition, many bordering on the edge of melancholy. He favours lone solitary figures usually coupled with stark skeletal trees like those in Man in Landscape (included in this exhibition).

Amor shows annually at Niagara Galleries and has had over 50 solo exhibitions to date. Perhaps the most important exhibition of his bronze sculptures was undertaken by Benalla Art Gallery in 2002, including many maquettes never previously exhibited.

Rick Amor lives and works in Melbourne. He is represented by Niagara Galleries, Melbourne and Liverpool St Gallery, Sydney.

JEAN APPLETON (1911 - 2003)

Interior with Figure

Jean Appleton, textile designer and painter of landscape and still life, had a distinguished career as an artist and teacher. In 1932 she graduated from East Sydney Technical College where the course was limited to drawing and illustration, but she did a little work in oils for her diploma. She studied at the Westminster School in England for three years under teachers who were important figures in the modern movement in British painting. She went through the stage of being semi-abstract in the 1960’s, when she won the Darcy Morris Prize for Religious Art. A self-portrait won the inaugural Portia Geach Prize in 1965.

The painting, “Interior with Figure” (102 x 90) is oil on Masonite. It is a low key tonal work with broken colour. In the design, shapes are repeated for emphasis. The figure of her daughter Libby is in darkness yet the eye is drawn to it. There is a use of complementary colours with accents of rich warm reds and cool darks to balance.

Though many of her subjects were similar to Grace Cossington Smith’s, the method of work was completely different. Cossington Smith worked continuously with blobs of colour, from the top left hand corner right through the painting, with no painting over. Appleton started with a few shapes right through the picture, working and reworking until satisfied.

Appleton was very interested in the study of light – light on surfaces, light reflecting and permeating the subject. This trend started after a trip to England in 1966-69, when she became more conscious of the difference of light in Australia and England. An exhibition of her work at the Painters’ Gallery in 1986 showed pictures flooded with light, the white light of summer. Always in the foreground is a still life, then a background landscape. They are scenes of domesticity with a scale larger than most. You feel you can walk into the room. The paintings of flowers are looser than in her earlier paintings.

Appleton was always interested in still life with a view through the window. She had a good visual memory for shapes and colours, and though she had many items from her room in her pictures, the works were completed from memory.

TULLY ARNOT

Jurassic Cup

At first glance the work titled “Jurassic Cup”, by Tully Arnot seems out of place in an art gallery, it seems to simply be a disposable plastic cup.

This playful work on further inspection is more complex, perhaps its title gives it away. The inspiration for the work is the 1993 American science fiction adventure film directed by Steven Spielberg based on the novel of the same name by Michael Crichton.

The film centres on the fictional Isla Nublar near Costa Rica’s Pacific Coast, where a billionaire philanthropist and a small team of genetic scientists have created a wildlife park of cloned dinosaurs.

Arnot’s “Jurassic Cup” refers to a scene in the film where water in a cup starts to vibrate as a massive cloned Tyrannosaurus rex (the largest of the dinosaurs) approaches. If you stand for a while you will observe that the cup has a hidden mechanism that causes the water to vibrate for a certain time frequency.

In a sophisticated way Arnot has transcribed the virtual world of film into tangible reality. The magic of this rather simple object is that it conjures questions regarding the boundaries between fact and fiction and how film has come to inform our everyday lives.

Robina Booth, Acting Curator, BRAG

DAVID ASPDEN (1935 - 2005)

Australia II

David Aspden was a self-taught painter and teacher who migrated to Australia with his family in 1950. He began his working life as an apprentice painter and sign writer in Port Kembla.

At 16 he joined a group of friends from the Wollongong Art Society and began experimenting with oils on canvas. It was through this group that he met painter, Bill Peascod, who became a close friend.

Determined to one day become a full-time painter Aspden set himself a rigorous programme of self-education. In 1963 judge Wallace Thornton awarded him both the Prize for Drawing and the prize for a Local Artist’s Painting in the Greater Wollongong Art Competition. At about this time Aspden met Colin Lanceley who encouraged him to move to Sydney and set up a studio in Paddington.

Aspden became interested in the work of American colour-field artists Mark Rothko and Jules Olitski, seeing their work as a move towards clarity, purity and simplicity. Two of his works were included in The Field exhibition of 1968, arranged by the National Gallery of Victoria to mark the opening of its new building. It was in this year that Aspden began lecturing in freehand drawing in the School of Architecture at the University of NSW.

In November 1969 David Aspden joined the Rudy Komon Gallery in Paddington. This connection gave Aspden a degree of financial security. After a brief visit to England, Aspden returned to Sydney. He was creating compositions of ‘torn’ shapes and leaf-like images scattered over primed canvas, balancing emptiness with shape and colour. These works, gifts to Gwen from David, were produced at this time.

Following Gwen Frolich’s bequest, David Aspden and his wife Karen Coote donated two major works by David, “Mediation Red” (1977) and “Meditation Blue” (1977) to our collection. They are a perfect compliment to Gwen’s vision.

David Aspden passed away on Sunday, 26 June 2005.

Margaret Linton, Gallery Guide

JOSEPH BACKLER (1813 - 1895)

Edward Austin & Mary Jane Austin

Backler was born in London in 1813, the son of an artist, with whom he trained. In June 1831, aged about 18, he was convicted of passing forged orders and sentenced to transportation. After number of offences, for which he was in Port Macquarie, and a few petitions later, he secured his ticket of leave in 1840, and by 1843, he was advertising himself as an artist. As the economic depression of the 1840’s deepened, he soon realised the financial possibilities of working in regional centres. It is known he worked in Goulburn, Yass, Bathurst, Maitland and Newcastle. Backler was a prolific painter of a particular kind of people – prosperous middle class colonial merchants and farmers.

In 1850, he painted Edward and Mary Ann Austin. Edward owned a produce store on the corner of Durham and William Street. The store was presumably quite large, as Mr Austin at one stage turned over part of the building to be used as the ‘immigration barracks’ for assisted immigrants and their families who had come to live in the Bathurst district.

In his paintings of the Austins, Backler has portrayed them in a manner that is common in many of his portraits, with both people being depicted in a seated position down to waist level, surrounded by a minimal background, such as a simple draped curtain. Backler very much followed the nineteenth century conventions in portraiture where backgrounds displayed simple elements such as a Grecian column, a window framed view and a swag of curtain. In the case of Backler’s works it has been observed that many of his portraits lacked “any background at all”, which indicates costs to the client were kept to a minimal. Backler brings some perception to his portraits, and we can see a hint of a personality, especially through his depiction of the sitter’s dress.

During his time in Bathurst, he also painted two known landscapes, one of which featured Kelso, and the other the township of Bathurst with the old Bathurst Gaol. Joseph Backler died in Sydney in 1895, aged in his early eighties. Through his career as a painter, Backler was able to map the rapid growth of regional colonial life through the landscapes of towns and the portraits of personalities who forged their development.

Sam Malloy, Gallery Guide

GEORGE BALDESSIN (1939 - 1978)

Reclining Torso & Figure in a circle

In 1964 the 25 year old George Baldessin made an impressive debut on the Australian art scene with an exhibition at the Angus Gallery in Melbourne. His combined show of drawings, etchings and sculpture had an ‘inner dynamism’ that was seen as the most promising in twenty years.

Baldessin had studied at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and also in London, but it was his time in Milan that added vitality to his skills, in particular his sculpture.

Critics heaped praise on his work; “never predictable”, “deliciously fresh and light”, “absurd” and “engaging”.

His first Sydney exhibition, hosted by Rudy Komon in 1965, was described as an extraordinary event.

Seeking perfection, Baldessin returned to Paris to workshop printmaking. Working collaboratively with Fred Williams, Roger Kemp, Jan Senbergs and others, his uncanny ability to produce quality prints was highly recognised.

His unexpected death in 1978, at the age of just 39, was mourned by many in the art world, particularly those at the Komon Gallery.

Many of his works in the Bequest were Christmas gifts to Gwen. Baldessin’s inscription on Window with factory smoke is a testament to the enduring respect he had for her: “artist proof for a most able assistant, Gwen”.

Margaret Marshall, Gallery Guide

LIONEL BAWDEN (b. 1974)

The Amour

At the heart of Lionel Bawden’s practice is an interest in the patterning of repetition. In The amorphous ones (the unending novelty of liberated sensation) Bawden was drawn to the intricate honeycomb pattern created when coloured pencils are fused together. The artist likes the way this material loses its familiarity when seen in this new context – its materiality is transformed.

The sculptural objects that Bawden creates through carving and shaping this experimental medium take on a life of their own replicating the patterns of nature. This work resembles the soft bodies of molluscs or the growing forms of corals.

Robina BoothActing Curator

RICHARD BELL (b. 1953)

What’s the Question

Australian Aboriginal contemporary artist Richard Bell says his work is not subtle, because “There’s no point in talking in metaphor to most people, because they don’t get it.” Bell considers himself to be “an activist masquerading as an artist” and his work is a vigorous response to white Australia’s appropriation of Aboriginal land, culture and art, and ongoing racism and injustice towards Aboriginal people.

Bell borrows concepts and techniques from traditional Aboriginal art and from artists in the Western tradition, naming Pop artists such as Andy Warhol as early influences.

“What’s the Question” is one of a series of paintings Bell calls his “Theorems”, in which he layers bold, provocative text over a background which is re-imagining of elements seen in traditional Aboriginal paintings. The work was acquired by Bathurst Regional Art Gallery in 2007.

Bell was born in 1953 in Charleville, south west Queensland. He is a member of the Kamilaroi tribe and three other indigenous peoples: the Jiman, Kooman, and Goreng Goreng. As a child, Bell experienced poverty, racism and forced separation from his mother. He describes this experience as “horrific.” His activism grew out of these experiences and he was also influenced by the struggle for racial equality in the USA.

Although Bell has said that message is more important to him than aesthetic, his work has been internationally exhibited and acclaimed for the way it combines aesthetic excellence with its demand for justice and equality for indigenous people.

Lyn Webster, Gallery Guide

JEAN BELLETTE (1908 – 1991)

Still Life

Jean Bellette (1908 – 1991) gave art classes regularly in Bathurst in the 1950s, teaching on Saturdays in the School of Arts building, formerly at the corner of William and Howick Streets. During these trips she and her husband, artist and art critic Paul Haefliger, would visit Russell Drysdale and Donald Friend in Hill End, where they purchased a cottage of their own in 1954. Haefligers Cottage is now one of the studio residences that form the heart of the celebrated Hill End Artists in Residence Program managed by Bathurst Regional Art Gallery (BRAG). “Still Life” won the inaugural Carillon City Festival Art Prize in 1955, becoming the first work to enter the Gallery’s permanent collection. Completed at Hill End, the work demonstrates Bellette’s formalist concerns with structure and composition and features a number of items still found in Haefligers Cottage today. “Still Life” remains one of the most enduringly popular works in the BRAG collection.

Born in Tasmania, Jean Bellette studied widely, firstly at the Hobart Technical School, then the Julian Ashton Art School, Sydney, and later at the Central School of Art, London. She and Paul Haefliger travelled extensively, settling in Majorca in 1957. During her career, Bellette taught, designed theatre sets, wrote for “Art in Australia”, exhibited regularly and was a founder of the Sydney Art Group. She was awarded the Sulman Prize in 1942 and 1944. Jean Bellette died in Majorca in 1991, aged 82.

CHARLES BLACKMAN (b. 1928)

Girl

As a child, Charles Blackman learnt to draw by tracing comic strips of Little Abner, Flash Gordon and Ginger Megs. He left school at thirteen and worked as a press artist with the Sydney Sun, while attending night classes in drawing and design at the East Sydney Technical College from 1942-5.

In 1951, Blackman married the poet Barbara Patterson. Her impaired vision had a profound impact on his work; sharpening his observation and leading him to focus on the face as a means of expressing the human condition.

During the 1950’s, working in Melbourne under the patronage of John Reed, Blackman began creating his series of work based on the Schoolgirl. These works won him critical acclaim and led to the popular Alice in Wonderland series.

He was part of the Heide Group and the Antipodeans founded in 1959, along with artists including Arthur Boyd, John Brack, Robert Dickerson and Clifton Pugh, all of whom are represented in the Gwen Frolich bequest.

In 1960 Blackman won the Helena Rubinstein Scholarship and left for London and Paris, exhibiting at the Whitechapel and Tate galleries.

His first exhibition with the Rudy Komon Gallery was in a group show titled “A Group of Melbourne Painters” with friends Leonard French, Clifton Pugh, John Brack, John Perceval and Fred Williams. A year later he had a solo show, and continued to exhibit with Rudy until the late 1970’s.

Hilary Stitt, Gallery Guide

LES BLACKEBROUGH (b. 1930)

Tree Pot

Les Blakebrough was born in 1930. He studied at East Sydney Technical College from 1952-56. He worked at Sturt Workshop in Mittagong, and took a trip to Japan in 1963 where he studied with Takeich Kawai. Blakebrough moved to Tasmania, where he now resides.

Tree pot, a slab built clay pot built in the 1970’s while he was at Sturt Workshop is held by BRAG. It was gifted by Margaret Smith in 1974. The pot is made from clay and rock from Mittagong, and is ash fired. It is a good example of his work at the time, boldly etched and strongly structured.

Many international Artists were hosted at Sturt whilst Blakeborough was successfully acting as director. Among notable artists were Alan Peascod and Shigo Shigeo (BRAG holds examples of works by both these artists). Japanese aesthetics and techniques were being explored. Blakebrough began producing work of incredible beauty, some small and quite precise.

Flower patterns, memories his time in Japan, wind patterns from the Derwent, and light shimmering through long grass are often recalled and delicately patterned onto the surface of Blakebrough’s recent works. He creates “pieces rich in detail and elegant in execution”

Margaret Marshall, Gallery Guide

ARTHUR BOYD (1920 - 1999)

Skull & Mirror

Arthur Boyd was born in 1920, into one of Australia’s most widely known artistic dynasties. Son of potter and painter Merric Boyd, and grandson of landscape painter Arthur Merrric Boyd, Arthur gained instruction in ceramics from his father, and was taught to paint in the Heidelberg tradition by his grandfather.

His art has been described as surrealist, religious, naturalistic or erotic, sometimes almost abstract. A prolific artist, his work encompassed print making, etching, figurative painting, pottery, ceramic painting and sculpture. His images were often concerned with portraying the human condition, and its capacity to endure.

With his friend and brother in law John Perceval he studied old masters, especially Bosch and Brueghel. Boyd also studied Rembrandt which added mood and spiritual texture to his work. He painted religious and mythological subjects, while continuing to paint his own highly individual interpretation of the Australian landscape.

He was part of the Melbourne Angry Penguins group as well as a member of the Antipodeans.

Boyd and his family went to London in 1959, and did not return permanently until 1972, settling at Bundanon on the New South Wales South Coast (the property was gifted the nation in 1990 as a haven for artists and musicians).

He exhibited with the Rudy Komon Art Gallery in 1975 and 1978. This work is inscribed “gift to Rudy Komon”; Gwen would have acquired it after Rudy’s death in 1982.

Hilary Stitt, Gallery Guide

MERRIC BOYD (1888 - 1959)

Jug With Tree Form Handle

William Merric Boyd was an early member of one of Australia’s greatest artistic families. Born in 1888 to parents who were both painters, he became a potter, painter and sculptor. His brother Penleigh became a landscape painter, brother Martin a famous novelist and sister Helen Read a painter.

As an adolescent, Merric was what we might now call ‘a lost soul’. He was a bit of a recluse, subject to epileptic fits (little understood then) and had no idea what he wanted to do with his life. With the help of his parents he tried theological college, jackarooing and dairy farming. None appealed. The family lived in St Kilda, a suburb of Melbourne, and finally his parents sent him to the National Gallery of Victoria Art School.

From the first moment he threw a pot on the wheel he knew he had found his vocation. In 1913 his family bought him an old orchard at Murrumbeena, then a small country town south-east of Melbourne. He built a simple, coal-fired kiln and set up his pottery. He called his place ‘Open Country’.

In 1915 he married Doris Gough and together they produced their distinctive pottery with Australian themes. They also had five children, all of whom became part of the art world. Arthur Boyd, the first son, became one of Australia’s most famous painters and potters. Mary, the last daughter, married John Perceval and later Sidney Nolan.

From now until 1st May the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery has a superb exhibition of ceramics, drawings and paintings by Merric Boyd and his son Arthur. The travelling exhibition is from the Bundanon Trust collection. In the foyer, there is an exhibition of Guy Boyd’s ceramics, collected by the Small family in Bathurst. Guy Boyd was Merric’s second son.

In the Lloyd Rees room there is the one Merric Boyd ceramic in the Gallery’s permanent collection. It is known as ‘Jug With Tree Form Handle’, made in the 1940s. Such pieces seldom come on the market now. There is currently a similar one on eBay valued at over $1500.00.

Merric died at Murrumbeena in 1959. Within a couple of years the buildings on ‘Open Country’ had been demolished and the area subdivided. But Merric’s legacy lives on in his distinctive art works and his artistic dynasty – his children and their children, who are working now.

Joy Dickson, Gallery Guide

JOHN BRACK (1920 - 1999)

La Traviata (from Opera series)

John Brack’s powerful paintings reflecting the balance and circle of life take time and contemplation.

He was born in Melbourne in 1920 and after leaving school he obtained a job with the Victorian Insurance Office.

Walking through the city one day he came upon some reproductions of Van Gogh paintings in a shop window that had a remarkable impact on him. He said “it was like a physical shock – sort of shuddering – like a door being opened.” From this time he knew which direction his life was to take.

He enrolled in evening classes at the National Gallery School and studied drawing under Charles Wheeler. World War II interrupted his studies, but he returned to full time training through the Commonwealth Rehabilitation Training Scheme, to study under William Dargie.He obtained a position in the print room at the National Gallery and later became part time Art Master at Melbourne Grammar School.

His paintings reflect life around suburban Melbourne featuring figures with over emphasised expressions, intense lines, and often showing tension within the work.

His first exhibition was in 1953 at the Peter Bray Gallery, Melbourne. This was followed by many exhibitions in Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra and at the Rudy Komon Gallery in Sydney where he exhibited for many years. He would have had a close association with Gwen Frolich. Bathurst Regional Art Gallery received two John Brack lithographs through the Gwen Frolich Bequest.

“La Traviato” (66x49cm) coloured lithograph, 1981, was part of a series produced to raise funds for the Australian Opera, and features Violetta the courtesan in the opera.

John Brack died in 1999.

Pat Pollard, Gallery Guide

EVELYN CAMPBELL

Bathurst Street

Evelyn Campbell gave an oil painting to Bathurst Regional Art Gallery in 1979, painted in 1978, “Bathurst Street.”

Evelyn grew up in Wagga, where she became a cadet journalist on the local paper. She had a natural talent for craft and drawing. She later went to the Julian Ashton School, and kept going back for refresher courses.

Evelyn and her husband Reg Campbell came to Sunny Corner in 1946, where they built a shack of stone and clay. The couple was broke. Reg worked as a sign writer in Bathurst, and took any job he could get. Evelyn was a good business woman, and taught Reg a lot of art. They had a son and a daughter.

Evelyn became better known in Bathurst when she painted many of the historic houses around the district for the sesquicentenary of Bathurst. She painted a landscape of Capertee Valley and some still lifes.

Reg and Evelyn later built a house, Studio Park, at Sunny Corner. They travelled extensively, spending some time painting portraits of the Royal family and nobility in Denmark.

REGINALD EARLE CAMPBELL (1923 - 2008)

Carillon City

Reginald Earle Campbell was born in Gladesville, New South Wales. He enlisted in the Australian Imperial Forces serving in New Guinea until his discharge in 1945. Campbell met Hans Heysen and Robert Johnson whose works inspired him. Still life and portraiture soon became the trade mark of his work. With no formal training Campbell won many awards and prizes which enabled him to travel overseas. Testimony to the mastery of his skill, Campbell was commissioned to paint portraits of many prominent figures in Australia and overseas. He completed 22 portraits of the Vice Regal family of Denmark. Whilst in England Campbell was invited to be a guest lecturer at the Slade School of Art.Upon his return to Australia, Campbell completed portraits of notable citizens: Don Bradman, Albert Namatjira, Sir Garfield Barwick, John Laws and Bob Dyer. Charles Sturt University commissioned Campbell to complete portraits of chancellors and prominent staff members, including a double portrait of Jack and Dr Colleen McDonough.

One of the largest works painted by Campbell was commissioned by Bathurst Rotary to celebrate the 100th Anniversary of the Bathurst Show. The work covers the wall of the Howard Pavilion, easily visible when visiting the Bathurst Growers’ Markets.

Campbell and his wife Evelyn, also an artist, lived for many years in a peaceful garden setting hidden half way between Lithgow and Bathurst. Many of their paintings of historic residences and flowers grace the walls of local homes and business houses.

JUDY CASSAB (b. 1920)

Portrait of Lloyd Rees

Judy Cassab was born in 1920 in Austria to Hungarian parents. At age 12 she decided to be a painter and at the same time started a lifelong habit of writing a diary. She married in 1939 but only after making her future husband promise that their marriage would not interfere with her art.

Her art studies were interrupted by the Nazi occupation and she took an assumed name to hide her Jewish identity. During the day she worked in a factory and at night she was able to use her artistic skills to forge papers and passports. After the war she holidayed each summer in an artists’ colony on the Danube which she found more useful than the school system. In 1951 she migrated with her husband and two children to Australia.

Judy Cassab paints abstracts and landscapes but it is her portraiture for which she is most celebrated. She has won many prestigious art awards including the Archibald Prize, which she has won twice. She has painted celebrities, dignitaries, royalty and fellow artists both here in Australia and overseas. She likes to talk with her sitters so as to catch the expression in their eyes, always her starting point, and to learn the inner person, just as important for her portraits as getting a good likeness.

The Australian sculptor, Robert Klippel (1920-2001,) utilised an extraordinary diversity of ‘junk’ materials in his work as he set out to relate the forms of nature to the styles and forms of machinery. Rosemary Madigan (1926- ), also an Australian sculptor, primarily carves in wood and stone with the female torso being a recurring image in her work. These two sculptors formed a personal and creative partnership for 28 years, although they did not live together.

To paint this portrait, Cassab visited Klippel in his Sydney home which, she notes in her diary, was full of dishevelment and jumble, presumably raw material for his sculptures, along with hundreds of examples of his work.

The Gallery holds a further four paintings by Judy Cassab as well as works by Klippel and Madigan. One of our assemblages by Klippel is almost identical to a work in the portrait and is also displayed.

This portrait was painted in 1987 and remained in the artist’s personal collection till now. Judy Cassab has gifted this portrait to the Gallery.

Kathleen Oakes, Gallery Guide

JOHN COBURN (1925 - 2006)

African Summer

John Coburn was an artist who predominantly worked in an abstract tradition. His joyous paintings of simple clear forms in radiant colours resonate with the spiritualism that informed Coburn’s life. Coburn’s work is influenced by European abstractionism, particularly the School of Paris which included the artists Matisse, Picasso, Leger, Manessier, de Stael, Soulages and Marchand.

Coburn was born in Ingham, in far north Queensland in 1925. From an early age he was interested in art – drawing and painting were hobbies he pursued on the weekends. At the age of 14 the artist left school to work in a bank.

With the outbreak of WWII Coburn joined the navy and spent the next three years travelling around the Indian and Pacific oceans, working as a radio operator, continuing to draw in his spare time. Shortly after demobilisation in 1946 he set out for Sydney with the intention of studying art.

Coburn enrolled at the National Art School in East Sydney under the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme, training under teachers such as Godfrey Miller, Wallace Thornton, Dorothy Thornhill and Douglas Dundas. After graduating in 1950, Coburn supported his arts practice through teaching and designing sets for ABC television.

In 1958, Coburn had his first solo exhibition at the Macquarie Galleries in Sydney. In 1960 he won the prestigious Blake Prize for religious art. He lived in Paris from 1969-72 with his wife, screen printer Barbara Woodward, designing and supervising the weaving of tapestries at Aubusson, among them those commissioned for the Sydney Opera House.

Magnificent banners designed by Coburn decorate the All Saints’ Cathedral in Bathurst (corner of Church and William Streets). These banners titled Come Holy Spirit Renew the Whole Creation (originally one large work) were commissioned for the World Council of Churches Assembly held in Canberra in 1991. In the same year, the work was acquired by the Bathurst Anglican diocese as a memorial to one of their patrons Mrs Maude Papworth. The installation of the banners in the cathedral was overseen by the artist in 1991.

The dual forces of nature and of the spiritual world were the inspiration for John Coburn’s art for most of his life. “I sometimes try to paint God, and sometimes I just paint the earth.” His flat semi-abstract modes of painting, in bright clear colours, lend itself to non-illusionist two dimensional media such as tapestry and screen print.

WILL COLES(b. 1972)

finite

Will Coles the artist describes himself as a sculptor, street artist and freelance European. Originally training in the UK, Coles relocated to Sydney in the late 90s and has been exhibiting in Australia since. The artist is represented by Brenda May Gallery, Sydney and has exhibited as part of the May’s Lane Project and Sculpture by the Sea.

Coles works in ongoing series, “finite” is from the “Nihilist Archaeology Series” that refers to obsolescence. He explores contemporary issues, examining the premise that within contemporary society, all products, forms of entertainment and culture seem polluted by the cult of disposability, a lack of content and a short shelf life.

In the “Nihilist Archaeology Series”, Coles asks “Are we and our junk reaching critical mass? If all our junk is made in China, we will have nothing worth digging up in the future...” This sculpture “finite” is decidedly angular with a rear corner ‘disappearing into the ground’. This play with shape in space, and how we relate to our surroundings, also accentuates its reference to disposability. The title of the work inscribed down the side of the object reflects Coles’ interest in word poetry, which condenses an idea, or sentence to its minimum making one word loaded with meaning.

Coles uses traditional sculptural methods of modelling and casting with materials more suited to mass production, such as concrete, plastics and fiberglass to create replicas of modern technology such as televisions, VCRs and remote controls, casting into their forms words such as ‘fear’, ‘numb’, and ‘lonely’ which question the information relayed via these same objects. Ultimately, the final work is a combination of two elements, either a word and an object or the fusion of two disparate objects. Will Coles’ sculptures of everyday objects, while recognisable, are transformed in a way that prompts us to question the quotidian relationships we have to these objects.

Coles disagrees with the traditional role of the galleries as repositories for objects, where often artworks in collections are rarely seen or displayed. The artist believes that “if that main thing about your art is for it to be seen and thought about, you have to find an alternative way of getting it out there.” To this end, as a means of subversively circumventing galleries as a context for viewing his work, Coles’ inscribed televisions, washing machines, mobiles, and TV remotes can be seen glued to footpaths, town squares and intersections in inner city Sydney as an act of ‘guerrilla art’.

“We were born to think, find and unravel, to solve problems”, Coles says, “Despite reports to the contrary, I believe that art can make a difference and with this in mind I set out to make sculpture that is confronting and provocative so as to create debate.”

Briony Hodgson, Gallery Guide

MARTIN COYTE(b. 1953)

Shee-oaks

Local artist Martin Coyte’s formation as an artist began with an idyllic rural childhood in the Central West that fuelled the inspiration for his future creative energy. During the 1970’s his formal education was nurtured at the Julian Ashton Art School, the National Art School and Alexander Mackie College of Advanced Education. These combined experiences continue to influence his work today.

The pivotal year was 1979. Martin was awarded the New South Wales Travelling Art Scholarship and held his first major solo exhibition as part of the Eighth Orange Festival of the Arts. For an artist in his mid twenties, Coyte was prolific, talented and completely devoted to his art.

Martin travelled overseas in the early 80’s. The imposed isolation of travel and the constant problems for a travelling artist on a tight budget challenged Martin to work with very small portable objects which were included in two exhibitions: Cite Internationale Des Arts, Paris and The Gallery, New South Wales House, London. One series of work consisted of insects collected on his travels that were placed within matchboxes and covered in red wax that came with rounds of Edam cheese. Both exhibitions were conceptual, sculpture oriented and formed in installation. The objects reflected Martin’s ideas about the nature of human existence.

Increasingly in his notebook the word “primordial” appears meaning “existing from the beginning”. Man is primordial. Art is primordial. It began with man. These ideas culminated in a large installation piece, “Three Chances” that was exhibited 1984 in Sydney and again at Bathurst Regional Art Gallery in 2005.

The central theme is that space is something that you are given to live in, to be in, to survive in and to do something with. You are provided with three chances or three shots at doing something with your space. According to Martin, the primordial colours are yellow and black. It is a combination that occurs in nature on insects and animals such as bees, snakes, or tigers. Black and yellow have emerged as one of the main elements in his work. It is a very strong combination, although the artists unique blending of these colours produces a warm and calming effect that rests easy with the soul.

By the end of the 80’s, he had started to use overlapping imagery to suggest different levels. A good example is “Stand of Shee Oaks” currently on display at Bathurst Art Gallery. Martin’s landscape is not a geographical place, more a metaphorical or psychological one. There is subtle streak of humour that imbues his work. The viewer must watch the work to reveal its layers of content, relationships and mirth. Martin continues to work and exhibit both locally and nationally.

Beverley Melhuish, Gallery Guide

ELIZABETH CUMMINGS(b. 1934)

Grey Interior

Elizabeth Cummings was born in Brisbane in 1934. She enrolled at the National Art School in 1954, and studied there in Sydney for five years, her teachers being Godfrey Miller and Ralph Balson.

After winning an Art Scholarship in 1958, Elizabeth Cummings travelled overseas, where she was to spend ten years working and travelling through Europe, particularly in Italy and France. In 1968 she returned to live in Australia, painting and teaching part time in Sydney (National Art School 1969-74, The City Art Institute 1975-87, and Tafe Colleges 1975-93).

“Grey Interior” is one of two paintings by Cummings in the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery’s collection. Her work develops “the relationship of figures and objects in space, the way in which the eye is led further through the placement of objects into the space beyond.” “Grey Interior” combines many of the motifs used in earlier works by Cummings, the Sepik masks on the wall, the eye travelling from the still life on the table to the room beyond. The painting is full of light with small contrasts of deeper colour.

Edwina Shand, Gallery Guide

GREG DALY(b. 1954)

Vase (Metallic red)

Greg Daly’s interest in clay began at the early age of 13, in secondary school, and continued into adult life when he went on to study at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, completing a Diploma and then a fellowship in Ceramics. He was influenced by potters such as Michael Cardew, Bernard Leach, and Peter Rushforth. Essentially, Daly’s work covers three main areas - thrown functional pieces, thrown and altered sculptural forms and rich glaze application and decoration.

In the mid-1970s, Daly’s career began to flourish. Bowls and platters were an early trademark of his enthusiasm for work on the wheel. The sculptural forms, as Daly referred to them, began to appear after the establishment of his thrown work. Using stoneware clay, these physical imposing pieces up to one metre tall, were gradually scaled down in size, and the original golden browns and greens made way for glazes on vibrant tones of electric blue.In 1982 Daly exhibited miniature slip-cast forms in bone china at the Craft Gallery in Melbourne. Subsequently lustrous glazes were added to his forms, and since then Daly’s interest in exotic glaze effects took his work into another dimension.

There was a move away from the delicate pastel tones to more richness and depth of colour. The platters were larger, the round pots more generous, and the petite bowls more exquisite. Previously Daly had used lustres in a limited way, but now he was completely covering his traditionally shaped pots with a wonderful selection of alluring lustres. He also used gold and silver leaf as a decoration in a variation of patterns. In many of these works there seemed to be an eastern influence.

Very few potters are as well recognised and respected overseas as Daly. His complete dedication to his work makes his craft an inseparable part of his life.

LAWRENCE DAWS(b. 1927)

Two Cages

Born Adelaide, South Australia 1927, Daws studied Architecture, Engineering and later Geology from 1945-47. His later work was influenced by his travels in outback Australia during this time. From 1949 to 1953 he studied at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School, Melbourne.

In 1956, Daws turned to abstract forms, becoming influenced by Jung’s ideas on the collective unconscious. His work was described as “sky bound forms”.

After Daws was awarded a travelling scholarship to Rome to 1957, he traveled extensively, spending the next ten years working in Italy, London, Russia, India, Mexico, USA and Canada. He returned to Australia in 1970.

Influenced by Iconic Painting (Russia) and Italian painters, Daws’ work acquired a visual integrity and intelligence, requiring thoughtful analysis.

Lawrence Daws exhibited four times with the Rudy Komon Gallery. This work, from his ‘The Cage” series of paintings and drawings, was exhibited at the gallery in 1973.

Edwina Shand, Gallery Guide

ROY DE MAISTRE(1984 - 1968)

Untitled (European street scene)

Born at Moss Vale in 1894, Roy de Maistre showed ability in music and art at an early age. He gained some academic training at the Julian Ashton Art School in Sydney and was heavily influenced by artist Dattilo Rubbo’s interest in colour and modernist art. His early formal figurative works and abstract art impressed Lloyd Rees with their “sheer beauty”. He moved from an imitation of nature to a creative process of design, form and colour.

In 1919, he produced the first abstract works by an Australian painter. They were based on the colour/music system he devised with Roland Wakelin. The seven colours of the spectrum were linked with the seven notes of the octave. The only painting remaing, “Rythmic Composition in Yellow Green Minor”, is at the Art Gallery of NSW.

By 1930, de Maistre was gaining recognition as a major artist, but he was barely making a living. He left Australia permanently and was immediately recognised as being amongst the most progressive artists in Europe. It was then that he changed the spelling of his name from “Roi de Mestre” to “Roy de Maistre”.

Based in London, he was regarded as a cubist artist. Picasso was the greatest influence on his later work, but de Maistre adopted a more decorative form of cubism that fitted with his own interest in colour and design as a means of expression.

He did portraits, landscape, colour/music work and flower paintings that became more sophisticated. He painted more religious works stemming from a profound religious belief that led to his conversion to the Catholic faith.

His biographer, Heather Johnson, says that the initial visual appeal of his religious paintings masks their complexity of depicting traditional subject matter in a new, but still recognizable way. His work had an appeal beyond religious circles.

A major commission was for the Stations of the Cross for Westminster Cathedral. Since he made many copies of most of his paintings, the Tate Gallery was able to acquire Station 13, one of the five de Maistre paintings it owns. Patrick White bought many of his works and donated them to the Art Gallery of NSW.

de Maistre was awarded the O.B.E. in 1962 for his contribution to art. He died after a stroke in 1968 in his 134 Eccleston Street Studio, the subject of some of his best paintings, and of his last painting. In his biographer’s opinion, “The fact that the final ripening of de Maistre’s work took place in Europe has resulted in an immense loss to Australian art”.

Jean Thatcher, Gallery Guide

ROBERT DICKERSON(b. 1924)

Girl

Elwyn Lynn said of Bob Dickerson, “His painting comes from a hard scrutiny of life, without the slightest desire to flatter, reform or condemn.”

Dickerson was born in 1924 at Hurstville, NSW. In the Depression years the family moved to Surrey Hills and Bob attended the Bourke Street School. Any spare wrapping paper was used for drawing and painting.

On turning 18 Bob joined the RAAF and served in New Guinea, Borneo and Indonesia. When war ended Bob was on the island of Morotai and while awaiting transport home used spare tent canvas and camouflage paint to make portraits of the island children.

Back in Australia he married, took odd jobs and painted late into the night while his two children slept.

In 1950, Charles Blackman met Bob, was impressed with his work and took “Man Asleep” on the Steps with him to Heide, where the Reeds were enthusiastically appreciative and persuaded the National Gallery of Victoria to purchase it for 40 guineas. The publicity, both positive and negative, that greeted the Antipodean Exhibition of 1959 brought Dickerson recognition and the association of other like-minded emerging artists.

The work of Robert Dickerson in the collection of the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, “The Orange Ball” (1969) was part of the 1996 ‘Hope of the Vale’ Peter Edwards Bequest, given as a memorial to the families who developed Queen Charlotte’s Vale district.

“The Orange Ball” is one of Dickerson’s earliest screen prints. In common with his paintings, the subject of this print is the human figure; in this case a young boy holding an Orange Ball. The figure is two-dimensional, the setting minimal and the colours bold and flat. The child’s face, with large eyes and pointed chin, has a wistful, dreamy expression. His long fingers grip the brilliant orange / yellow ball; a sphere of brilliance in a dull world.

Dickerson paints human beings in a symbolic way as expressions of loneliness, fear, anxiety and uncertainty. He says “I have no earth shaking messages to convey. All I’m trying to do is make a few simple statements about people living at the same time as myself”.

Robert Dickerson is represented in the National Gallery of Australia, most State and Regional Galleries and in significant private collections.

Margaret Linton, Gallery Guide

RUSSELL DRYSDALE (1912 - 1981)

Study for the Councillors House

Russell Drysdale and his friend Donald Friend were the first Hill End Artists. Friend talked Drysdale into driving him to Sofala and then to Hill End in his new car in 1947. As a result of this trip Friend and Donald Murray purchased the house now known as Murray’s Cottage – their friends followed to paint in Hill End, Jean Bellette and Paul Haefligar also purchasing a Hill End Cottage. Drysdale and his family were regular visitors. Cottage Interior depicts Donald Friend’s sitting room.

It is said that Drysdale stumbled into the world of art through developing eye trouble. Exempted from the armed services during the war, he produced some unusual and highly original wartime paintings and drawings of railway stations, aeroplane hangars, fire devastated ruins, and figures in uniform reminiscent of the works of Henry Moore.

In 1944 the Sydney Morning Herald commissioned him to execute line and wash sketches of the appalling drought in western NSW. He was one of the first painters to discover the Australian ‘outback’ as a subject. It has been said that his paintings of the desolate fringe of the interior of Australia were better known to most Australians than the outback itself.

Drysdale studied at the George Bell School in Melbourne, under Ian MacNab at the Grosvenor School in London, and under Othon Friesz at the Frande Chaumiere in Paris.

His work is represented at the Tate Gallery, London; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; all State and many provincial galleries and in the National Collection in Canberra.

In an Obituary in the Sydney Morning Herald in June 1981, Sir Russell Drysdale was described as the Australian Artist responsible for the images of erosion, decay, rusting tin and bleached skeletons of animals in sandy spaces, which have dominated Australian landscape painting since the 1940s. Coupled with these have been his elongated figures of dour, silent humans – stockmen, station hands, half caste families, solitary women – caught up in their harsh, uncompromising surroundings.

Hilary Stitt, Gallery Guide

RUBY EAVES

Bathurst Landscape

Ruby was born at Lake Cargelligo in western NSW but lived most of her early life in Orange and Bathurst. She moved to Brisbane with her family in 1986 and then to Thornlands in 1989. Ruby has been painting for much of her life and has studied art for the Leaving Certificate and then at Bathurst Teachers’ College. She also attended TAFE and Mitchell College in Bathurst studying all mediums. Well-known artists she has studied with include Jack McDonough, Greg Turner, James Wynne, David Taylor, Ron Muller, Ross Paterson, Herman Pekel and Joseph Zbukvic.

After moving to Queensland, Ruby joined Queensland Watercolour Society while pursuing her personal career in art. She regularly conducts classes in watercolour at the Society. Recently Ruby joined the Brisbane RQAS.

Ruby enjoys painting in all mediums including oil, acrylics, and watercolour. With watercolour she is able to capture light, mood and atmosphere, which is typical of her paintings. A judge recently commented when awarding her first prize in the Watercolour section of the Manly Art Show, “that her work captured the atmospherical magic of the scene with a high degree of technical skill.”

Recently Ruby has also enjoyed working with acrylics and oils, which displays a vibrancy and vivid colour contrast so typical of the Central Australian Landscape, she is planning to pursue this more in the future. Other subjects Ruby enjoys painting are seascapes and floral work.

Throughout her career, Ruby has won many awards in all mediums in NSW and QLD. She has had a number of solo and joint exhibitions as well as being a guest artist at All Saint’s College Bathurst, Morton Shire Council, Nudgee College and the Watercolour Society of QLD. Her works hang in both public and private collections in Australia, New Zealand, England, Japan, Canada, and the USA.

Researched by David Eaves

RACHEL ELLIS(b. 1967)

Late afternoon, IGA carpark

Rachel Ellis was born in Adelaide in 1967, and grew up in Forbes. She studied at the City Art Institute in Sydney and completed a Master of Art at the College of Fine Arts, University of NSW, majoring in drawing. After finishing her study, Rachel spent several years travelling and working overseas.

Since 1993, Ellis has won many awards and has exhibited widely both in Australia and overseas. She draws with a high degree of technical skill (simplicity of line, noting the quality of light at different times of the day), choosing simple subjects, such as houses, fences, telegraph poles, and roads, and drawing them with homogenous lines, after observing the subject at different times of the day. There is a stillness in her work that gives a wonderful sense of serenity.

Ellis lives and works in Bathurst, choosing her subjects from simple streetscapes. She does not include people or cars. The viewer is invited into the picture, to feel the warmth of the late afternoon sun, to appreciate the quiet simple beauty of the buildings, things often taken for granted.

JOHN FIRTH-SMITH(b. 1943)

Far-De-Ing-Ding

One of Australia’s most distinguished abstract painters, his career spans four decades, and has been included in numerous museum exhibitions in Australia and overseas. His work is held by every major public collection in Australia as well as numerous public and private collections.

During the 60s, Firth-Smith was influenced by John Olsen to explore Hill End and sample the magnetic attraction of the region. Firth-Smith, and other artists such as Whiteley would often camp in sheds and spend hours exploring the ‘fantastic forms’ along Golden Gully.

EDITH MARY FOX

Prancing Horses

Edith resided in Bathurst in her youth and attended the Bathurst Technical College. She was a noted beauty in her day, and a beautiful photograph was taken of her around 1905 in an evening gown, with diamonds in her hair, which has since been lost.

“Prancing Horses” c. 1910 (carved ebony, along with “White Work Embroidery” were given to Bathurst Council by her husband after her death in 1965. Fox would have carved this work when she was a student at Bathurst Technical College. Some correspondence exists from the Historical Society to her family saying they did not know the whereabouts of the works. The family wrote – “Handed them personally to the Mayor asking him to put it in the Museum. Anyway it must be in Bathurst, either at the Town Hall in some secret chamber – or maybe being stored or housed by one of the municipal heads who may have forgotten them. As Bill Fox’s wife learnt woodcarving at the Technical College, I feel he meant it to find a permanent home at the Museum.”

“Prancing Horses” was in an exhibition “Before Their Time” at Bathurst Regional Art Gallery in 1995 - a look at works by women artists in the permanent collection who began their career as artists before 1955.

DONALD FRIEND(1915 - 1989)

Friend was born in Sydney in 1915 into a wealthy grazier family. He was educated at Cranbrook and began studies at Sydney Long’s Studio. At 15 he began his lifelong search for exotic destinations. He lived in the Torres Strait Islands and began drawing and painting ‘people who were happy with their bodies’.

Convinced by family that formal training was required, he returned to Datillo Rubbo’s school in Sydney and then travelled to attend the Westminster School in London. There Friend became enchanted by the African born jazz singers. The desire to absorb their lifestyle saw him travel to Nigeria via Lagos. By 1939 he was assimilating the romance and creativity of Yoruba art in Africa.

The declaration of war saw Friend return to Australia. Even though he enlisted he ‘saw himself as an artist not a soldier’ and gained a commission as a war artist to escape combat. On demobilisation he continued to draw and paint but became depressed by poor reviews. He persuaded his friend Russell Drysdale to join him in seeking inspiration in the hills behind Bathurst. So in 1947 they arrived first at Sofala then moving on to Hill End. A cottage now marked ‘Murrays Collage,’ which still stands at the corner of Beyers Avenue and Moores Lane, was purchased for seventy pounds. This cottage is now owned by NSW National Parks and Wildlife and will soon become part of the Artists in Residence Program.

Friend and Dysdale were soon followed by artists Jean Bellette, her husband Paul Haefliger, Margaret Olley, Donald Strachan and later Jeffrey Smart. All the artists painted daily, each in their own way. Some painted buildings others the compelling landscape.

While Friend was at Hill End he painted “St John the Divine and scenes from the Apocalypse” which won the Blake Prize in 1955. Still unsettled, he headed off to Sri Lanka, then Bali, in 1967. Here he lived a legendary life painting, drawing, writing, collecting antiques, carvings, bronzes and ancient porcelain.

Dogged by illness, Friend returned to Australia in 1981 where he continued to paint, write and exhibit. Undeterred by crippling strokes, he taught himself to paint using his right hand. In 1988, he was awarded the University of Sydney Medal for services to art. Friend died in August, 1989. Six months later a retrospective exhibition opened at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. He has been described as a ‘genius, a satirist, a humourist …..profoundly perceptive about human nature’. He summed himself up: ‘like all young men I set out to become a genius, but laughter mercifully intervened.’

Margaret Marshall, Gallery Guide

MERRICK FRY(b. 1950)

Apples & Pears

Fry was born in Bathurst in 1950. His family owned the Fry Bros Orchard, and Fry said he has an “idyllic country childhood”. Artistically, he was first inspired by the appearance of the orchard in spring. As well as the beauty of the blossom, the ‘frost pots’ put out between midnight and 2am created images he has never forgotten.

After a year in the Navy, which he did not find very enjoyable, he studied drawing and sculpture at the National Art School (NAS) in Sydney, 1971-73. He was shown in a group exhibition in 1975 and he held his first solo exhibition at Gallery A in 1978.

In 1972, Lloyd Rees had recognised Fry’s talent by awarding the 22 year old student the NAS Drawing Prize. Rees’ influences, and that of Chinese calligraphy, are shown by the careful draughtsmanship, even tenderness, Fry brings to every detail of his work.

Fry’s diverse and passionate imagination soon encouraged him to move from sculpture to drawing to painting to assemblage and back to sculpture as his creative mood dictated.

HECTOR GILLILAND(1911 - 2002)

Sheds

A distinguished painter and teacher whose career spanned almost 60 years, Hector Gilliland won no less than 48 national and regional prizes in 5 years.

About his work, Sheds, Gilliland stated “I am seeing into matter, seeing space in things rather than things in space. I was completely permeated by nature”.

Gilliland lived and worked in Leichhardt, where the suburb’s humble dwellings, industrial work sites and railway yards became subjects for his paintings. In 1994, the Sydney Morning Herald called him “Leichhardt’s Artist Laureate”.

JAMES GLEESON(1915 - 2008)

Frank in Surreal Landscape & The Coast Near Coolum Augumented by a Recollecation of Mazzepa

Australia’s foremost surrealist painter studied at East Sydney Technical College and Sydney Teacher’s College, where he later taught. He has travelled widely in Europe and America. Initially influenced by Dali, his work became more abstract over time.

In his earlier small works on paper he experimented with many of the techniques of surrealists such as collage, frottage and airbrushing, often embellished by quotations, some of them his own poems. He used figures in small paintings such as this one.

It wasn’t until he was almost seventy that he was able to divest himself of duties as teacher and critic, writer and curator and devote himself to work on his large paintings that John McDonald describes as being “without peer and precedent anywhere, taking his subject from the surrealists and his technique from the old masters.”

In 1978, Gleeson and Robert Klippel exhibited their joint work ‘Locus Solus’ and works from their 1948 collaborations in London, at the Rudy Komon Art Gallery. After her death in 2004, Gleeson described Gwen as “the heart and soul of the organisation”.

Jean Thatcher, Gallery Guide

GWYN HANSSEN PIGOTT(1935 - 2013)

Still life - bowl & Porcelain bowl

Born in Ballarat, Victoria, in 1935, Gwyn studied Fine Arts at Melbourne University. Here the Kent Collection of Ancient Pottery made a deep impression. What is it about these ancient pots that still speak to us today? Gwyn’s ceramic career has been a constant search for the answer to that question.

In 1958 she travelled to England, worked with highly respected potters including Bernard Leach and Michael Cardew, married Canadian writer Louis Hanssen and set up a workshop in Portobello Road, London, producing stoneware and porcelain tableware for Liberty of London, Heals and Primavera.

While in London Gwyn attended Lucie Rie’s classes. In the sparse elegance of Rie’s work Gwyn recognized something of that elusive quality she herself was seeking – “the qualities that make you ask how such a simple thing as a bowl, something you eat from, can last in time and still be magical.” An exhibition of Giorgio Morandi’s paintings in Paris in 1971 elicited this response – “I found his work disturbing. There was …..a pulling back from colour and sensuality in his painting which I found difficult at first. And then it began to reach me, the profound realness of what he was painting.”

It was not until 1988, and after much experimentation and critical acclaim for both her gas and wood-fired tableware produced in France, England and various states of Australia, that the idea of constructing sculptural ‘still life’ groupings of vessel shapes evolved. The five piece, ‘Still Life’, in the collection of the Bathurst Art Gallery was acquired in 1993 at the 28th Bathurst Art Purchase.

Hanssen Pigott now has a workshop near Mackay in Queensland. Here she works in wheel-thrown wood-fired porcelain. She uses a feldspathic glaze, responsive to the calcium in the wood ash which creates a subtle shift of colour across the surface of the pots. The translucency of the Southern Ice porcelain, developed by Les Blakeborough, which she now uses, causes the delicately tapered edges of the pots to glow with reflected light. John McDonald describes these works as “a metaphor for the human condition. We are all vessels and no-one’s inner life is identical with another’s”.

Margaret Linton, Gallery Guide

JOHN HARDMAN LISTER(1826 - 1890)

Our Cradling Place- Turon River

“Our Cradling Place- Turon River” (1851). Unsigned and undated. Pencil and (faded) ink on blue paper. Leaf removed from an album which contained some signed works by T. Lister, and belonged to the Lister family. Acquired 1996 assistance of BRAGS via Hordern House, Potts Point.

An important depiction of cradling for gold on the Turon, immediately prior to the first Australian gold rush. Edward Hargraves, with his guide John Lister had discovered specks of gold at the junction of Lewis Pond and Summer Hill Creek, 50 miles from Bathurst on 12 February 1851. Hargraves, eager to secure a large reward for the discovery of payable gold, hired a further three workers to help with the search – the Tom brothers, Henry, James, and William, who taught the others to construct a “cradle”, a new invention for separating gold from soil.

Hargraves went to Sydney to see the Colonel Secretary and show evidence – Lister and the Tom brothers had found 4oz gold. The gold rush began in May. By 14 April, there were 500 diggers. It was “tent city.” Hargraves named the field Ophir.

This drawing shows four figures and one tent on the Turon, indicating that it predates the gold rush, and was drawn during the feverish search for gold between late February and early May 1851.

Margaret Linton, Gallery Guide

JESSE JEWHURST HILDER(1881 – 1916)

The Plain

Jesse Jewhurst Hilder was born in Toowoomba, QLD in 1881. Throughout his life he was plagued with ill health and poverty. Hilder moved to Sydney as a young man in 1898, and worked at the Bank of NSW, studying part time at the Julian Ashton Art School. Ashton recalled Hilder as a shy and reserved man with a natural instinct for drawing and an innate sense of colour.

After his marriage, Hilder became a full time artist, frequently working out of doors and camping while he painted the landscape, usually in watercolour. Hilder always worked on a small scale, and his colour became increasingly atmospheric; soft and monochromatic. His style owed much to Corot, whom he greatly admired. The Blue Mountains and the Lake Macquarie areas of NSW were favourite places of his.

Hilder died of tuberculosis in Hornsby NSW in 1916. After his death, Julian Ashton and Elioth Gruner gathered some 200 of his works for an exhibition at Ashton’s school.

MARGEL HINDER(1906 - 1995)

Untitled Bronze

Margel Hinder was an Australian-American sculptor who is most noted for her large-scale public works in the modernist abstract style. Born in New York, Hinder met her husband, renowned Australian modernist and abstract artist and sculptor, Frank Hinder, at a summer school in America in 1930. They married and returned to Australia in 1934. Margel and Frank Hinder became a mutually supportive art partnership, as well as both making significant contributions to Australian contemporary art in their own right.

Bathurst Regional Art Gallery is fortunate to include 11 smaller sculptures by Margel Hinder and over 30 works by her husband, Frank, in its permanent collection. The most recent acquisitions are three 1977 abstract pieces by Margel Hinder titled Monoliths. An oxidised copper surface gives these graceful plaster forms an intriguing texture and colour.

Today we can see Margel’s large-scale metal sculptures in many familiar public places including: Free-Standing Sculpture in front of the Reserve Bank, Martin Place, Sydney; Sculptural Form, in the Woden Town Square, Canberra; and the Captain James Cook Memorial Fountain, in Civic Park, Newcastle. Arriving in Australia in 1934, Hinder was captivated by Australian wildlife and sculpted birds and animals in wood. In the 1940s she experimented with abstract forms using modern materials. She “sought movement, light and spontaneity and so abandoned wood and embraced wire, plastics and metal”.

Her later works included “revolving sculptures through whose interlocked forms spaces changed and changing shadows were cast. Nature, such as spider webs, often inspired her work”.

In her June 1995 obituary, Renee Free wrote: “Hinder will be remembered both as a sculptor and a strong, wise and compassionate twentieth century woman.”

Denise Payne, Gallery Guide

FIONA HISCOCK(b. 1965)

Double Handed Fig Pitcher

Fiona Hiscock, a Victorian based ceramicist was born in Melbourne in 1965. Her colonial inspired vessels with botanical illustrations are made using traditional hand toiling technique and are represented in many national collections. She has been exhibiting consistently throughout Australia since 1991 in solo and group exhibitions.

She has a BA from Melbourne University and a double major in Art History and BA Honours from RMIT.

In November 2002 Fiona Hiscock had residency at Haefligers Cottage at Hill End where her interest in botanical illustration was increased. She uses the relics of early colonial gardens, figs, plums, roses, blackberries, quince and pears as well as native plants as a source of decoration on the vessels. Often she depicts the life pattern of a plant including bud, flower, fruit and spent flower.

The vessels are loosely based on simple utilitarian objects often referring to robust early colonial mixing bowls and enlarged water pitchers, forms that were designed to produce many years of faithful domestic service.

Hiscock starts the botanical illustrations on the ceramic vessels by preparing a watercolour painting on paper of the plants then that image or parts of it is transferred onto the pots by building up layers of soft colourwash.

In 2005 the Governor General of Australia presented a piece of Fiona Hiscock’s work to Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles on the occasion of their wedding.

Bathurst Regional Art Gallery acquired Fiona Hiscock’s Hill End “Double Handed Fig Pitcher” in 2003.

DAVID JAMES(1853 - 1904)

A breezy day in the Bristol Channel

David James was a prolific Marine painter between 1881 and 1897, yet little is known about his private life. It is most likely he was born in Cornwall. At his best James was a very skilful painter of the sea. He depicted it from the shore and preferred capturing strong marine atmosphere and dramatic coastal lighting, with vessels often being of secondary importance. His realistic style distinguished him from his contemporaries, who were exploring expressionism, and his keen eye allowed him to capture the grace, beauty, and magnificent power of the sea. He was especially good at painting waves and breezy day is a good example.

A breezy day in the Bristol Channel shows the Bristol Channel, on the coast of North Devon and although a steam packet is depicted, it is not the subject. Rather it gives a sense of scale to the true subject – the sea. James’ favourite locations were Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly off the south-west coast.

This oil on canvas is the 6th oldest work in our collection. It is not known how the gallery acquired the work or when. We do know that it was already in the collection when Shirley Batty arrived as curator in 1978.

Linda Leseberg, Gallery Guide

JONATHAN JONES(b. 1978)

Salt 9

In this installation, which includes a series of drawings and light sculptures, Sydney based artist Jonathan Jones, a member of the Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi nations, explores the idea of salt as a symbol of revolution.

Jones’ installation, titled “Revolution”, explores concepts associated with the ways that colonialism has affected two indigenous peoples’ cultures, on two continents – India and Australia. Revolution draws parallels between India’s plight for independence and an Australian Indigenous nation seeking recognition.

The artist took his inspiration from the element salt. This relates to the father of the Indian nation, Mahatma Gandhi, whose passive resistance movement and his famously led Salt March from Ahmedabad to Dandi in 1930, where he protested against the British-imposed Salt Tax – “the condiment of the common man” led to his nation’s independence.

After completing “Revolution” in 2011, Jones stated “I find Gandhi’s independence movement using something basic as salt, very poetic.”In this work, the artist draws a parallel with the element of salt in Australia, seeing it as a symbol of the destruction caused by white settlement, due to the salinization of the land caused by European farming practices.

To link these ideas, Jones collected salt crystals, both in India and from the salt-encrusted Murray River in Australia, and made precise drawings of their chemical structures. These drawings reference a Western modernist tradition of geometric abstraction, developed in the early 60s called ‘minimalism’.

Jones’ signature works are his fluorescent light sculptures, the raw, unfiltered light they emit create a disorienting effect. In “Revolution”, the artist uses these three dimensional structures as a means of interpreting – in a very contemporary way – an age-old methodology used by Aboriginal Peoples in Northern Australia to depict images of their Dreaming known as ‘rarrk’. In “Revolution”, Jones unfolds the distinctive cross-hatched two dimensional style of rarrk painting into three dimensional forms and combines these with a scientific analysis of salt that mimics a minimalist tradition. While deceptively simple, Jones’ work embodies a complex set of art-historical and cultural references.

Jones has exhibited both nationally and internationally. He has won several awards for his work, including the 2002 New South Wales Indigenous Arts Fellowship from Arts NSW and the inaugural Xstrata Coal Emerging Indigenous Art Award from Queensland Art Gallery in 2006.

Lyn Webster, Gallery Guide

HERBERT KEMBLE(1894 - 1986)

Landscape II

New Zealand born Herbert Kemble was a veteran of the Gallipoli campaign. Living in the Blue Mountains, which he loved, he began landscape painting. When Blue Poles was purchased by the National Gallery of Australia, he decided abstraction was the direction his art should take in Australia. According to his son, the family were quite disappointed with this artistic direction.

Herbert Kemble is believed to have commented that his work “Elliptical” may well have been hung upside down when exhibited in the 1968 Carillon City Festival Art Prize exhibition.

PETER KINGSTON(b. 1943)

Haefliger Cottage

Born in Sydney 1943, lives in Lavender Bay near Luna Park. He was first educated at Vaucluse Public School, moving to Cranbrook when he was eight. Later completed Arts and Architecture degrees at University of NSW. During the 1970s he was one of the Yellow House group of artists.

“Sydney Harbour has long been a muse for Peter Kingston. The Harbour and the Harbour traffic have been dominant themes in his pictures for years.” (Ways Art Auction website)

Kingston is creative in many ways. He is probably best known for his paintings and drawings of Sydney Harbour. He paints in a fluid, impressionistic style, using bright colours and bold line. He also does many screen prints and linocuts, as well as some constructions.

His first solo exhibition was at the Hogarth Gallery in 1978. Kingston was an artist in residence at Haefliger’s in 1995. He is represented in numerous private collections, the NGA in Canberra, and galleries in Sydney, Tokyo, New York, Belgium and Los Angeles.

Joy Dickson, Gallery Guide

ROBERT KLIPPEL(1920 - 2001)

Untitled & No 465

There are few in the art world who can truly be called innovators but one who stands out in Australian art is Robert Klippel.

Born in 1920 to a non-artistic family, he had an interest in building model ships. He was not inclined to an artistic career and in fact joined the Navy during World War II, where he was engaged in making models of ships and aircraft.

After the war, Klippel went to study at the Slade School of Art in London, where he met other expatriate Australians including the surrealist painter James Gleeson. The two collaborated on several works combining Klippel ‘s sculpture and Gleeson’s painting.

By the 1950’s Klippel had grown away from surrealism and moved to New York where he was invigorated by the rise of abstract expressionism. He started joining found objects together to create sculpture resulting in the now famous “junk” assemblages.

Klippel returned to Australia in 1963, settling in Birchgrove. He was by this time well known internationally. In 1964, art critic Robert Hughes praised Klippel as one of the few Australian sculptors worthy of international attention.

Over the following years Klippel worked continuously in Sydney. In addition to his “junk’ assemblages he utilised drawing, collage and photography in his work but he never completely abandoned traditional sculpture and worked on several high profile public art commissions.

In 1978, Klippel and Gleeson exhibited their joint work ‘Locus Solus’ and works from their 1948 collaborations in London, at the Rudy Komon Art Gallery.

Judy Plater, Gallery Guide

GEORGE WASHINGTON LAMBERT (1873 -1930)

Portrait of Mr Irvine

George Washington Lambert was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1873, the son of an American engineer. Following the death of his father, the family moved to Germany and England, and then in 1887, arrived in Australia. For the next four years, Lambert spent his time between Sydney and his great uncle’s property in Nevertire NSW, and became a regular artist for the Sydney Bulletin, sending in his drawings of bush life. In 1896 he began studying with Julian Ashton, and in 1900 he was awarded the first NSW Society of Artists Travelling Scholarship. He studied in Paris, and then settled in London where he became known as a portrait painter.

“Portrait of Mr Irvine” was one of the works completed by Lambert in 1912 whilst living in London. It is the portrait of a family solicitor, and an example of Lambert’s excellent skills as a draftsman. The strong form of a man’s face is expertly created by tonal values. Especially in the eyes, several corrections are plainly visible. This work was one of three special Centenary gifts presented by the Bathurst Art Gallery Society in 1985.

In 1917, Lambert became an Official War Artist for the Australian Light Horse in Palestine. In 1919 he went to Gallipoli. The sketches he made during this time were the basis for the war paintings which established his Australian reputation. He was awarded the Wynn Prize in 1899 and the Archibald Prize in 1927. He died at Cobbity NSW in 1930.

GEORGE FEATHER LAWRENCE(1901–1981)

Hobart Nocturne & Portrait of Mr Irvine

Lloyd Rees once said “I am not going to classify George Lawrence as belonging to any school of –ism”.For most of his life Lawrence ( 1901–1981) was a commercial artist, working humbly in the same job for 30 years. He painted in the tradition of Turner, Pissaro and Monet.

An urban painter living in Sydney, he was drawn to painting cityscapes, streets, harbours, industrial sites and cities. In the late 1930’s and 1940’s he had several exhibitions around Sydney. In 1945, still virtually unknown, Lawrence held his first solo exhibition at the Macquarie Galleries in Sydney. It was well received mostly due to his association with William Dobell. When not working, Lawrence surrounded himself with distinguished artists such as Dobell who became a close mentor. Lawrence was awarded the Wynne Prize for landscapes by the Art Gallery of NSW in 1949.

A travelling French Impressionist exhibition had made a strong impression on Lawrence in 1939. Although he had won several art prizes, the money earned was not enough to support his family. By 1950, Lawrence was keen to travel abroad and immerse himself in European experiences both past and present. During his three trips to the Continent, he sketched and painted many cities: Paris, London, Florence Venice and Rome. These works received many accolades. He especially loved France but, unfortunately his trip was cut short because he contracted pneumonia while painting the Seine in Paris in extremely inclement weather.

Upon his return to Australia, Lawrence travelled extensively and his paintings portray iconic places from Yamba to the Iron Cove Bridge to Kiama on the South Coast. On trips to the Bathurst area, he visited the picturesque town of Sofala and painted the view of the town from the Turon River (1976). His black and white sketch of Hill End shows he was influenced by the historic gold mining town.

Lawrence’s works illustrate how inspired he was by travel and he once said “Those streets and the people in them seemed so dreary and derelict – they needed loving”.

Tracy Collins, Gallery Guide

LIONEL LINDSAY (1874 –1961)

Morning Glory

Born in 1874 in the gold mining town of Creswick, Victoria, the second son of ten children to Robert Lindsay, the stylish Irish protestant doctor in the town and Jane, daughter of a Methodist missionary, Lionel Lindsay was introduced to drawing by his mother, a competent watercolourist. The Lindsay sons included Percival, Lionel, Norman and Daryl, all of whom became prominent in the world of art and literature.

At 18 he moved into bohemian Melbourne, working as an artist-journalist for various newspapers while studying under Bernard Hall at the Gallery School. He was fascinated by the Whistler etchings newly acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria and despite having to improvise with materials he started increasing his knowledge of etching.

In 1902 with limited means he sailed for Spain, a long held ambition. There he was awakened to the reality of great European art and architecture. While in London he met his future wife Jean Dyson, sister of friends Will and Ted Dyson. The need to secure his future to marry found him back in Australia doing political cartoons for the Evening News and illustrating books for Steele Rudd, Henry Lawson and Banjo Patterson. The changing face of Sydney he recorded with his etchings and drypoint.

Lindsay held his first one man exhibition in 1919 with enough success to make him believe in himself as an artist. In 1924 at the age of 50 he held exhibitions in Bond Street London and in Glasgow, and was acclaimed at the highest level. While visiting Paris he was shocked at the new generation of artists: Matisse, Picasso and Leger. Surrealism to him was a perversion. He later wrote a book “Addled Art” a vociferous attack on modern art which was also perceived as anti semetic.

Lionel Lindsay was Knighted in 1941 by his long time friend Robert Menzies for extending Australian art in woodcuts and etchings. As a Trustee of the Gallery of NSW Lindsay was involved in the sensational court case contesting the awarding of the Archibald Prize for Portraiture to William Dobell’s ”Joshua Smith”. Lindsay supported Dobell.

The mood in the art world in post war Australia was not kind to Lionel Lindsay. Lindsay was outspoken on issues he disapproved of and so he made enemies in the art world. Also etchings and other forms of printmaking were no longer popular.

Lionel Lindsay died in 1961 at the age of 87 before the revival of printmaking caused collectors to take another look at those artists such as Lionel who had been dismissed as conservative. Bathurst Regional Art Gallery has one print of Lindsay’s “Peacock” acquired in 1991 from the McGillivray Bequest.

Researched by Judy

PERCY LINDSAY (1870-1952)

Landscape

Percy Lindsay (1870-1952), painter and illustrator, the eldest of the ten Lindsay children, was born in 1870 at Creswick, a prosperous small gold-mining town in Victoria. He was competent but unambitious, and some of his unsigned works have been passed off as works by more sought-after artists.

Influenced by Walter Withers, with whom he studied landscape painting; Lindsay did a number of “plein air” paintings in the 1890s of the old gold diggings and scenes around the old Chinese camp near Creswick. His brother Daryl thought these paintings the best he ever did, and predicted they would become collectors’ pieces.

Landscape is a small oil on board, probably painted around 1900-1910 after Lindsay had moved to Sydney. It shows his true feelings for nature. Daryl thought these later paintings lacked the charm of his early work, without the “pristine clarity of vision” of the little pictures painted around Creswick. However, he regarded Percy as the best painter and colourist in oils in the family, better than Norman, Lionel or himself.

The painting shows a receding landscape with a range of hills in the distance, smoke, perhaps a bushfire. There is a farmhouse in front, then an indistinct landscape in the background. Highlights of yellowy-cream give form to sky.

This painting was donated to Bathurst Regional Art Gallery by Mrs P Coleing.

Jean Thatcher, Gallery Guide

MATILDA LISTER(1889-1965)

Showing the Nugget

In 1996, the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery acquired “The Return of the Beyers Holtermann Nugget of Hill End” an oil painting by Bathurst and Hill End naive artist, Matilda Lister (1889-1965).

The painting was her contribution to the Hill End Centenary celebration of the discovery of gold at Ophir in 1851. (Matilda’s husband Fred Lister was a descendant of the famous Lister Bros. who first found gold at Ophir). Another reason was her recognition of the importance the discovery of gold had in the history of Hill End (and of the nugget in 1873).

Naïve artists are not tutored, Matilda having completed a crash correspondence course to help her get over the death of her son in WWII. Here though, she happily and vividly captured the moment of the nuggets return, Holtermann stands proudly beside the nugget in the dray, centred in front of the Hill End Hotel. People in their finery, excited children, miners riding on horseback or passing from their diggings, and the bright autumn tones of the surrounding hills convey the sense of occasion.

Lister had begun to paint in oils (from her ladylike watercolours) after Donald Friend and Russell Drysdale came to the village in 1947. Friend taught her to paint in oils providing her first brushes, boards & oils. She painted many scenes of Hill End and the district. (Drysdale gifted her painting “The Bushranger” to the NSW Art Gallery).

Matilda loved her Religious Art, a legacy from her Presbyterian upbringing and in 1959, age 70 painted “The Marriage Feast of Cana in Galilee” for which she won the D’Arcy Morris Memorial Prize and was accepted into the Blake Prize. She was a member of the Contemporary Art Society, and exhibited at Terry Clunes Gallery in Sydney. She was included in an exhibition in 1979 of 30 Australian Naïve in Melbourne and a retrospective of her work was held at Canberra and Kelso in 1977.

All this in the last seventeen years of her life. Age was certainly no barrier to Matilda.

Irene Holden, Gallery Guide

WILLIAM LISTER LISTER(1859-1943)

On Our Selection

William Lister Lister worked in the academic tradition. After study and exhibiting in the UK, (he exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy aged 17 years) he returned to Australia, (Sydney) in 1888. Australian artists such as Streeton soon influenced Lister Lister to change the lower tones he had used for the European work, to those more suitable for the stronger light in Australia. Lister Lister is known for his seascapes and coastal scenes, though the work in the collection of Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, On Our Selection is an Australian pastoral scene, a fine delicate watercolour, perhaps showing the gentle influence of his European experience. The colours are warm and sunny with a glow of light overall. It is considered that some of the watercolours of William Lister Lister show greater freedom than his work in oils.

Between 1898-1925 William Lister Lister won the Wynne Prize on seven different occasions.Studied and worked UK 1878-1888.Represented in State Galleries of Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney (8 works), New Zealand National Gallery, and overseas (Cardiff, Wales).

JOANNE LOGUE(b.1964)

Conifer - Essington

Joanne Logue’s art is inspired by the landscape of the property where she has lived for the past 20 years. Essington Park near Oberon was first settled by Europeans over 150 years ago.

It is a landscape dominated by old, introduced conifers as well as native trees and grasses. Logue’s studio, an old, high-ceilinged, converted stable, with white walls and flooded with natural light, is set within this green retreat.

In her paintings, and videos, Logue aims to ‘get to the spirit of the place’. Her works have a shadowy, dreamlike quality, giving what has been described as a ‘filtered view’ of the landscape. Her large, mesmerising paintings, present a visual contrast between figurative and abstract art.

After her ‘Glimpse’ exhibition in 2007, she generously gifted one of her paintings to the Bathurst gallery. Called ‘Conifer - Essington’, it typifies the mystical quality of much of Logue’s work.

Joanne Logue and her identical twin Simmone were born in Scone in 1964. The family later moved to Muswellbrook, where their father owned the local paper.

Interested in painting even as a young child, Logue studied, between 1984 and 1987, at the City Art Institute in Sydney (now the NSW College of Fine Arts). Her first solo exhibition was held at the Cooper Gallery, Sydney, in 1987 while she was still studying.

Since then Logue has held many exhibitions in various Australian cities and won prestigious awards. In 2006 she won the $35,000 Country Energy Art Prize for Landscape Painting and, in 2009, the Central West Regional Artist Award. Her works are held in numerous private and public collections in Sydney and elsewhere.

Joy Dickson, Gallery Guide

SIDNEY LONG(1871-1955)

Flamingoes

Long was known best for his European Art Noveau style (decorative idyllic landscapes). He was one of the first plein air painters in Sydney. He was a painter, an etcher, and a teacher.

Long believed all his life in studying the landscape first hand. He used topography as a peg on which to hang his fantasy. He often used dark foregrounds and a distant illumination of the Australian sun. His colours were strong, almost garish. Long had one of the first serious attempts to capture the spirit of Australia through imagination rather than imitation.

Long said: “It is this difference in environment that will make our art distinctive. The brilliancy and dryness of the summers and the comparative mildness of the winters give to our landscape a range of hot, warm colours peculiar to ourselves…the more serious and sombre side of [the landscape] has not been touched yet… [But] Australian feeling is not to be got by sticking to the gum tree.” – Source: The Story of Australian Painting, p.152

Flamingoes (1910) Work owned by Dr Magnus – given to Dr Busby after he successfully treated Dr Magnus’ son, who was seriously injured in WWI. Work remained in Busby family until death of Busby’s daughter Enid Weaver. Gift to Gallery in memory of Dr Hugh Busby in 1988.

GRAHAM LUPP(b.1946)

Riverside, Bridle Track

Graham Lupp, artist, architect, photographer and teacher, was born in Bathurst in 1948. He trained as an architect at University of NSW before completing courses at Hornsey College and then at Chelsea School of Art in London. He acknowledges the influence of his architectural training on his art, saying that “the conscious control of volume and space is essentially an architectural problem.” Lupp’s early works, dating from student days were meticulously studied paintings from close observation of nature. He continued to work from photographs and slides, but now feels that intuition plays a more important part in his work than photographic detail.

FRANCIS LYMBURNER(1916 -1972)

Untitled (Portrait of....

Francis Lymburner was born in Brisbane in 1916, in a conservative middle class family. He attended Brisbane Grammar School from 1929-33. Lymburner was interested in all the arts, especially literature and theatre. However, his devotion to drawing and painting superseded his other interests, and despite his parents disapproval he studied art at Bathurst Technical College from 1934-6 where he showed merit by being awarded the prize for the best final year student. Yet, he failed to gain the award that would have allowed him to study abroad – his dearest wish.

Lymburner wrote to R.H. Wilenski, an acclaimed British critic, in 1939, sending him an accompanying folio of photographs of his drawings. He appreciated his own talent, and it is apparent from his letter he expected others to recognise it, and assist him in his search for a patron. This was not to be, so in 1939 he travelled to Sydney.

He initially lived in Kirribilli, sharing a studio with fellow students, Leonard Shillam and Kathleen O’Neill. During this time he produced a number of drawings of outstanding merit, particularly of animals, which he found in the neighbouring Zoo.

Lymburner’s career was interrupted by conscription from 1942-44 and on his discharge he resumed his relationship with Mavis Mace and their baby son Julian. His next few years were the most successful, both financially and socially. He was widely acclaimed and attracted a number of influential patrons, including Warwick Fairfax. He had several one man shows and Sydney Ure Smith produced an important monograph “Fifty Drawings by Francis Lymburner” in 1946. In 1951 one of his paintings was added to the Art Gallery of NSW collection, and he won the Mosman Art Prize. As well as producing a large volume of work, he taught from his studio.

Finally, in 1952, he travelled to Europe, where he stayed for the next eleven years. This was not a happy time for him. His success was limited and recognition negligible. He returned home in 1964 after exhibiting in the Qantas Gallery in London and a successful show in Paris. Although he exhibited widely on his return home, he never achieved the recognition he sought, and after a severe cerebral haemorrhage in 1966, his main activity was teaching with occasional exhibitions earning little acclaim. In 1970, Lymburner produced a book of drawings, which despite their quality, was only given a luke-warm reception. He died in 1972.

Bathurst Regional Art Gallery is indeed fortunate to have a Francis Lymburner picture, which was donated by Mr William Bowmore.

June Emmerson, Gallery Guide

ELWYN LYNN(1917 - 1997)

Still Life

Industrial Port No 1 was originally submitted to the Art Gallery of NSW in 1957 for the Wynne Prize, but was rejected by the Trustees. Elwyn Lynn later described the work as derived from a photograph of an Estonian port, and cranes in the port of Hamburg.

Lynn spoke of being interested in geometrical abstraction and “painterliness”. In 1994 he said: “I set out to do things you are not supposed to do. You see I’m for risks”.

Elwyn Lynn was educated in Junee, Wagga Wagga and Sydney. Lynn began his career as an English teacher. With no formal training in Art he became a distinguished artist, art critic, curator and writer. He took the post of Curator of the new Power Collection in 1968 shaping what was to become the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Lynn was awarded an Order of Australia Medal in 1975.

ROSEMARY MADIGAN(b. 1926)

Untitled (Bronze Figures) & Still Life composition #34

Rosemary Madigan studied in Sydney, then London, Europe, and India. She has been both a sculptor and a teacher and exhibited continuously since the 1940s.

Best known for her sculptures of the female torso, her work has been likened to the classical sculpture of Mediterranean antiquity.

Working mostly in the classic materials; sandstone, marble, timber, bronze, and occasionally tin, Madigan also produced works from collage with figure sculpture. She has also been part of the judging panel for the Blake Prize for religious art and has also created sculptures with religious themes.

Madigan, however, is not given to theorizing about her work, and the viewer must make an individual decision about its meaning.

Rosemary Madigan exhibited with Rudy Komon in 1980, and was one of the few female artists he represented.

Jenny MacLennan, Gallery Guide

SHEILA LETHBRIDGE MCDONALD(1902 - 1971)

Cottage, Victorica Road Bellevue

Sheila McDonald was born at St Mary’s NSW in 1902 into a well-known pioneer family, and later moved with it to Sydney. Art was her great interest from an early age, so at fifteen she left school to Julian Ashton Art School. She trained well, as after that she went on to study etching with Sidney Long, where she did beautiful work and was encouraged by Norman Lindsay. In 1948 she studied oil with Desiderius Orban. At the National Art School she had tuition in sculpture by Lindon Dadswell. In 1950 she studied in Europe and, in 1955, in Japan, and the Pacific Islands.

Sheila McDonald changed her art as life went on, being meticulously traditional early on, and later, more abstract as she became more interested in the scene of her time – the antipodean movement. Sheila’s travels were a great influence on her work. Her pictures were gay and colourful after her trips to the East, and very good ones were painted after visiting Central Australia, where she captured the timelessness of the country, its aridity, its textures and its brooding. Towards the end of her life her landscapes were serener and quieter.

Sheila McDonald made this statement: “When I start to paint my subconscious invariably takes over and I find I am invariably painting my impressions of some subject which I have seen on my many travels – always of a landscape.” Sheila died in 1971.

Sheila Keenan, Gallery Guide

CLEMENT MEADMORE (1929 - 2005)

Maquette (untitled)

Clement Meadmore was an Australian-American sculptor, known primarily for his massive, outdoor steel sculptures. He has been called a Minimalist and later an Abstract Expressionist, but his work transcends these labels with a unique vision that has made him one of the most respected and significant sculptors of the 20th Century. Meadmore was born in 1929 in Melbourne. He had no formal training as a sculptor, instead studying aeronautical engineering and then industrial design at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. After graduating in 1949, he became a successful furniture designer. Meadmore’s first welded steel sculpture was offered for sale in 1953. He had several one-man exhibits of his sculptures in Melbourne and Sydney between 1954 and 1962.

Meadmore moved to New York City in 1963 and later became a United States citizen. His work began to change, and by the early 1970s his flat, welded panels with rough, industrial textures had developed into smooth forms based on rectangular prisms that twisted and curved sinuously before heading off into space.

Meadmore was also an accomplished amateur drummer and found inspiration for his work in the rhythms and improvisational nature of the jazz music he loved. He was adamant that his sculptures were about the possibilities of pure form, and were not representative of anything else.

Meadmore’s works range in size from small pieces that may be held in one hand to huge steel, aluminium or bronze forms that stretch to more than 14 metres long. He was one of the first sculptors to work with COR-TEN steel, which became his preferred medium. Despite its solid nature, Meadmore was able to transform it to express fluidity, lightness and delicate balance, even in his largest sculptures.

Clement Meadmore died in Manhattan in 2005, at the age of 76. His massive outdoor sculptures are displayed prominently in cities around the world, a lasting legacy of the artist who has been called the father of Australian sculpture.

Lyn Webster, Gallery Guide

FRANK MEDWORTH (1892-1947)

Portrait of Muriel

By the time Frank Medworth arrived in Australia from England in 1939, he had trained at the Westminster School of Art and the Royal College of Art, worked in a printing business, become head teacher of the drawing and painting school at Hull College, was a finalist in the Rome Scholarship in engraving, and published a number of books.

He brought with him knowledge of the contemporary new trends in art and design and soon became a leader of the contemporary art movement in Sydney. He was appointed director and chief lecturer at the National Art School at East Sydney Technical College from 1939 until his death in 1947 at the age of 55. From October 1944 to September 1945, he was acting director of the then NSW National Art Gallery.

Medworth was acknowledged by many as an extremely able technician in all fields of art. Sydney Ure Smith wrote: “He practiced in all media. An expert engraver and etcher, he was just as happy at wood engraving. His pen drawings had style and charm, and he was equally at home with pencil. Water colours he handled particularly well. He worked in tempera and in oils. He did portraits, abstracts, figure subjects, landscapes, illustrations….He wrote important books on drawing and craftsmanship….He opened exhibitions and he always had something thoughtful to say. He kept himself alive to all that was going on in the art world…”

Penny Coleing donated two oil paintings to the Gallery in 1987 which reveal diverse styles, which are different again to his watercolours, drawings and prints. “Portrait of Muriel” (1940) is a traditional approach, which he may have used to demonstrate techniques – composition, use of colour, tone, shape and shadow – to his students. The subject of the portrait is his wife Muriel, who was also a painter.

Medworth committed suicide in Mexico City in November, 1947 during a visit as a delegate to the United Nations Education Scientific and Cultural Council.

DANIE MELLOR(b. 1971)

Native’s Chest

Danie Mellor’s mixed media installation “Native’s Chest” is displayed in the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery’s current exhibition: ®eclaimed: contemporary Australian art. This intriguing and thought-provoking installation is typical of Mellor’s work which takes a playful and satirical look at the relationships between culture, environment, history and people. He especially focuses on the relationship between Indigenous and Non-Indigenous people.

“Native’s Chest” features the kangaroo and the emu from the Australian coat of arms, but they are both “stuffed” and stand well apart. The kangaroo wears a king plate around its neck – a symbol of colonial authority. Colourful stuffed parrots watch over a gilded and white porcelain-encrusted coffin on which a beaded skull and crossbones rest. The caption reads, “Take my bones and paint them”. There is indeed much to stimulate our thoughts about the detrimental relationship between Indigenous people and colonisers.

Mellor originally created “Native’s Chest” for the exhibition Curious Colony: A 21st Century Wunderkammer at the Newcastle Regional Art Gallery in 2010. The exhibition placed works by early colonial artists alongside contemporary pieces. “Native’s Chest” was based on The Macquarie Chest – a chest used by Governor Macquarie to hold his collection of Australian specimens and curiosities – dead birds, animals, insects etc. Such chests or “wunderkammers” were very fashionable for 18th and 19th century explorers and travellers. The gilded coffin suggests that Australia’s original inhabitants were once seen as exotic specimens and curiosities.

Danie Mellor is a nationally acclaimed contemporary Indigenous artist. He was born in Mackay in 1971. He works in a wide range of media – printmaking, drawing, sculpture and installation. He has studied in Adelaide and Birmingham and has a doctorate degree from the Canberra School of Art, Australian National Universit . He currently lectures at the Sydney College of the Arts, Sydney University. His art is often inspired by the rainforest area around Cairns, home to his mother’s Mamu/ Ngagen people.

In 2009 Mellor won the 26th Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Art Award for his mixed media work “From Rite to Ritual. He is represented in the major Australian galleries.

Denise Payne, Gallery Guide

JOHN OLSEN(b. 1928)

Brett Whitely About to Pounce, Untitled & Bold Frog

‘John Olsen is Australia’s greatest living painter. He is also a marvelous raconteur…..’ (Alistair McAlpine, quoted on dust jacket of Olsen’s book, ‘Drawn from Life’, 1997).

John Olsen, OBE, Patron of the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery and winner of the 2005 Archibald prize, needs no further introduction. Perhaps he is amused to remember that he took part in the anti-Archibald Prize demonstration in 1953.

Olsen is indisputably one of Australia’s most revered, talented and versatile artists. His lifetime of works includes oils, gouaches, drawings, etchings, ceramics, tapestry designs and ceiling paintings. His magnificent mural, “Salute to five bells” (1973), enhances the Sydney Opera House.

Since his first exhibition at the Macquarie Galleries in 1955, he has exhibited in every Australian State and many places overseas. Olsen and Gwen Frolich were friends for many years, Olsen first exhibiting at the Rudy Komon gallery in 1969.

Joy Dickson, Gallery Guide

DESIDERIUS ORBAN(1884 – 1986)

Morning

This work was gifted to the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery by Dr Lloyd Rees and Mrs Rees, 1983. It was drawn when Orban was 84. He continued to teach and paint almost until his death at the age of 101.

Initially, Orban was closely associated with the emerging Sydney Romantic School, but by the 1960’s, the elements of mysticism in his work had become more pronounced. James Gleeson remarked, in 1971 when Orban was 86, “Had Orban stopped painting 15 years ago, he would have taken place a in the middle register as an artist of solid worth. Only in the past few years has his work been illuminated by some sort of spiritual-aesthetic enlightenment which elevates it to a very high level indeed.” At 86 years of age, Orban was awarded the Blake Prize for his diptych, Transition to Christianity.

Orban studied in Budapest and Paris and was a founding member of the Hungarian modern art movement before migrating to Australia, a refugee from Nazi Germany, in 1939. With extraordinary vitality and optimism, Orban set out to establish a second career in his adopted country that focused upon teaching as well as painting. Much of Orban’s subsequent influence was transmitted through his establishment of the Orban Art Schools and through his writings. As a teacher, he had great influence on up and coming Australian artists.

In 1980, he felt his first London exhibition when he was 96. In 1981, he held a large retrospective at the Niagara Lane Galleries in Melbourne; the exhibition covered 70 years, revealing a strong and consistent line of development that linked the early dark figurative work to the much lighter, open line work of the 1980 pictures.

Regarding art and artists, Orban said, “A painter is someone who tries to make a pictorial copy of nature: whereas the ‘artist’ uses the elements of reality to make a new creation.”

JENNY ORCHARD(b. 1951)

Totem

Jenny Orchard is a ceramic sculptor, designer and mural maker who has exhibited widely in Australia, the UK, USA and Japan.

Born in Turkey in 1951, Jenny moved to England as an infant, and then as an eight year old to Zimbabwe where she lived for ten years. She returned to England in 1969 and was employed as an architectural assistant designing details and making presentation drawings. In 1977 she arrived in Sydney, Australia searching for creative freedom.

Jenny spent three years at the Alexander Mackie College of Art and majored in Ceramics. She does not use a potter’s wheel, but makes or finds simple geometric shapes and casts them in plasters to make moulds. She then uses these moulds to slipcast as many of each shape as she needs. She works with low fired earthenware using commercial clay and glazes.

“There is a real delight in Jenny Orchard’s pottery. The bright colours are splattered with spots, daubs, and brushstrokes; angular or geometric shapes – spikes, cones, cylinders, spheres – join in playful, unexpected ways.” (Craft Aust. Summer 83)

Margaret Linton, Gallery Guide

ALAN PEASCOD (1943 - 2007)

Lustre Urn

Alan Peascod was one of Australia’s most highly acclaimed ceramic artists. He was born in England in 1943, migrated to Australia with his family in 1952 and died at Gulgong in 2007. His father, a mining engineer, was known for his textural paintings, his great interest being earthscapes with strong structural and textural surfaces. Peascod felt his father’s work had stimulated his interest in ceramics, and his experimentation with firing and glazing.

Peascod studied under Peter Rushforth who introduced him to Zen philosophy and the natural processes associated with high temperature wood firing. He also worked with Les Blakebrough where he was influenced by the English and Asian ceramic aesthetic.A chance meeting in 1971 with Professor Said el Sadr, an expert in lustres from Cairo, sparked his lifelong interest in Islamic art. Seeing how inventive Iranian potters are taught him that “imagination was more valuable than information.”

Peascod was a technical innovator who said, “I became involved with forced-draught firing methods, after three frustrating years with natural draught, wood kilns.” He found natural wood firing too slow. He needed a more immediate and positive method. After 1966 he built and used over 47 forced-draught oil, coat or wood fired kilns.

Peascod never stopped experimenting with glazing and complex multi-layering. His research into Islamic pottery forms led him to see that traditional pottery shapes could be interpreted to create non-functional vessels.

The proportions of his pots became increasingly determined by the glazes chosen, the method of building the pot and the firing techniques available at the time. His study of Islamic pottery making encouraged him to adapt, not just adopt, their creative principles.During the early 2000s he also created figurative work in natural colours.

Janet Mansfield said “Alan seeks beauty in form, surface and decoration, with a strongly individual style that is both contemporary and a continuation of the past, especially Middle Eastern cultures.”

Hilary Stitt, Gallery Guide

ADELAIDE PERRY (1891 – 1973)

Phillipa

Adelaide Perry was born in Beechworth, Victoria in 1891. She studied at the National Gallery School of Victoria under Hall and McCubbin, and won a travelling scholarship in 1920 which enabled her to travel to London, where she enrolled at the Royal Academy School, and was influenced by Post-Impressionism. Her drawing master was Ernest Jackson, from whom she claimed to have learnt much about drawing.

Perry returned to Australia in 1925, and settled in Sydney. She exhibited at the exhibitions of ‘young moderns’ organised by Lambert and Proctor in Sydney in 1926 and was, with them, a founder member of the Contemporary Group. She taught at the Sydney Art School, and in the early 1930s ran her own art school in Pitt Street. One of her students was Eric Wilson who was to become a pioneer modernist in Sydney.

Adelaide Perry’s many life drawings, nude studies and portraits are characterised by an incisive, sometimes angular line. Form is suggested from nuances of outline or delicately indicated by means of shading. Besides drawings, she also produced woodcuts and linocuts, generally monochrome, using white line, black line, and contrasting tonal areas.

THEA PROCTOR (1879 - 1966)

Seated Figure

Bathurst Regional Art Gallery’s work by Thea Proctor “Reclining Nude” illustrates Proctor’s ability in line and composition, “her drawings have a rhythmic vitality, relying on her instinctive reaction to the model.” Proctor commented “I have an intense feeling for line, I can appreciate Picasso’s drawings.” Amongst other artists of her time, Hans Heyson thought the quality of her line was equalled only by G.W. Lambert (a contemporary at the time). “Miss Proctor is one of those rarities, a woman who can draw.”

In the work “Reclining Nude”, Thea Proctor’s use of a cream background with the red Conte line brings warmth to this life drawing. She worked in most mediums during her life as an artist and teacher - drawing, watercolour, pastel, lithograph, woodcuts and linocuts.After Proctor’s studies at the Julian Ashton School, Sydney, she went overseas and studied at St. John’s Wood School, London. She lived in London for eighteen years where she worked with and was influenced by G.W. Lambert. In 1920 she returned to Australia to live permanently when the Lambert family returned.

From that time on, she worked with G.W. Lambert to encourage and support young Australian artists, some of which were Grace Cossington-Smith, Margaret Preston and Adelaide Perry. Lloyd Rees has said “A particular debt is owed to Thea Proctor, whose influence particularly in the field of design, went deeper than is generally recognised.”

Edwina Shand, Gallery Guide

PIERRE JOSEPH REDOUTE (1759 - 1840)

Diplarenna Morvea (Butterfly Flag)

Pierre Joseph Redoute (1759-1840), known as the Raphael of Flowers, was the most famous botanical artist of his time, winning international recognition for his precise and beautiful pictures of plants. He was born in Saint Hubert, Luxembourg, into a distinguished family of artists, and spent his early years learning from his father and brothers. After moving to Paris in his early twenties, he was immediately commissioned to do illustrations for the excellent botanical publications France was printing at the time. Redoute worked as an engraver, and learnt the difficult art of stipple engraving during a visit to England (a method of engraving in dots rather than in lines, where the resulting prints more closely resemble the water colours with the subtle gradations of colour).

Redoute was appointed court artist to Queen Marie-Antoinette upon returning to France. He painted the gardens at the Petite Trianon. During the revolution, he was employed to document gardens, which became national property. However, under the patronage of the Empress Josephine, Redoutte’s career truly flourished. For her he produced two beautiful works of little known plants in her gardens at Malmaison. Encouraged by her husband, the Emperor Napoleon, who was interested in science and the Australian flora, Josephine established at the Chateau Malmaison one of the great plant collections of the day.

Redoute died in 1840 of a sudden heart attack while painting a lily.

Jean Thatcher, Gallery Guide

NORMA REDPATH (1928 – 2013)

Buttress Wall

Sculptor, studied at Swinbourne and RMIT and undertook extensive travel studies in Europe in the 1950’s.

Immaculate in finish and influenced by the works of the British sculptor Barbara Hepworth, her early work gained attention at the Central Five exhibitions and the annual exhibitions of the Victorian Sculptors Association, of which she was a council member and Vice President.

An Italian scholarship took her overseas again in1962 where she worked in bronze casting foundries and established a headquarters in Milan. From then on she travelled much between Italy and Australia.

The strength of her development became widely known through the first major Australian exhibition of cast bronzes at Gallery A in Melbourne in 1963. She was awarded several major commissions in Australia during the 1960’s and 1970’s, including the Treasury Fountain in Canberra,

A dedicated artist of prodigious energy, her contribution to the development of Australian sculpture has been far-fetching and continuous.

Norma Redpath was awarded the OBE in 1970, the same year in which she exhibited with Rudy Komon.

Judy Plater, Gallery Guide

LLOYD REES(1895 – 1988)

Lloyd Rees (1895 – 1988) was one of Australia’s best-loved and acclaimed artists. Preoccupied with depicting the effects of radiant light, his works convey the beauty of the Australian landscape as he sought to express an ideal of harmony between man and nature.

Lloyd Rees’ “May Morning No. 2”, (1981) is one of the most significant works in the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery (BRAG) collection and was purchased by the Gallery with the help of Lloyd Rees in 1981. This superb painting of Sydney Harbour – one of Rees’ most treasured subjects - is an excellent example of the artist’s late works which, as his eyesight began to deteriorate in the last decade of his life, became semi abstract “visionary” pictures based on memory. In this case, Rees had been painting Sydney Harbour since 1916 and had never failed to be moved by its beauty. Here, a delicate veil of light washes the Harbour with a golden glow, casting the city behind in an ethereal luminosity that reaches skyward creating a shimmering El Dorado on the horizon line.

In a long and illustrious career spanning seven decades in the fields of architecture, painting, drawing, printmaking and teaching, Lloyd Rees was the recipient of numerous accolades, awards, and prizes. His work is represented in major public and private collections throughout Australia. BRAG‘s substantial Lloyd Rees focus collection consists of 58 paintings, drawings and prints – one of the largest representations of the artist’s work in a public gallery in NSW.

WILLIAM ROBINSON (b. 1936)

A prominent contemporary landscape painter William Robinson studied at Queensland Teachers’ College and Central Technical College. After graduating, Robinson taught at Central Technical College, leaving in 1989 to become a full-time painter. Interested in both art and music he chose the privacy of art over the public performances required in music. Music has remained an important part of his life and is integral to his painting practice.

Robinson lives within the landscapes that he paints and draws inspiration from his daily life. Shifts in his art have proved to be congruent with his physical relocations. He has moved through intimate interiors, cows and the whole farmyard to the multi-viewpoints of his rainforest works.

Gwen Frolich met Robinson through Ray Hughes, who had taken over the Rudy Komon Gallery collection. They formed a happy relationship of mutual admiration with Frolich buying six of his works. The painting in the bequest was recognized instantly by Robinson as “That’s Gwen Frolich’s”.

Linda Leseberg, Gallery Guide

JO ROSS

The River

“The River” (90x58cm) in oil on board was a 1985 gift of the Gallery Society. This is one of the series of paintings entitled ‘Memories of their Childhood’. Of this series Jo said, “the memories were of my sons scrambling around a very beautiful area, but somehow menacing to two small and strained boys who were trying to come to terms with such a different life after the death of their father.” In this work the eye of the viewer is captured by the two small bright red areas, the shirts of the small figures, and carried along the outstretched arms from one side of the painting to the other. Above the tiny figures the strong, dark vertical lines of the tree trunks bear down with intimidating weight. However, one senses that those active little figures will find their way over the huge daunting rocks to find solace in the cool waters of the golden sun-flecked pools which open up the foreground of the picture. The surface of the painting is given interest by the varied ways in which the paint is applied; brushwork overlaid by heavier areas of paint which appear to have been applied with a palette knife and horizontal areas of highlight possibly scraped on with cardboard.

In 1985 Jo said “The stimulus for my paintings has varied considerably over the years but has always had its origins in landscape.” Jo has exhibited widely in NSW, has won a number of awards, including the Hunter’s Hill Art Prize in 1962. In 1982 she was named Bathurst Artist of the Year.

Margaret Linton, Gallery Guide

JOAN ROSS(b. 1961)

BBQ this Sunday, BYO

In this digital animation titled “BBQ this Sunday, BYO”, Joan Ross animates early Australian painter Joseph Lycett’s colonial landscapes and figures that appear in these paintings.

The premise for much of Ross’ work is an interest in history and the retelling of history particularly from Australian colonial times. The artist uses motifs from early Australian artists such as Lycett to retell a story that lays bare the lies and bias projected by history.Calling herself a “materialist” working in the mixed mediums of animation, drawing, and high-vis glow materials, Joan Ross plays with the retelling of history. Her frustration with inexact truths motivates her to connect with her material, using them as a means to question the prejudices she sees in contemporary Australia.

Robina Booth, Acting Curator

ANTHONY DATTILO RUBBO(1870 - 1955)

The Lost Game

“The Lost Game” (1918) - Dattilo Rubbo has used colour to give form, reflection of light, and contrast colours for the shadows. He has applied many small thick brush strokes of many colours to the canvas in the Impressionists style.

Dattilo Rubbo founded an art school in Sydney in 1898 and maintained it for 43 years while teaching also at the Royal Art Society for 28 years. He was elected a member of the Council of the Royal Art Society in 1900. Although more traditional as an artist himself, as a teacher, he encouraged individual experimentation among his students.

After going to Europe in 1906 for seven months to search out the best methods of teaching, Dattilo Rubbo returned with many reproductions of paintings, which he displayed in his studio. They included Cezanne, Sisley, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Seurat, and Vuillard. Dattilo Rubbo’s difference was colour. He lectured about ‘colour harmony’, and was attacked by Sydney’s art community for his views on colour. Soon his classes at the Royal Art Society and his studio in Sydney were being given lessons in ‘colour perspective’ – the expression of space and three dimensional forms through colour. Analysis of light and light waves formed the scientific basis of Dattilo Rubbo’s and his students’ use of the colour spectrum rather than tone.

HUI SELWOOD(b. 1973)

Totarc IV

Hui Selwood was born in Sydney, had his primary education in Toowoomba, and completed secondary school in Newcastle. His father Paul Selwood, a well known sculptor, was a teacher, and his mother was a painter. Both influenced him greatly. On finishing school, Selwood took up a career in carpentry, but with such a creative mind, this was never going to fulfil his dreams. Following the family tradition, Hui enrolled in the National Art School. He graduated with a Certificate in Ceramics in 1994, and an Advanced Diploma in Fine Arts (sculpture) in 1997, and in 2000 he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts, majoring in sculpture.

Hui Selwood is probably best known as a sculptor, but he also enjoys working in other mediums. Steel, with a variation of surface treatment is the main component of Selwood’s sculptures. As Selwood states, “using colour on separate elements enhances the surfaces and spatial dynamics”. Hui Selwood’s inspirations come from the environment and architectural blocks. He has also been intrigued with totems from various cultures for many years. ‘Totems and Architecture’ was the first body of works that were produced from Hill End. Abstract compositions of metal and wood dominate this work. The structural compositions acknowledge an architectural quality, which stems from his interest in design, architecture and construction.

Hui Selwood exhibits at several galleries throughout NSW. He exhibited works at the first ‘Sculpture by the Sea’ in 1998, and at every exhibition since. He teaches at Bathurst, and does installation work for galleries such as the Art Gallery of NSW.

“Totarc IV” was purchased by Bathurst Regional Art Gallery in 2007.

Yvonne Jones, Gallery Guide

WENDY SHARPE(b. 1960)

Church in Hill End

Wendy Sharpe’s creative urge came to her early in life. She was illustrator for the school magazine and drama productions and after leaving school attended the Seaforth Technical College. She says ,“When I went to Tech I realised I had come home to a place that just felt so great”. After completing post graduate studies she travelled to many parts of the world including America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

She won the Sulman Prize in 1986, The Portia Geach Portrait Prize in 1995 and Archibald Prize in 1996 with “Self Portrait as Diana of Erskineville”, a large colourful work with broad brushstrokes showing her as Diana wearing a green bra, leopard skin pants and thongs. This win was a surprise to many, but John McDonald wrote; “Even those who don’t like the picture will have to appreciate its energy and joie de vivre. She is a deserving winner in an unusually strong field.”

In 1994 Wendy Sharpe spent four weeks at Haefligers’ Cottage at Hill End drawing and painting. Of her time there she says, “I enjoyed the isolation of Hill End – the starry skies, kangaroos, the cows that walk allover the road, I particularly enjoyed staying in artist Jean Belette’s house, full of old books and furniture. There was no hot water and a big open fire. I have always lived in the city so it was a different experience for me. I decided to paint pictures about the night. I am not a landscape painter. I always paint figures. I appear in each of the paintings. All are oil on canvas painted back home derived from little oil studies, drawings and water colours in Hill End.” Bathurst Regional Art Gallery has a collection of works from that time including “Dinner at Hill End”. This is a narrative work – a group of friends sharing a good meal and conservation and enjoying the warmth of a glowing fire.

In 1999 Wendy Sharpe went to East Timor on behalf of the Australian War Memorial. She was only the fourth official woman war artist in Australian History. Sharpe says it was an “incredible, fascinating experience” and she did hundreds of drawings conveying the emotional intensity and drama of her surroundings, the hopeless aftermath of war but also the optimism of new beginnings. These works will remain part of Australian History and it’s a measure of the high regard in which Wendy Sharpe is held.

Pat Pollard, Gallery Guide

ANNEKE SILVER

Donald’s Sign - Hill End

Anneke Silver, a Queenslander, was “seriously worried about the cold”, and requested a residency in November. Overjoyed when granted four weeks at Murray’s Cottage in November 2005, she was inspired to work on her two passions, landscape and geometric configurations of shadows.

The old buildings of Hill End formed the basis of her work whilst there. This fascination is strengthened by her links with Holland, her country of origin. Sketch books contain many fine drawings of cottages and villages in France, Holland and Tuscany.

Silver, an Associate Professor at James Cook University, Townsville, has had numerous solo and group exhibitions, and is represented at the Queensland Art Gallery. Works are also held by regional galleries, private and corporate collectors in Australia, Europe, and America.

Margaret Marshall, Gallery Guide

ERIC SMITH (b. 1919)

Crown of Thorns

When Eric Smith’s painting Crown of Thorns won the 1956 Carillon City Festival Art Prize, the headlines in the Western Times declared “ANOTHER CONTROVERSY CERTAIN’’.

Smith had won the Blake Prize for Religious Art in 1954 with The Scourged Christ, a painting similar to Crown of Thorns. Controversy and argument about the boundaries between religious art and abstract expressionism had continued to engage the public and critics in heated discussion.

The Bathurst public were divided: A local clergyman, Reverend A. Dougan, stated “the artist was deeply moved by the passion of Christ” and claimed the work would be “A Future Treasure.” One resident stated “Orthodox paintings were never to be considered for the major awards”.

Religious painting was Eric Smith’s passion for many years. He was a multiple winner of the Archibald, Blake, Wynne & Sulman Prizes. In 1995 Smith was recognised for his contribution to visual arts with the presentation of an Australia Council Emeritus Award.

GRACE COSSINGTON SMITH(1882 - 1984)

The Dressing Table & Open Doorway

Grace Cossington Smith won the major Oil prize category twice in 2 years. She was a pioneer impressionist painter and was awarded the Order of Australia in 1983. Judge Jean Appleton said of “Open Door” that with its “its clear light playing all over the surface”, the work was of “considerable merit”.

Cossington Smith often stated that her chief interest had always been colour...”it has to shine, colour within colour...vibrant with life”. In her paintings, the everyday and the domestic “became imbued with a vital energy’.

“Dressing Table emits a beautiful glow” said Lloyd Rees, judge of the 1958 Carillon City Festival Art Prize. “I am delighted by the winning painting”.

Visitors to the 1958 exhibition, however, commented that they thought “The Dressing Table” had “too much yellow”.

Grace Cossington Smith, one of the founders of the Contemporary Art Group in Sydney, was one of many Sydney based artists to enter the Art Prize. In 1958, there were one hundred and forty paintings hung, with one hundred from outside Bathurst, which greatly pleased the committee.

EUGENIE SOLANOV(1910 - 2002)

Portrait of Matilda Lister

Eugenie was born on July 20, 1910 in Riga, Latvia. She received her education in Riga and attended Art College after high school, where she studied under Sergei Vinogradov (a Russian Impressionist painter whose work resides in The Louvre).

Russian occupation of Latvia and wartime conditions led Eugenie to flee to Western Europe for Australia with her husband and first son Andrew, arriving in Sydney on the boat ‘Nelly’ in 1949. Her first three years in Australia were spent in the Cowra migrant refugee camp while her husband built their new home in Bathurst, in which they lived with their second child, Eve, from 1953 to 1974.

Whilst in Bathurst Eugenie continued to paint and exhibit in local and regional forums. Eugenie won Bathurst’s Carillon City Festival Art Prize three times including the Wilson Stinson Prize (1959, 1963 & 1971), and most significantly, won the Dubbo Centenary Art Prize Exhibition in 1972 with ‘Girl in White Blouse’ (judge: Sali Herman). During this period she also received a letter of commendation from Lloyd Rees. Eugenie’s ceramics were exhibited in Bathurst, with local newspapers often reporting her work and achievements.

Landscape and abstraction were added to Eugenie’s core subject matter of portraiture and still life painting during the time she spent at Bathurst. After moving to Sydney’s inner west in the early 1970’s, she resumed painting on an intermittentent basis, concentrating on flower arrangement as a vehicle for exploring colour.

In recent times, Eugenie has been featured in several Latvian and Russian publications including newspaper articles and books by academic Ms Nina Lapidus who is pursuing research and documentation of Vinegradov’s work, his students and influence. Eugenie has also been featured in recent historical publications published by the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery.

Although Eugenie is now too restricted by physical ailments to continue working her enthusiasm and love of painting and art has never waned.

TONY TUCKSON(1921 - 1973)

Untitled 2 - Red and Blue

Tony Tuckson produced some of the greatest abstract expressive painting in Australia. During his childhood on the Suez Canal, and as he commuted to school in England, his observation of the endless lines drawn on the sea by the ships’ wakes doubtless influenced his late abstract works of extended charcoal lines on paper. The clear light and sandy earth colours of the Suez appealed to him as did the bright Australian light.

His art studies in London were interrupted by his war service. Tuckson came to Australia as a spitfire pilot in 1942 in the RAF. He married an Australian ceramic artist, Margaret Besset in 1943, and returned to Australia permanently in 1946, where he continued his studies at East Sydney Technical College (1946-49). He was the star pupil and was said to belong to the Cezanne school.

His early paintings were of the domestic environment. There was a gradual shift from figuration to abstraction and finally to gestural painting, but his abstractions were concerned with the figure. There was limited colour and pure line with symbolic forms. “Untitled I” (1956-58) is typical of his middle period. We feel the presence of the painter as he makes his quick deliberate marks that have significance for him – dark hatchings of black over a delicate wash and gentle shapes in oranges, blues and yellows. We see the influence of Ian Fairweather, Chinese calligraphy, and Aboriginal art, especially bark paintings.

During the twenty three years he worked at the Art Gallery of NSW as an assistant to the director, Tuckson was the curator who first displayed Aboriginal art in the permanent collection of an art gallery. During his career, he was far better known as an arts administrator than a painter.

He encouraged and promoted aspiring artists, but rarely displayed his own work in his lifetime, until a 1970 one man exhibition at the Watters Gallery, and a second exhibition in 1973, just months before his untimely death from cancer.

After his 1973 show, Sandra McGrath stated that “Tuckson was recognised overnight for what he was – the best Action Painter in Australia, and one of the country’s most important artists.”

ROSEMARY VALADON (b. 1947)

The Open Door

Rosemary Valadon was involved in the Hill End Artists in Residence Program in 2003, staying in Haefligers Cottage, formerly owned by the artists Jean Bellette and Paul Haefliger. This residency provided the inspiration for the two paintings, ‘The Nuns’ Picnic’ (2003) and ‘Jean Bellette’s Bed’ (2004). Both works on exhibit here are held by the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery and form part of the gallery’s extensive collection of Hill End artworks.

Born in Sydney in 1947, Valadon’s impressive artistic career has spanned over forty years, initially studying drawing and painting by the Meldrum method, before studying at the Sydney College of the Arts. Her interest in the ‘feminine’ and depictions of women throughout the ages has become a major focus of her work. These issues were explored through the theatrical worlds of ancient mythologies, archetypes, psychological theories and feminism. The beauty of floral china teacups and the rituals associated with making and drinking tea are celebrated in her Large Cup Paintings and still life paintings. These works are a positive antidote to a pervading social and economic cynicism and a demonstration of her technical skill as a tonal painter of still life subjects.

The influence of Max Meldrum’s tonalism on Valadon’s work is evident in the painting ‘Jean Bellette’s Bed’, painted in 2004, where the beautiful light and rich golden tones of the sunset in the folds of the bed linen, create a luminous and atmospheric quality of light and space. Valadon describes herself as ‘a tonal painter’ who is influenced by the work of Rubens, Velasquez, El Greco and Monet. The disordered bed is evocative of sleepless nights, being tossed about by personal challenges, dreams and a sense of restlessness that pervades the village of Hill End. Valadon talked of Hill End having a strong, spiritual presence of the ghosts of the departed and having a ‘feeling of being compressed into the Earth and feeling close to heaven’ when fierce electrical storms frequent Hill End, contributing to that feeling of tumult and restlessness. The bed has been left and ‘the person has walked off somewhere’.

Her awards include the Blake Religious Art Prize (1991) the Portia Geach Memorial Portrait Prize (1991), the Muswellbrook Open and Drawing Prizes and her work is in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery and Muswellbrook Regional Art Gallery, BHP Billiton, Macquarie University Gallery, the Queensland Conservatorium of Music as well as many portrait commissions and private sales in the UK, USA, Canada and Australia.

After participating in the residency program, Rosemary Valadon continued to return to Hill End to paint. Wanting to get out of Sydney and find a new place to live with a strong sense of community, she chose Hill End, and in 2005 purchased a property and built a studio. Here she has established a lovely garden, with blossom and fruit trees, providing a setting for her still life paintings.

Judith Nash, Gallery Guide.

PRUE VENABLES

Jug, Bone

Statement: “The making of functional pots – simple objects to be held and used – provides a lifetime of challenge and excitement. A beautiful cup, gently holding and reflecting so much ceremony and personal connection. The translucency of porcelain, with light dancing on the sprung tension of a rim and a softly melting body inviting touch. The finished object stands innocently – oblivious to the complexities of making and firing processes. A search for simplicity and quietness – an essential stillness – motivates my work.”

These forms are thrown, and then gently bent into a new shape while still soft. As the porcelain retains a memory of all changes, movements must be confident and simple. Timing must be precise, as fired rims and walls frustratingly recall every wobble and meander from the desired result. The leather-hard forms are then attached to new hand rolled bases and slowly dried. Firings are to 1300 degrees centigrade, under reduction, in a gas kiln.

GREG WEIGHT (b. 1946)

Silhouette and Brushes No 2 & Coat, Hands and Brushes No 1, Portrait of Lloyd Rees

Renowned Sydney photographer Greg Weight (b. 1946) has been fascinated by photography since childhood. He began his photographic career as soon as he left school, working for an advertising agency as a photographer’s assistant. In 1968, he opened his own studio, and then expanded into magazine work and photography for the Australian Opera and Australian Ballet. A member of Yellow House in the early 1970s with Martin Sharp, Brett Whitely, Peter Kingston, George Gittoes and others, he extensively photographed the interiors of the radical Potts Point mecca to pop art.

In 1999, Weight was one of the first Hill End artists-in-residence, staying at the Haefliger Cottage. He became interested in experimenting with the techniques of 19th century photography. Bathurst Regional Art Gallery has two hand coloured gelatin prints from the residency.

In 1975, Weight was commissioned to photograph Lloyd Rees visiting his favourite sites for Architecture in Australia. Four works from this series are in the Bathurst Gallery’s permanent collection. Weight wrote of Rees: “Meeting Lloyd Rees … was like being in the presence of a wise old sage, the unofficial elder of a tribe of artists …. On the few occasions I photographed him I came away with some of my most treasured images of an artist.”

Weight has photographed numerous people (including Bob Dylan) but is perhaps best known for his portraits of Australian artists. An exhibition and book ( Australian Artists: Portraits by Greg Weight) includes portraits of many artists in our permanent collection – John Olsen, Lloyd Rees, Margaret Olley, Donald Friend, Jenny Sages, Arthur Boyd, John Coburn, James Gleeson, Tim Storrier, Judy Cassab, Wendy Sharp, Colin Lanceley, Brett Whitely, William Robinson – and many other well-known and emerging artists. Most photographs were taken in the artist’s studio, giving the viewer entry into a very private and creative world.

In 2003, Weight won the inaugural Citicorp Private Bank Australian Photographic Portrait Prize. This prize was held in conjunction with the Archibald Portrait Prize at the Art Gallery of NSW. In 2006, he won the prize at Head On: Alternative Portraits in Sydney for his image of painter Shen Jiawen, taken while Shen was painting a portrait of Weight. The painting by Shen was a finalist at the 2006 Archibald Prize.

Pat Corrigan AM donated 101 of Weight’s striking images of contemporary Australian artists to the National Portrait Gallery at Old Parliament House. Greg Weight’s works are also included in many permanent collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, Australian National Library, Art Gallery of NSW, State Library of NSW, Power House Museum, Manly Art Gallery and Museum and Westmead Children’s Hospital Sue Jones, Gallery Guide

NICOLE WELCH(b. 1974)

Apparitions #1 - Projection, Mount Arapiles and the Mitre Rock 1863, Nicolas Chevalier

Bathurst-born Nicole Welch graduated in 1998 from the Canberra School of Art at the Australian National University with a BA Visual Arts (Printmaking) with Honours (First Class). She is currently undertaking a Master of Fine Arts at the College of Fine Arts, University of NSW, Sydney (2012).

In 2007 she had her first solo exhibition Stealing Beauty at the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery. The exhibition toured in 2008 to the FCA Gallery in the Faculty of Creative Arts at the University of Wollongong, NSW.

In 2010 she was awarded the Country Energy Funded Residency as part of the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery’s Hill End Artists in Residence Program and was also the inaugural winner of Harris Farm Markets $5000 Acquisitive Art Award.

In 2011 she was a recipient of the Windmill Trust Scholarship for a Regional NSW Artist.

Nicole has been a finalist in the Blake Prize for Religious Art (2007) and the APACHE CLIP Award for contemporary landscape photography at the Perth Centre for Photography (2012).

Nicole’s work is represented in the collections of the Canberra School of Art (ANU), Greater Western Area Health Service (Health NSW), Harris Farm Markets, the National Library of Australia and many private collections.

BRETT WHITELEY(1939 - 1992)

Design for the cover of the book “Wetjala” by Alan Morse & Untitled (denist’s surgery)

Born in Sydney in 1939, Whiteley had a long association with the Bathurst district. He boarded at the Scots School in Bathurst from 1948 until he returned to Sydney in 1956. His early, natural ability as an artist is shown in his haunting Self Portrait at 16. He won the Young Painters Section at the Bathurst Show in 1956.

While still at school, Whiteley was mentored by William Dobell. He also met and studied the work of Lloyd Rees and other renowned Australian artists. His appetite for studying the techniques of great artists, whether local or international was insatiable. He had a burning desire to be their equal.

At age 20, he won the 1960 Italian Government Travelling Art Scholarship, judged by Sir Russell Drysdale. The works exhibited were Sofala, Dixon Street, July and Around Bathurst. He spent many weekends painting landscapes around Bathurst, Sofala and Hill End. The shapes, textures and colours of the Central West had a lasting impact on his life’s work.

For the next decade, Whiteley studied art, worked frantically, and exhibited in many European countries. At an exhibition in London in 1961, the Tate Gallery bought one of his paintings. This made Whiteley, at 22, the youngest artist ever to enter the Tate’s collection.

He returned to Australia at the end of 1969, an internationally famous artist. He continued to work and experiment prolifically, in 1978 winning all three of the Archibald, Sulman and Wynne Prizes. Whiteley was an obsessive artist; in Paris in June and July in 1989 he completed 60 works in 60 days. His last paintings were done in Far North Queensland just before he died at age 53 in June 1992.

The sheer diversity of his artistic talents (painter, printmaker, sculptor, writer) is astounding. “Underneath all the fuss of the publicity which surrounded him was a hard working painter of tenacious dedication and sensitivity” Barry Pearce.

Joy Dickson, Gallery Guide

FRED WILLIAMS(1927 - 1982)

Boy with scythe & Australia

A foremost Australian painter and printmaker Fred Williams studied at the National Gallery Art School and the George Bell School in Melbourne and the Chelsea School of Art and the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. At the Central School he learnt etching. Awarded an OBE in 1976, he is represented in most Australian Galleries and internationally in the United Kingdom, the United States of America and New Zealand.

While in London, as a means of keeping warm cheaply, Williams regularly attended music halls. His many sketches, done from the music hall gallery, resulted in his first celebrated series. On returning to Australia his focus moved to the landscape. His landscapes evolved to the use of aerial perspective; human presence and structures were ignored. The challenge was to construct a painting based on considered design.

Towards the end of 1961, through Leonard French and Robert Dickerson, Fred Williams joined Rudy Komon’s stable and gallery. Gwen Frolich was already working at the gallery so her association with Williams dates from this time. Rudy Komon fostered Williams’ career, paying him a monthly retainer, and by the end of the 1960s Williams was the dominant figure in the stable. The association between Williams and Komon was enduring and enabled Williams to give up paid employment to concentrate on his art.

Williams’ work is about the making of a picture. His interest is in colour, form and space rather than subject matter. He achieves this aim through interposing a long period of reflection and contemplation between the creation of a sketch and the commencement of painting. Williams would regularly turn his sketch upside down to assist in removing irrelevant details from his paintings.

James Mollison in A Singular Vision: The Art of Fred Williams states “As Lyn Williams recalls: Fred liked to go backward and forward through his pictures. He sat on ideas, consciously held himself back. He liked to digest, sifting what was best out of previous work. When he had his first sell-out show with Rudy [Komon] in 1966, he said he couldn’t paint for a year – he had lost his references”.

The works received from Gwen Frolich reflect the different themes and breadth of media found in Fred Williams’ art.

Linda Leseberg, Gallery Guide

DAVID BRIAN WILSON(1946 - 1998)

Wind and water

David Brian Wilson studied at the Julian Ashton Art School under J. Richard Ashton, from 1971 until 1976. He taught there from 1972 and was a Visiting Lecturer to the School. He also studied basic sculpture with Tom Bass in 1977, 1985 and 1988.

In 1979 David established his own school in Bathurst NSW, teaching there for 11 years. More recently David was a part time Lecturer in Drawing and Painting at Charles Sturt University, Bathurst.

David was a strong supporter of the visual arts within the city of Bathurst. He served as a member of the art gallery’s Management Committee on several occasions and as a member of the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery Society.

He was an exceptional draughtsman, able to reveal with an “uncompromising tenderness and empathy” the individuality and often the limits of his models. For David drawing was the means of conveying human feeling.

“There are few Australian draughtsmen (or women) of the figure nowadays, like David Wilson and there are fewer still, who care as much for the teaching of figure drawing as does David Wilson. Drawing the figure has become all too rare a practice and is otherwise too often hidden from public view, and hence appreciation and understanding.” Hendrik Kolenberg, Senior Curator of Australian Prints Drawings and Watercolours, AGNSW

David Brian Wilson passed away on 26 March 1998 after a long battle with cancer.

Louise Doyle, Director, BRAG

TIM WINTERS(b. 1948)

Curse and rape by the river

Landscape is central to the vision of painter and printmaker, Tim Winters. Through non-representational landscape painting he explores the visual impact of the land on his own artwork and the environmental impact of man’s use of the land.

Born in London in 1948, Tim migrated to Australia in 1964. In 1981 he moved to Stuart Town, a small village north of Orange.

In 1993 Curse and Rape by the River was acquired by Bathurst Regional Art Gallery through the Bathurst Art Purchase. This work is one of a series of abstract landscape paintings loosely based on the terrain from Stuart Town to the Coast. Its roughly geometric design features the purple-blue of the Patterson’s Curse, the yellow and white of the rape-seed crop and the heavy black soil bordering the blue river. Framed in lengths of rough and aged wooden palings show the rugged nature of the countryside; the work comments on farming practices.

Tim writes, “When I moved from the city to the country I was struck by the interaction between man and landscape: turning landscape into land… the sense of man imposing human structural concepts on a natural environment. My work has mainly been involved in that aesthetic interaction.”

Margaret Linton, Gallery Guide

ROSWITHA WULFF(b. 1938)

Mediaeval Jug

Roswitha Wulff was born in Persia in 1938. Her father, a German goldsmith and engineer, was interned by the British and sent to Australia. Roswitha went with her mother to Germany where they lived with a potter friend. Wulff lived amidst the making and firing of pots until she was eight, when the family joined their father in Australia.

In the 1960s she trained at East Sydney Technical College under Peter Rushforth, who introduced her to the philosophy and aesthetic of Japanese woodfire. In 1978 Wulff returned to Germany intending to perfect her skills by living and working there. However, she found the orderliness of the pine forests alien and stultifying and longed for the subtlety of colour and the randomness of the eucalypt forests of Australia. She returned here intending to develop her work to express qualities of the Australian landscape.

The first of her works acquired by Bathurst Regional Art Gallery was ‘Medieval Jug’ (1972). The stoneware piece has a dry glaze and the body of the work gently corrugated with dull green slip from the mouth of the jug.

Over the years Roswitha Wulff’s work has grown in sureness and strength. Her pots and platters speak of the nature of beauty. She feels that traditional skills and techniques are the basis of good pottery and that the hand-made object is our connection to our physical environment, and essential requirement for our well-being.

Margaret Linton, Gallery Guide