Details
Latitude51.7687323 Longitude19.4569911 Start Date1953-01-01 End Date2023-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Lodz, Poland
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 24 August 1953
- Summary
- Polish-born, Sydney-trained poster and textile artist who used local iconography, notably kookaburras, in his artwork.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- Feb-23
- Age at death
- 70
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1938-01-01 End Date2023-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- This entry is a stub. Please help the DAAO by adding to it.
Writers:
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 15 September 1938
- Summary
- Painter and poet, Royston Harpur's work has consistently shown his admiration of Japanese Zen gestural abstract forms.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 21-Feb-23
- Age at death
- 85
Details
Latitude-33.88477 Longitude151.22621 Start Date1933-01-01 End Date2023-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Paddington, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1933
- Summary
- Wrobel was a private gallery curator (Woolloomooloo Art Gallery ) and collector working with her partner Fred Wrobel until his death. In 2003, she created the John Passmore Museum of Art to promote his work after an inheritance from the Passmore estate in 1989. Their museum collected broadly She was also instrumental in developing the Nightingale Museum, Sydney Hospital as well as the career of Percy Grainger (d.1961)
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1-Jan-23
- Age at death
- 90
Details
Latitude-32.916667 Longitude151.75 Start Date1928-01-01 End Date2023-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Newcastle, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- He was born on 21 January 1928 in Newcastle, the son of Esma Agnes (née McCubbin) and Henry Olsen, who worked at the Cooee Clothing company. When he was seven his father was transfered to Sydney, where they lived at Bondi. Nevertheless he continued to hold deep visual memories of the industrial landscape of Newcastle. In Sydney he attended Paddington Junior Technical High until the outbreak of World War II when his father enlisted in the Army, his mother and sister stayed with relatives at Yass, and Olsen became a boarder at St Joseph’s Hunters Hill.After obtaining his Leaving Certificate in 1943 he worked as a clerk for Elders Smith, a job he loathed. His early talent for drawing was soon turned to good purpose as he became a freelance cartoonist and illustrator for a number of Sydney based publications.His first art classes at the Julian Ashton School in 1946 were to help him develop his illustrative skills. When he wanted to learn more about life drawing so enrolled in Dattilo Rubbo’s School. This was followed by a return to the Julian Ashton School in 1950.Always convivial, Olsen began to move in the circle of artists, writers and coffee drinkers who were congregating around Rowe Street as a sort of Sydney bohemia (many of these would later form the nucleus of “The Push”. He came to know Carl Plate’s Rowe Street Notanda Gallery with its art books and reproductions of European modern art. He decided to become a serious artist.He was aided in his ambition by the difficult but brilliant teacher, John Passmore, who taught at the Julian Ashton Art School from 1950 to 1954. In his old age Olsen recalled Passmore’s uncompromising rigour and his non-precious approach to materials. Olsen also took classes at East Sydney Technical College with the less bombastic Godfrey Miller. The 1950s was a time of renewed prosperity after the trauma of War and economic Depression. Young radical students, like Olsen, were keen to stake their claim as leaders of the avant garde. In 1953 he led a student demonstration against the conservative Trustees of the National Art Gallery of New South Wales, and was quoted in the press criticising the awarding of the Archibald Prize to William Dargie. Over two decades later, Olsen was himself seen as one of the more conservative Trustees of the same institution.In 1956 his work was selected for the prestigious Contemporary Australian paintings : Pacific Loan Exhibition on board Orient Line S.S. Orcades , an exhibition that took what was seen as the best Australian art on an ocean cruise as a form of cultural exchange. In December of the same year, Olsen joined with John Passmore, Ralph Balson, Robert Klippel, Eric Smith and William Rose in a group exhibition at Macquarie Galleries – Direction 1 . This exhibition was later credited with bringing Abstract Expressionism to Australia, although, with the exception of Klippel, none of the artists involved had any real knowledge of contemporary art activities in other countries.Olsen’s paintings, some based on moody readings of T.S.Eliot, so impressed the art critic of the Sydney Morning Herald, Paul Haefliger, that he encouraged the Sydney businessman Robert Shaw, to give him a private scholarship to Europe, on condition that he not be based in the UK. Instead he went to Paris, where he spent some months in 1957 learning etching in S.W. Hayter’s Atelier 17 Workshop in Paris, before travelling to Spain. By July 1958 he was in Majorca, where he based himself in a house in Deya to paint. He also worked as an apprentice chef, and developed a life long love of Mediterranean food, both its flavours and its appearance.The distilled essence of these Spanish years continued to flavour his art on his return to Sydney in 1960. Olsen’s paintings of the 1960s established him as one of the leading artists of his generation. He painted Spanish Encounter (Now in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales)shortly after his return while living in Victoria Street Woolloomooloo, in loose-knit creative community with many of Sydney’s leading younger artists. Later he stayed for some month’s at Paul Haefliger’s former house in the old gold mining town of Hill End, before eventually settling at Watson’s Bay with his young family. This was the seascape that inspired Entrance to the Seaport of Desire and other works, although these paintings were also celebrations of the hedonism of Sydney life. Even though he was now lauded as a major Australian artist, Olsen did not earn enough from his art to support his family, so supplemented his income by teaching at East Sydney Technical College, Desiderius Orban’s school, the Mary White Art School and lectured to Architecture students at the University of New South Wales. In 1968 he ran his own art school at the Bakery Art School, but this only lasted a year. In 1969 the Olsen family moved to Clifton Pugh’s collective of artists at Dunmoochin in Victoria. On their return to Sydney in 1971, Olsen bought a large property at Dural, north-west of Sydney,and here built a large house and studio. This was the base from which he ventured on many painting and drawing expeditions, including one memorable visit to Lake Eyre in flood, which became the subject of a major series of paintings and prints.In 1980 Olsen moved to Wagga Wagga to join fellow artist Noela Hjorth. Later they moved to Clarendon in the Adelaide Hills, where he lived and worked until the end of the relationship in 1987.He returned to Sydney’s artistic community in Paddington. In 1989 he moved to Wentworth Falls in the Blue Mountains with his fourth wife, Katherine. In 1999 they moved to a large property, Owlswood, near Bowral, and in 2011 to a seaside property at Avoca Beach on the Central Coast.John Olsen has been one of Australia’s most consistently honoured artists for most of his professional life. His work is represented in most Australian public collections and he has been the subject of a number of monographs. He was awarded an O.B.E. for services to the Arts in 1977 and an Order of Australia (A.O.) in 2001.In 2011 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Newcastle.
Writers:
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2023
- Born
- b. 21 January 1928
- Summary
- John Olsen's exuberant paintings, which were first exhibited in Sydney in the 1950s, are often celebrations of Sydney, Majorca, marine life, good food and sunshine. He is an abstract artist whose work remains grounded in the landscape or in evocations of poetry, a painter whose distinctive curvilinear style continually pays homage to the quality of a wanderingline.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 11-Apr-23
- Age at death
- 95
Details
Latitude-37.560833 Longitude143.8475 Start Date1991-01-01 End Date2022-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Ballarat, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1991
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 5-Feb-22
- Age at death
- 31
Details
Latitude-33.7620891 Longitude151.2150889 Start Date1968-01-01 End Date2022-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Forestville, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1968
- Summary
- Craig Ruddy was best known for his striking portraits of Aboriginal Australians. He came to fame after he was awarded the Archibald Prize in 2004 for his linear study of David Gulpilil.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 4-Jan-22
- Age at death
- 54
Details
Latitude-35.5302183 Longitude144.9597178 Start Date1959-01-01 End Date2022-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Deniliquin, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1959
- Summary
- Higgins was an ornithologist and photographer who, after an assistantship, became a managing editor over five volumes of the Handbook of Australian, New Zealand and Antarctic Birds (HANZAB).
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-22
- Age at death
- 63
Details
Latitude51.507222 Longitude-0.1275 Start Date1956-01-01 End Date2022-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- London, Shooter's Hill, SE London, England
- Biography
- painter, sketcher, printmaker, illustrator and animator. After studying art in the mid 1970s, Harding travelled through Europe, then returned to Australia, where he developed a reputation for his painterly images while also working in illustration and animation.
Brett Ballard, reviewing an exhibition in 2005, commented that “We can not think of Nicholas Harding without thinking of paint. Luscious, buttery paint. What Harding does with paint is important but of equal importance is what he paints. Harding is after all a painter of subjects…”
Among many awards and honours, Harding won both the Archibald and Dobell Prizes in 2001. He was a finalist in the Archibald 19 times. He undertook four residencies at the University of New South Wales College of Fine Arts’ Cicada Press since 2001.
David Marr remembered that he “worked and worked and worked all the time.”In 2022 he was awarded the Wynne Prize for his painting Eora, a painting that evoked the surviving beauty of the landscape around Sydney which Marr called “Nicholas at the peak of his powers”
Writers:
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2011
Last updated:
2022
- Born
- b. 1956
- Summary
- painter, sketcher, printmaker, illustrator and animator. After studying art in the mid 1970s, Harding travelled through Europe, then returned to Australia, where he developed a reputation for his painterly images while also working in illustration and animation.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2-Nov-22
- Age at death
- 66
Details
Latitude35.6892523 Longitude51.3896004 Start Date1949-01-01 End Date2022-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Tehran, Iran
- Biography
- Hossein Valamanesh combines cultural elements from two countries: his native Iran and Australia. The result is sculptural and installation-based work relating to memory, cultural dislocation, loss, and the progression of time. The work, simultaneously strong and subtle, and occasionally playful, has gentle and poetic resonances.
Hossein Valamanesh graduated from the School of Fine Art Painting in Tehran in 1970. He immigrated to Australia in 1973, arriving in Perth and travelling to Central Australia for four months, where he worked with Aboriginal children. In 1975, he began further studies in visual arts at the South Australian School of Art and, since graduating, has exhibited frequently in Australia and overseas, including Germany, Poland and Japan.
Hossein has completed a number of major public art projects in Australia and Japan, most notably for the Tachikawa Project, an urban precinct in Tokyo featuring 110 works by 90 major sculptors. In 1999, he collaborated with Angela Valamanesh to create the Memorial to the Great Irish Famine, An Gorta Mor , at Hyde Park Barracks, Sydney. He was one of the international artists invited to participate in the 2003 Echigo-Tsumari Necklace project organised by Art Front Gallery in Tokyo. Hossein has received numerous awards, including a fellowship residency in Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (1991) and, more recently, an Australia Council Fellowship. An Art & Australia monograph on his work, written by Paul Carter, was published in 1996. Two years later he won the Grand Prize at the 1998 Dacca Biennale in Bangladesh.
In mid-2001, 'Hossein Valamanesh: A Survey’ was held at the Art Gallery of South Australia; the accompanying catalogue contained essays by Sarah Thomas, Ian North and Paul Carter. In February 2002, 'Tracing the Shadow: Hossein Valamanesh’ was held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Hossein’s work is included in most major public art collections in Australia. In 2006 he was living and working in Adelaide.
Writers:
Murray-Cree, Laura
Olivia Bolton
Date written:
2006
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 2 March 1949
- Summary
- Born in Iran, Hossein Valamanesh migrated to Australia in 1973. His sculptural and installation-based work, which combines cultural elements from Australia and his native Iran, relates to memory, cultural dislocation, loss, and the progression of time.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 15-Jan-22
- Age at death
- 73
Details
Latitude50.1106444 Longitude8.6820917 Start Date1948-01-01 End Date2022-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Frankfurt, Germany
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1948
- Summary
- Meyer was a film-maker developing feature films such as "Flight of the Albatross" and documentaries for UNESCO and a series Schatze der Welt. He taught at AFTRS and was the recipient of a number of film awards during his career.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-22
- Age at death
- 74
Details
Latitude-33.9247222 Longitude151.1313889 Start Date1946-01-01 End Date2022-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Earlwood, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1946
- Summary
- Strachan was a documentary film-maker, active in the Sydney Film-makers Coop and the Feminist group "Lorraine" in Redfern. Together with Alessandro Cavadini, she formed Reddirt Films working with First Nations people. She moved to the USA in 1982, teaching film with periodic returns to Australia.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1-Jan-22
- Age at death
- 76
Details
Latitude51.1371483 Longitude0.2673446 Start Date1944-01-01 End Date2022-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1944
- Summary
- Page arrived in Australia in 2002 after an international career as a photojournalist, primarily focussing on war photography.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-22
- Age at death
- 78
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1943-01-01 End Date2022-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Born Sydney 1943 and was first introduced to art at Cranbrook school with Justin O’Brien, where he also met his friend and collaborator Martin Sharp.
On leaving school Kingson studied architecture and arts at the University of New South Wales, but was more interested in drawing than design. However his studies led to a long friendship with Jan Utzon, the son of Jorn Utzon, the architect for the Sydney Opera House. When Utzon was effectively dismissed by the Askin government in 1966, Kingston was one of many who marched in protest.Peter Kingston’s first published cartoons were drawn for the student newspaper, Tharunka. Later he gravitated to OZ, which was dominated by the graphic style of his old school friend, Martin Sharp. His first exhibition was at Hyde Park with Mlck Glasheen and John Allen. Later her participated in the OZ Super Art Market exhibition at Clune Galleries. He also made experimental movies.
In 1971 he became one of the artists who created the communal Yellow House in Sydney’s Kings Cross. His most important work from this time was his contribution to the Stone Room, made for the Spring 1971 exhibition. He also created the Elephant house, made magic shows and participated In some of the performances.
His love of the whimsical nature of comic book heroes led him to make fantasy versions of the life of the Phantom, as well as Snugglepot & Cuddlepie. His mother once knitted a jumper showing his design of Superman unzipping his fly.
In the 1970s, along with Martin Sharp, Peter Kingston became an activist in the campaign to save Luna Park from the developers. He was a fierce campaigner for Sydney’s heritage, whether it be the remnant bush land near his Lavender Bay home or the ferries on Sydney Harbour. The Harbour, the bridge, the ferries and the beauty of moonlight on water, iconic buildings and the bushy foreshores became dominant subjects in his later paintings.Even as he was dying from lung cancer, he continued to campaign to save North Sydney’s modernist MLC building from the hands of the developers.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Olivia Bolton
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2022
- Born
- b. 8 May 1943
- Summary
- Sydney painter, printmaker and cartoonist. Kingston was one of the key figures in Martin Sharp’s Yellow House. Many of his works honoured comic strip heroes, especially the Phantom. He is also well known for paintings of Sydney Harbour ferries.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 29-Sep-22
- Age at death
- 79
Details
Latitude-33.8772 Longitude151.1049 Start Date1942-01-01 End Date2022-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Burwood, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 23 March 1942
- Summary
- Peter Powditch first began to paint and sculpt his celebrations of the beach and bikini culture in the late 1960s. He was also active as a teacher in several Sydney-based institutions.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 13-Feb-22
- Age at death
- 80
Details
Latitude-34.1347694 Longitude150.9931332 Start Date1940-01-01 End Date2022-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Waterfall, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1940
- Summary
- Webb was a lighting engineer and designer combining the science of lighting with aesthetic goals. Among his projects are the lighting programme for the 2000 Olympic Games Boulevard, the Sydney Opera House, City of Sydney street lighting and interior commissions for the Great Hall, Sydney University and St Mary's Cathedral crypt.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-22
- Age at death
- 82
Details
Latitude55 Longitude-3 Start Date1937-01-01 End Date2022-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- United Kingdom
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1937
- Summary
- Spate was a lecturer in art history at Sydney University with major publications on Australian and European artists (notably Monet). She was also involved in major exhibitions on French art in Australian galleries. As the Power Bequest professor and custodian, she was instrumental in the Bequest's transfer to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1-Jan-22
- Age at death
- 85
Details
Latitude-33.88477 Longitude151.22621 Start Date1936-01-01 End Date2022-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Paddington, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1936
- Summary
- Proudfoot trained as an architect, working for the NSW Government Architect (1960-1964), later taking up a lectureship at the UNSW. He is best known for his study of the Burley Griffin design of Canberra.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-22
- Age at death
- 86
Details
Latitude-33.7962 Longitude151.2827 Start Date1935-01-01 End Date2022-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Manly, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1935
- Summary
- Fitzwater began his career in radio broadcasting, then turning to TV with the ABC. In 1963, he began working with the BBC making over 20 films. In the 1970s, he created an experimental film on the career of Erik Satie with a multilayered soundscape and continued his sound work with poetry. He later developed a film process for dance with cameras moving with the performers.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-22
- Age at death
- 87
Details
Latitude-34.4576958 Longitude149.4696713 Start Date1935-01-01 End Date2022-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Crookwell, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1935
- Summary
- McIllree began her career as a fashion model, turning to photography ca.1958 with a photographic studio in Flinders Lane, Melbourne. She and Helen Homewood (also a model) ran a modelling agency as well.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1-Jan-22
- Age at death
- 87
Details
Latitude51.507222 Longitude-0.1275 Start Date1930-01-01 End Date2022-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Toleworth Rise, London, England
- Biography
- Les Blakebrough’s career as a ceramicist began in 1957 when he was taken on as a pottery apprentice at the Sturt workshops in Mittagong, NSW. Since 1973 has has been based in Hobart. Throughout his career, production has been a central concern for Blakebrough, and in the 1990s he became particularly interested in how the handmade could be combined with limited industrial production.
In 1993 Blakebrough won a Churchill Fellowship to experience industrial processes in the factories of Royal Copenhagen (Denmark), Arabia (Finland) and Royal Worcester (UK). Between 1995-97, along with colleague Penny Smith, and with grants from the Australian Research Council, he established the Ceramic Research Unit at the University of Tasmania. This is capable of producing domestic ware in runs of up to 10 000 items. The porcelain clay used is Southern Ice, a clay that Blakebrough developed in the 1990s and is now manufactured by Clayworks Australia in Victoria.
Blakebrough‘s work was included in the exhibition 'Smart works: design and the handmade’ (2007), and several items are in the Museum’s permanent collection.
Writers:
Jonathan Holmes, Powerhouse Museum
staffcontributor
fishel
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2013
- Born
- b. c.1930
- Summary
- Renowned ceramicist and ceramics educator, first at Sturt Workshops, later in Hobart, Tasmania. Last studio in Coledale, NSW. Pioneer in Australian porcelain clay, described as Southern Ice Porcelain Clay.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-22
- Age at death
- 92
Details
Latitude-37.7572829 Longitude145.3456774 Start Date1927-01-01 End Date2022-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Lilydale, VIC, Australia
- Biography
- This record is a stub. You can help out by adding more detail.
Writers:
staffcontributor
Date written:
2011
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1927
- Summary
- Ken Whisson combined a strong social conscience with an ascetic life style. His paintings and drawings were intuitive approaches to things seen and felt. He was given a major travelling retrospective ("As If") in 2012.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- Feb-22
- Age at death
- 95
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1964-01-01 End Date2021-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 27 September 1964
- Summary
- Ewing is an artist and designer working in illustration, painting, graphic design and printmaker.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- c.7 December 2021
- Age at death
- 57
Details
Latitude-27.5610193 Longitude151.953351 Start Date1961-01-01 End Date2021-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Toowoomba, Queensland, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1961
- Summary
- Pulbrook worked as a designer, photographer and writer. He worked for John Brumley and Associates, University of Qld and Canberra's AGPS Design Studio and other outlets in addition to his own work as a photographer.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-21
- Age at death
- 60
Details
Latitude-41.441944 Longitude147.145 Start Date1956-01-01 End Date2021-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Launceston, Tasmania, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 2 November 1956
- Summary
- Irvine was an architect, based in Denver, Colorado since 2001. He worked on the Buri Khalifa, Dubai, did residential work in Kigali, Rwanda and was engaged in preservation work at the San Miguel Mission, San Miguel, California. His last position was with Stantec Urban Places, Planning and Urban Design Lead, Denver.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 17-Jul-21
- Age at death
- 65
Details
Latitude-34.9275 Longitude138.6 Start Date1952-01-01 End Date2021-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Adelaide, SA, Australia
- Biography
- Mandy Martin who first emerged as a political activist printmaker and painter, was born in Adelaide in 1952, the daughter of Peter Martin, a professor of Botany and Beryl Martin, a watercolor painter. She first studied at the South Australian School of Art from 1972 to 1975. She first came to prominence as one of the political activists in the Women’s art movement, and exhibited in Fantasy and Reality, alongside Jude Adams, Frances Phoenix and Toni Robertson. Her feminism was very much tinged with political activism. Some of her early works included posters against the Vietnam War and other acts of American imperialism. Along with fellow artists Ann Newmarch and Robert Boynes she became one of the activist of the Progressive Art Movement.After she moved to Canberra with her first husband, the artist Robert Boynes, she taught at the Canberra School of Art at the Australian National University from 1978 until 2003. In 1995 she relocated to Mandurama in rural New South Wales. She continued her close association with ANU, so much so that on her departure she was appointed a Fellow of the University until 2008 when she became Adjunct Professor at the Fenner School of Environment and Society, a position she held until 2018. The new appointment reflected the change in the focus of her art as she moved from a tough political and social critique to an equally rigorous commentary on how out fragile environment suffers from both climate change and mining.Many of her large-scale paintings served as a critique of the degradation of the land in both rural and urban Australia. In 1988, Red Ochre Grove, which has been described by Sasha Grishin as “an apocalyptic intense landscape”, was commissioned for the main committee room at the new Australian Parliament House.In 2017 a touring exhibition of her paintings demonstrated the fragility of land damaged by coal mining and poor management.Her later works included large scale installations, made in collaboration with her son, Alexander Boynes.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2021
- Born
- b. 18 November 1952
- Summary
- One of the activist women artists who emerged in the mid-1970s, later turned from overtly political posters and industrial landscapes to painting powerful landscapes of the Australian desert.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 10-Jul-21
- Age at death
- 69
Details
Latitude-45.874167 Longitude170.503611 Start Date1935-01-01 End Date2021-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Dunedin, Otago, New Zealand
- Biography
- Ray Rogers was born near Dunedin, Otago, New Zealand, in 1935. He worked in the petro-chemical industry but after discovering his affinity with the clay medium in 1969 he devoted himself to pottery and was initially self-taught. Initially he was an adherent to the Leach/Hamada tradition and held his first one man show in Auckland in 1974. He was an exhibiting member of the New Zealand Society of Potters, the Auckland Studio Potters, and is an Artist Member of the Academy of Fine Arts.
Rogers is especially noted for his exploitation of a pit firing technique. He studied this technique in California in 1980 and introduced it to New Zealand in 1981 and also to Australia, where he came to live after winning the Fletcher Brownbuilt International Award in 1983. His work is fired in a relatively primitive method, using a large pit dug into the ground. Wood and pots are layered within the pit, and then fired. Rogers continues to explore pit firing as the method sympathetic to the hand built forms he creates. Each piece is considered in order to maintain harmony with the vagaries of the fire where contrasts are achieved on the pots by the flame and heat of the fire.
He remarked of his works in the catalogue of 'Evolution of style: the decorative spirit in Australian contemporary crafts’ at the Craft Centre Gallery, Sydney, in 1985:
I am continuing to explore pit-firing as this Primitive method of firing best suits my work. Character is developed by the Resolution of each piece being kept in harmony with the Vagaries of the fire. One can observe the individuality, not only in the forms but also in the way hues and tones move across each surface. Sometimes the colours are subtle allowing the forms to speak for themselves. Black fungoid areas contrast with softer movements often referred to as Intergalactic. I endeavour to achieve contrasts that offer a challenge for the observer. There is new work in the exhibition showing a gradual change of direction. I like to move slowly as inspiration allows and believe that ones best work is achieved in this way.
During the early 1990s he began to experiment by introducing other organic materials and metallic salts such as silver chloride and bismuth nitrate to his firings. Metallic salts especially provided a lustrous surface and were fired up to five times to provide the depth of the desired effect.
Pit firing is a technique which began to attract many adherents over the succeeding years because of the striking colour variations that the firing can impart. Like Ray Roger’s work, the forms chosen are generally simple spherical forms to enhance the decorative, random effect of the flames. The high point of his career was probably in 1997 when he demonstrated his firing techniques at the 1997 International Ceramics Festivalat Aberystwyth in Wales.
Rogers was a member of the Potters Society of Australia for many years but resigned in 2003 as he had ceased his involvement with ceramics.
Research Curator, Queensland Heritage, Queensland Art Gallery.
Writers:
Cooke, Glenn R.
Date written:
2008
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1935
- Summary
- Ray Rogers made a significant contribution to the ceramics medium in both New Zealand and Australia and was especially noted for introducing the pit-firing technique to both countries. His career spanned more than thirty years.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 13-Mar-21
- Age at death
- 86
Details
Latitude51.627422 Longitude-0.7484153 Start Date1934-01-01 End Date2021-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- High Wycombe, United Kingdom
- Biography
- Gerald Easden FDIA (13/04/1934 – 17/09/2021)
Gerald Easden was a well-known designer who contributed greatly to many memorable design outcomes in Australia during his sixty-year career. He was a significant furniture designer, who also worked as an Interior Designer, and with many accomplishments in graphic design and the occasional foray into product design. He was an all rounder, and also a gentleman (this title followed him around over the years and was a lasting impression of his attitude and his behaviour).
Easden was born in High Wycombe in the United Kingdom in April 1934. Since High Wycombe was the centre of furniture design and manufacturing in Britain at this time, it was unsurprising that he enrolled at the Wycombe Technical Institute in Furniture and Interior Design, and graduated in 1950. He worked in the Drawing Offices of two large furniture manufacturers, Ercol and Parker Knoll from 1950 to 1957 (less two years National Service in the RAF).
He came to Australia in 1957 and worked in the Design Studio of Radio Corporation-Astor, and from 1958 to 1961 he was employed as a designer for Reliance Furniture, winning two Good Design Awards from the Victorian Guild of Furniture Manufacturers in 1960. He worked as an Interior Designer in the Victorian Public Works Department from 1961 to 1962, designing furniture and interiors for Government Offices, Courts and Hostels, before joining the Studio of the Commonwealth Department of Works, to design interiors and furniture for the cabins and public spaces of the Empress of Australia, which was built in Sydney as the Sydney to Hobart Ferry. During his tenure he also designed furniture for the Reserve Bank, for many Government Offices and the Melbourne and Sydney Airports.
In 1963, Easden was appointed Assistant University Designer for the Australian National University in Canberra. He worked closely with legendary designer Derek Wrigley OAM, University Designer, and deputised for Wrigley for six months to cover for his overseas study tour. Easden designed not only furniture for the University Halls of Residence, but he also devised graphics for university publications and catalogues for exhibitions, and oversaw the hanging of paintings for Sidney Nolan and John Percival exhibitions. He was a part time lecturer in charge of Interior Design at Canberra Technical College also.
In 1968 he married his wife Jenny in Canberra, and the couple moved to Melbourne, where he set up his freelance practice in South Yarra and then later in Toorak. His consultancy offered services in Interiors, Furniture, Exhibition and Graphic Design. Then in 1973 the family moved to Mitcham, where they were to live for the next forty-seven years.
He designed interiors for retail and duty free stores in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, the Gold Coast, Cairns and Port Douglas. He also designed Exhibition Stands in Melbourne, Sydney. Germany, China and Japan, as well as interiors and furniture for restaurants, hotels, motels, offices and domestic clients. His Australian manufacturing clients included Aristoc, Fler, Module and Ausgum, as well as Chinese and Malaysian manufacturers with exports to the UK, Europe and the Middle East.Easden was a multi award winning designer, winning over twenty Good Design Awards and awarded ‘Modern Icon” status of Australian Furniture by the Australian Furniture Association in 2013. He was elected a Fellow of the Design Institute of Australia in 1997, awarded a DIA Gold Citation in 2002, and inducted into the DIA Hall of Fame in 2018.
Easden was the consummate designer as his record attests, but he was also a loving husband and father, as well as a great colleague and friend. He is sadly missed by his wife Jenny and children Mark, Mandy, Rebecca and Ben.
A wonderful designer and a great gentleman has left the stage.
Geoff Fitzpatrick OAM, obituary, 3 November 2021
Writers:
Michael Bogle
Date written:
2021
Last updated:
2021
- Born
- b. 1 January 1934
- Summary
- Easden was a furniture and interior designer working across the industry in the UK, Victoria and Canberra. He had extensive experience designing furniture and interiors for the Commonwealth and State Public Service in Victoria and elsewhere. He also worked in design display for commercial retail in Australia and overseas and by the end of his career, had received 20+ Good Design awards.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-21
- Age at death
- 87
Details
Latitude-41.5936936 Longitude147.1215353 Start Date1933-01-01 End Date2021-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Longford, Tasmania, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1933
- Summary
- Jolliffe was an animator and illustrator active in film, television and in her late career, digital work. She worked internationally with the CSIRO, Television Cartoons (TVC) and after 1979, established her studio "Jollification" in Sydney, later in Blackheath. She retired from animation after 2011.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1-Jan-21
- Age at death
- 88
Details
Latitude51.507222 Longitude-0.1275 Start Date1932-01-01 End Date2021-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- London, England, UK
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 2 December 1932
- Summary
- London born Medical doctor, active as a painter and photographer in Tasmania from the 1970s including extensive documentary photography of the people of remote East Coast region of Fingal Valley.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 10-Dec-21
- Age at death
- 89
Details
Latitude56 Longitude10 Start Date1929-01-01 End Date2021-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Denmark
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1929
- Summary
- Larsen, practicing first as a principal of Solvform, Copenhagen, later as a partnership Larsen and Lewers (Darani), Sydney. He had extensive experience in design education and was part of the Steering Committee that formed the Crafts Council of NSW in 1971.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-21
- Age at death
- 92
Details
Latitude-25 Longitude133 Start Date1929-01-01 End Date2021-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Australia
- Biography
- Fish has produced logotypes, packaging, illustrations and TV commercials as well as award-winning Australian poster designs.
In 1951 Fish moved to London where he created posters for clients such as Cadbury’s and National Benzole, and record covers for Decca and Telefunken.The humour and drama of the European posters Fish found in Paris in the early 50s ‘ particularly the work of Leupin and Savignac ‘ fuelled his passion for the medium. ‘The most striking thing was the way they used ideas, because the idea is the lifeblood of a poster ‘ the visual penetrates the eye, but the idea penetrates the mind,’ said Fish.
Upon his return to Australia in 1954, Fish adopted the European-style poster ‘ designing and writing arresting posters for national and international clients including AWA, the Commonwealth Bank, Johnson & Johnson, NSW Tourism, P&O, Peek Freans, Qantas, Resch’s, Schweppes, STC and Tooth’s Beer. 1955’60 saw his work appear in prestigious international design publications such as Graphis and Modern Publicity. At this time, Fish shared a studio with renowned Australian sculptor Robert Klippel, with whom he also collaborated on various industrial and packaging design ventures.
In 1957, Gordon Andrews commissioned Fish to design two large murals for the Australian Department of Trade’s Food Fair in Köln, Germany. Fish and Andrews also formed part of the group of designers and architects who inaugurated the Sydney chapter of the Industrial Design Institute of Australia in 1958.
Shortly after his return to London in 1961, the Australian Treasury invited Fish to submit designs for the new decimal currency of the 1960s, however he reluctantly declined the commission owing to his commitments in the UK.
Back in Australia again in 1964, Fish co-founded the Kaleidoscope, a famously avant-garde antique shop in Sydney’s Woollahra, with wife Victoria and friend Grant Roberts. Its success was confirmed by its choice as the venue for Liza Minnelli’s Sydney-based television show.
By 1970, Fish was Creative Director (Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide) for the US agency, Compton International, winning a Bronze Lion at the Venice Film Festival for client British Airways with writer, John Flanagan. The same campaign also won a Silver Logie at the Chicago Film Institute in 1974. In 1976, Fish created standout poster campaigns for Harry M Miller’s productions of Jesus Christ Superstar and The Rocky Horror Show. The latter was awarded Poster of the Year by the Outdoor Advertising Association of Australia.
Joining advertising agency Fountain Huie Fish in 1976 as Partner, Fish went on to create an international campaign for TIME magazine in 1981 that utilised its iconic front cover. This was supported by the release of promotional ‘TIME’ watches to media buyers. Other FHF clients included Club Med and Lufthansa German Airlines. Upon the sale of the agency to Clemenger’s in 1987, Fish went on to design for Northwest Airlines (US), Pirelli and Citroën until his retirement in 2005.
Don Fish’s other significant passion is music. He recently created a series of over 100 cartoons based on classical music themes that ran for 10 years in the ABC magazine, 24 Hours. Today he is expanding on this series with a view to publication, along with composing and writing.
He lives in Sydney with his wife of 46 years, Victoria.
Writers:
Fish, Charlotte
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 1 January 1929
- Summary
- Fish produced poster designs, logotypes, packaging, TV commercials and illustrations for major clients around the world, including Cadbury's, British Airways, Qantas and TIME Magazine. Founder member of Industrial Design Institute of Australia (1958). Creative director Compton International, principal of Fountain Huie Fish ad agency. Retired 2005.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 13-Jul-21
- Age at death
- 92
Details
Latitude52.561928 Longitude-1.464854 Start Date1927-01-01 End Date2021-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- England
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1927
- Summary
- Dunlop began his career in the Commonwealth Film Unit with a special emphasis on rural Australia, then documenting First Nations people in "People of the Australian Western Desert" (later the Martu "Desert People"); later working in Arnhem Land with the Yolngu people and others. This resulted in the Yarrkala Film Project. Much of his later work was editing and archiving ethnographic film records.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-21
- Age at death
- 94
Details
Latitude55 Longitude-3 Start Date1924-01-01 End Date2021-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- United Kingdom
- Biography
- Derek Wrigley (1924–2021) studied architecture and town planning at ManchesterCollege of Art & Design and Manchester University from 1940 to 1946. Heemigrated to Australia in 1947 and spent the next eight years lecfuring inarchitecture at the NSW University of Technology, initiating the first Building Science course in Australia. In 1950-51, he travelled to the UK, US and Hawaii to visit architecture schools. From 1949 to 1954, he designed and built two solar houses for himself, at 13 and 15 Burne Avenue, Dee Why. In 1957, he moved to Canberra to join furniture and industrial designer Fred Ward in the Design Unit of the Australian NationalUniversity and in 1962 became the ANU’s University Architect. initiating the concept of Total Design covering site planning, architecture, interior, landscape and graphic designWhile in Canberra, he designed and built more solar houses: at 14 Jansz Crescent, Griffith ACT (1958), RMB 901, Little Burra Road via Queanbeyan NSW (1975) and RMB 625 Candy Road, Burra NSW (1985, with Ben Wrigley). He was a founding member of the NSW and ACT branches of the Melbourne-based Society of Designers for Industry in 1955. In 1980 he was made a Life Fellow of its successor organisation, the Design Institute of Australia. He was also a co-founder of the Industrial Design Council of Australia in 1956 and a councillor for 30 years afterwards. He remains an activist for better quality design, more sustainable and solar housing (particularly retrofits). and designing buildings and equipment to suit disabled people. In 2004, he wrote and self-published the book Making Your Home Sustainable. In 1977, he retired from the ANU to design furniture for the High Court of Australia. He founded the ACT branch of Technical Aid to the Disabled in 1979 and was awarded the Order of Australia for his services to the disabled in 1982.Sources—Architecture and Arts and the Modern Home. 1955. ‘People: Derek F. Wrigley’. February. p11.—Derek Wrigley Design website www.derekwrigleydesign.id.au—Wrigley, Derek. 2004. Correspondence recorded by Davina Jackson, October.—Rosenfeldt, Ron. 1999. The History of the DIA. www.dia.org.au/history/dia_history.html
Writers:
Davina Jackson
Michael Bogle
Date written:
2015
Last updated:
2021
- Born
- b. 1924
- Summary
- Wrigley practiced architecture in the UK and Australia. Formerly employed as a lecturer Manchester College of Art, UK, lecturer at NSW University of Technology (now UNSW). He had several domestic architecture commissions in NSW. As an exhibition and furniture designer, he designed the UNIVER chair and settee for Aristoc. He was an original member of the Australian National University's Design Unit initiated by Fred Ward.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-21
- Age at death
- 97
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1922-01-01 End Date2021-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Dawn Fitzpatrick was born in Sydney, but grew up in Adelaide where she studied at the South Australian School of Arts and Crafts. As with many of her generation her life was disrupted by World War II when she served in the WAAF. After the war she married, and in the public eye became defined by her daughter, the actress Kate Fitzpatrick.After moving to Sydney she began to show the fabric art she had long made. Her first exhibition was in 1975 with Lee McGorman in West Street Gallery, North Sydney. In 1977 she joined with Lee McGorman and her daughter Kate at Ace’s Art Shop at Edgecliff. She also designed costumes for the Old Tote Theatre company.
This entry is a stub. Please help the DAAO by completing it.
Writers:
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 1922
- Summary
- Fitzpatrick is a textile artist, first exhibiting in Sydney in 1975. She also designs and makes theatre costumes.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 27-Oct-21
- Age at death
- 99
Details
Latitude-33.8611665 Longitude121.8885159 Start Date1965-01-01 End Date2020-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Esperance, WA, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1965
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 7-Sep-20
- Age at death
- 55
Details
Latitude39.3077391 Longitude-76.4768667 Start Date1950-01-01 End Date2020-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Maryland, Maryland, USA
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1950
- Summary
- Jon Lewis, photographer and film maker was one of many talented artists to emerge from Sydney's Yellow House. He was a passionate environmentalist, a founding member of Greenpeace and an active participant in its anti-whaling campaign. In 1999 he travelled to Timor-Leste to be a photographer witness to the events surrounding the vote for independence.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 20-Dec-20
- Age at death
- 70
Details
Latitude-34.9275 Longitude138.6 Start Date1950-01-01 End Date2020-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Adelaide, SA, Australia
- Biography
- Annette Bezor was born in Adelaide, the daughter of Alma Smith and Keith Bateman. After her parents’ divorce she changed her family name to “Bezor”, a name connected to her mother’s family.She left school at 14, embarrassed at the way schoolboys commented on her voluptuous appearance. In 1974 she enrolled at the South Australian School of Art, graduating in 1977. This placed her in both the male dominated context of the lecturers at the art school and the heady feminism of the Adelaide art scene of the 1970s. She later said that she spent most of her art school years in pyjamas, working in her bedroom at home, enabled by the encouragement of the feminists.After exhibiting her work to strong critical approval, she was awarded an Australia Council residency at the Cité international des artes in Paris, which she took up in 1987. Her subject matter changed to appropriating images of women from Classical painting, transforming them into highly sexually charges personas.
On her return to Adelaide she continued her career, with significant commercial and critical success. In 1994 she was commissioned by the Parliament of Victoria to to paint the official portrait of the former Victorian Premier, Joan Kirner.
She was diagnosed with ovarian cancer three years before her death on 9 January 2020, and held her final exhibition at Hill Smith Gallery, Adelaide, in October 2019.
Writers:
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2020
Last updated:
2020
- Born
- b. 1950
- Summary
- Annette Bezor was one of the new wave feminist artists to emerge in Adelaide in the 1970s. Her characteristic paintings were studies of voluptuously beautiful women, often inspired by 19th century visions of classical subjects.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 9-Jan-20
- Age at death
- 70
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1949-01-01 End Date2020-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW Australia
- Biography
- This record is a stub. You can help out by adding more detail.
Writers:
Date written:
Last updated:
- Born
- b. 13 December 1949
- Summary
- John Nixon's art is best described as radical minimalism. His tough non-objective approach to art was first developed in his student years and continued throughout his long career. As such he was a significant influence on many other artist, especially in Melbourne.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 18-Aug-20
- Age at death
- 71
Details
Latitude52.561928 Longitude-1.464854 Start Date1947-01-01 End Date2020-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- England, United Kingdom
- Biography
- Sally Couacaud is a curator, project manager, and former director of Artspace in Sydney. She was the inaugural Director of the Australian International Video Festival, and was one of the first curators in Australia to focus her critical attention on video and other forms of electronic media art.Some of her video curatorial projects include: Putting on an Act (Performance Space, Sydney); Terrorising the Code: Recent US Video, (Australian Centre for Photography and New Zealand tour); Looking with the Whole Body (AGNSW, Artspace, ACP, Powerhouse Museum); Aboriginal Video from Central Australia (Los Angles Festival); Satellite Cultures (New Museum, NYC); Videokunst in Australien – Auf dem Weg zu Teletopologien (Linz); Video Art in Australia (Fukui, Japan).She was also Curator of the Sydney Open Museum where she commissioned and managed the City of Sydney’s public art collection, including the Sculpture Walk. She also spent three months working with Art Front Gallery in Tokyo. Art Front was well known for its commissioning of site-specific art works and the close collaboration between artists, town planners and architects.
Writers:
Scanlines
Date written:
Last updated:
- Born
- b. 1947
- Summary
- Couacaud was a gallery director at Sydney's Artspace (1988-1992), later curator of public art, City of Sydney where she developed the city's Sydney Open Museum's "Sculpture Walk". She curated a number of other exhibitions internationally and in Australia, later initiating the inaugural Australian International Video Festival. In 2008, she moved to Mauritius, later returning to Sydney near the end of her life.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2020
- Age at death
- 73
Details
Latitude51.2918693 Longitude-0.7539836 Start Date1946-01-01 End Date2020-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Farnborough, England, United Kingdom
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1946
- Summary
- Stennett was a designer active with the Australian Opera from 1969 when he came to Sydney as a costume designer for the Marriage of Figaro. As his career accelerated, he worked on international productions, returning often to the Australian Opera for design work. He retired from theatre in 1994 to tend his garden in Yoxford, Suffolk, England.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 11-Jun-20
- Age at death
- 74
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1940-01-01 End Date2020-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1940
- Summary
- McLennan was a sound artist who developed his career through the ABC (beginning 1971), working as a producer, later with the ABC Arts Unit and the programmes "Surface Tension" then "Listening Room". He also performed as an actor, musical performer and mime.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-20
- Age at death
- 80
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1938-01-01 End Date2020-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1938
- Summary
- Little began her career as a fashion designer with a dress-making shop in 5-Ways, Paddington under the name Jeanne Mitchell. Her mother had worked as a tailor in Scotland. Little's fashion designs, often reproduced in Australian Womens Weekly, were the springboard for her later career as an entertainer on the stage and television where she designed most of her clothes.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1-Jan-20
- Age at death
- 82
Details
Latitude-32.2675086 Longitude150.8905694 Start Date1934-01-01 End Date2020-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Muswellbrook, New South Wales, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1934
- Summary
- Frank Watters was one of the most influential figures in Australian art in the second half of the 20th century. From 1964-2018 he, along with Geoffrey and Alex Legge ran Sydney’s Watters Gallery. Watters was a founder member of Australian Commercial Galleries Association & one of the first gallery managers to practice droit de suite for their artists before it became law in 2009. His archive is in the Art Gallery of NSW.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 22-May-20
- Age at death
- 86
Details
Latitude-33.0923817 Longitude148.8638613 Start Date1932-01-01 End Date2020-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Molong, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Brian Sear (1932-2020)
The Australian industrial designer, Brian Sear, played a major role in the design of electronic consumer goods at Kriesler, a profitable Australian subsidiary of the Dutch corporation, Phillips. Born in Molong NSW, he began his career with a 1948 apprenticeship with the office of the architect M.V.E. Woodforde in his George Street studio, Sydney.
This designer-to-be spent two and one-half years with Woodforde while completing his leaving certificate at Sydney Technical College. During his studies, he read books by the American industrial designers Walter Dorian Teague and Raymond Loewy and began to look at industrial design rather than architecture.
Rather than enter the industrial design course (est.1949) at the Melbourne Technical College, Brian chose the UK and gained admission at Leicester College of Art sailing for Europe in January 1956. Although intent on Leicester, the Council of Industrial Design (COID), London, persuaded him to switch to a new course launching at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in 1957.
The RCA’s first industrial design teachers were the head teacher F.C. Ashford and the Russian expatriate Naum Slutsky (1894-1965) (1). Ashford commented in an interview in 1956 that “nowhere else in Europe will there be a course [on] offer quite like ours.”
Brian Sear’s savings held out for two years of study at the RCA and now penniless, he decided to take the RCA diploma. In 1959, Sear re-emerged in Stockholm to study at Stockholm’s new “Konstfack” school (The official name of the school is Konstfackskolan, Stockholm) where a number of design options were on offer. He could study free in Sweden, but the programme specified that could not take employment. After his second year, however, Sear was awarded a Swedish scholarship and allowed to work until he completed the degree.
The designer returned to the UK after completing the Stockholm programme and took interim industrial design work (notably the silversmith Robert Welch for projects for J & J Wiggin) before returning to Australia in late 1963 and taking an industrial design position with Kriesler Australia working under Harry Widmer (1926-2002) (2). When Widmer left the firm around 1966, Brian inherited his role and became Kriesler’s design team leader. By the 1970s, according to Sear, the company’s design and marketing had led Kriesler to generous profits but market forces and the 1970s tariff reforms began to drain the industry’s profit margins.
By 1978, Sear had left Kriesler to found his own design firm, “Bits”, with designs in the IKEA style of flat-pack furniture for the childrens’ market segment. He maintained a retail outlet in the Westfield Centre, Parramatta until “Big Box” competitors such as IKEA overran his market.
Sear, imagining that the “Golden Era” of Australian industrial design was over, returned to architecture after 1982 providing an architecture and graphic corporate identify for the financial giant Australian Guarantee Corporation (AGC) Westpac. When AGC and Westpac separated in 1987, their corporate design section closed and the designer opted for retirement at the age of 55. Brian Sear lived in a small town south of Sydney and maintained an active career in drawing and persistently enters the annual Dobell Prize for Drawing at the Art Gallery of NSW.
[This edition of the biographical summary was amended, corrected and supplemented by the designer’s son, Tom Sear in 2022]
1: Naum Slutsky was a notable metalsmith and jeweller.
2: Widmer was an award-winning industrial designer but the dynamic character left the field to pursue music and theatre interests. Harry Widmer obituary, Sydney Morning Herald, 14 May 2002.
ends/
28 April 2011, 2022
Writers:
Michael Bogle
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2022
- Born
- b. 1 January 1932
- Summary
- Sear is an industrial designer with studies at the Royal College of Art, later, Konstfackskolan Stockholm, returning to Australia in 1963, working as a Senior industrial designer, Kriesler Radio, later design team leader. Sear also established "Bits" as a independent designer developing flat pack furniture.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-20
- Age at death
- 88
Details
Latitude-27.467778 Longitude153.028056 Start Date1924-01-01 End Date2020-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Brisbane, QLD, Australia
- Biography
- Owner of Beaver Galleries, Canberra, ACT.
Beaver is known for her promotion of fashion design. From 1976-88 she organised annual fashion parades titled 'The Second Skin’ parades.
This record is a stub. You can help out by adding more detail.
Writers:
Date written:
Last updated:
- Born
- b. 1 January 1924
- Summary
- Owner of Beaver Galleries (est 1975), Canberra and a pioneer of craft-based exhibitions in the ACT. She studied design with Derek Wrigley at Canberra Technical College and was an active participant in the establishment of the Craft Association of the ACT (now Craft ACT).
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1-Jan-20
- Age at death
- 96
Details
Latitude52.52 Longitude13.405 Start Date1915-01-01 End Date2020-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Berlin, Germany
- Biography
- industrial designer, graphic artist and sculptor, came to Australia in the prison ship Dunera and was interned at Tatura (Vic.) where he either helped produce or produced alone the POW magazine, Brennessel Hinter Stacheldraht (Stinging Nettles Behind Barbed Wire ) – copy sold at Sotheby’s Rare Book sale, Melbourne, for $3,900. His monotype of the camp, Huts at Night 1941, is in the National Gallery of Australia. Other Dunera Boys who worked at Australasian Post included Frederick Schonbach and Klaus Friedeberger .
After his release Fabian went to Melbourne where he was the leader of a group of young German artists, several of whom contributed to Argus publications especially the Australasian Post (1946-47) under art editor Alan McCulloch along with Albert Tucker and McCulloch himself. (Craig Judd could not find any signed examples of his work in Post ). He worked as an advertising artist in Melbourne and contributed drawings and designs to Army Education publications. In 1950 he moved to London, worked as a designer and lectured at the London School of Printing. He returned to Melbourne in 1962 and commenced work as a sculptor, exhibiting there and in other Australian capital cities as well as London.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 5 November 1915
- Summary
- Industrial designer, graphic artist, sculptor and one of the "Dunera Boys" interned in Hay, NSW, during World War II. In 1950 Fabian moved to London where he worked as a designer and lectured at the London School of Printing. He returned to Melbourne in 1962.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- Jan-20
- Age at death
- 105
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1943-01-01 End Date2019-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 16 November 1943
- Summary
- Caldersmith, a musical instrument maker, began his career as a high school science teacher, later taking a degree in aerophysics with further study in acoustics. His instrument work explored the properties of Australian timbers with colleagues and constructed and repaired instruments for noted musicians. From 1980, he was a full-time violin maker in Canberra, later moving his studio to rural locations.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 5-Oct-19
- Age at death
- 76
Details
Latitude-28.3275 Longitude153.395833 Start Date1938-01-01 End Date2019-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Murwillumbah, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 6 October 1938
- Summary
- Madonna Staunton, who spent all her working life in Brisbane, was best known for her precise, assemblages and collages, but she also painted. Her works are characterised by their small scale, and the way they encouraged viewers to contemplate their many visual possibilities.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 16-Dec-19
- Age at death
- 81
Details
Latitude-2.4833826 Longitude117.8902853 Start Date1936-01-01 End Date2019-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Indonesia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1936
- Summary
- Heins' design career began with architects Jenkins and McLuhan, Sydney, later working at Artes Studio, Sydney. He assumed the lead position of the Design Unit, Sebemo Building Contractors leaving in 1968 to establish his own design practice as Unicum Design. He also lectured at TAFE NSW in Randwick's interior design programme.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-19
- Age at death
- 83
Details
Latitude52.561928 Longitude-1.464854 Start Date1931-01-01 End Date2019-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- England, UK
- Biography
- Derek Smith was born in England and trained as a ceramic designer and art teacher before emigrating to Australia in 1956.He taught at art schools in Hobart and Sydney, until 1973 when he managed the pottery studio at the Doulton Australia Factory at Chatswood. In 1976 he left Doulton to establish his Blackfriars Pottery in Chippendale.In 1984 he returned to Tasmania where he continued to produce his distinctive ceramics from his Oakwood studio at Mangalore.Shortly after his pottery was successfully shown in Chicago, he spent four years in Italy, before returning to Hobart.
Writers:
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2022
Last updated:
2022
- Born
- b. 1931
- Summary
- The English born Derek Smith emigrated to Australia as a young man and became a significant influence on younger potters in both New South Wales and Tasmania
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 24-Feb-19
- Age at death
- 88
Details
Latitude-7.3279694 Longitude109.613911 Start Date1928-01-01 End Date2019-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Java, Indonesia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1928
- Summary
- Altmann was a self-taught artist, working as a commercial artist in Brisbane, later in Sydney. He joined John Fairfax's Sydney Morning Herald in 1954 working there until retirement in 1986. He possessed a remarkable ability to visualise three-dimensional objects including buildings and urban settings.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-19
- Age at death
- 91
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1927-01-01 End Date2019-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1927
- Summary
- Taylor was a sculptor, typically working in wood. He was head of sculpture at the School of Art, University of Tasmania, also becoming involved in the University's Design in Wood degree. From this engagement, he and Kevin Perkins were commissioned to design furniture for Parliament House, Canberra.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-19
- Age at death
- 92
Details
Latitude-34.9275 Longitude138.6 Start Date1926-01-01 End Date2019-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Glenelg, Adelaide, SA, Australia
- Biography
- sculptor, was born at Glenelg South Australian, the youngest of five children. Her father was the geologist and Antarctic explorer Cecil Madigan. She first developed her love of sculpture while at Walford House, Unley. She left school in 1938 because of illness. In 1939 she studied at the Girls Central Art School, Adelaide, having decided very early on to pursue a career as a sculptor. After moving to Sydney in 1940 Madigan attended night drawing classes at East Sydney Technical College under Liz Blaxland. In 1941 and 42 she studied sculpture under Lyndon Dadswell. On returning to Adelaide she completed three years of evening classes at the School of Art (1944-46)where her fellow students included Jeffrey Smart and Jacqueline Hick, while working at John Martin Department store by day. In 1947 she returned to East Sydney and completed her Diploma in Fine Art (Sculpture) in 1948. After marrying fellow student Jack Giles in 1949 and adopting his name, she won the NSW Travelling Art Scholarship in 1950, only the third sculptor to receive this award.
She left Australia in 1950 to study in Europe for three years, stopping at Bombay on the way where she saw the sculptures at Ellora Caves. Her first daughter, Mnemosyne was born in November of that year.She studied stone carving at the John Cass College, London, but most of this time was characterised by by extensive travel in Europe, including a year spent in Italy. Her second daughter, Celia, was born in 1953. The same year she returned to Australia via India, where she spent time drawing at both the Ellora and Ajanta caves. On her return to Australia the family settled in Adelaide, where she raised her daughters (her third daughter Alice was born in 1961) and taught pottery, painting and sculpture at various schools and at the School of Art. She completed a major commission, the Downer fountain for St Mark’s College, Adelaide, in 1964. With the end of her marriage Madigan returned to Sydney in 1973 and continued to sculpt and teach both at the East Sydney Technical College and at the Sculpture Centre. At this time she began her creative and personal partnership with the sculptor Robert Klippel ( they lived near each other but in separate houses). In the 1980s she experimented with assemblages-constructing works from small wooden machine pattern parts-before reverting to carving figurative works in wood and stone, the materials in which her most significant sculptures have been produced. She continued to draw, paint and produce collages in parallel with this.
Madigan was the recipient of of Australia Council grants in 1976 and 1985 and was the winner of the Wynne Prize in 1986, the first sculptor to receive the prize in over 50 years.
Since her first experience with an automatic drill-carving a stone female form in London in 1952-the female torso has been the focus of much of Rosemary Madigan’s work. Madigan has had an active career as both a teacher and sculptor since winning the New South Wales Travelling Art Scholarship in 1950 but it was only in the last decades that these compact and subtle torsos came to greater public prominence. She should also be better known as the creator of a number of the most compelling religious sculptures executed in Australia, for instance The Yellow Christ (1968).
An independent thinker, Madigan’s interests since her student years placed her somewhat outside the mainstream of Australian sculptural production. Yet her allegiance to the humanist tradition, with its adherence to the impact of the sculptor’s hand, has been of primary importance to the development of many of Australia’s modern sculptors.
Madigan’s exposure to Indian sculpture-beginning with a visit to the Bombay Museum on her way to Europe and three weeks spent drawing the Ellora cave sculptures on her way home-has been profoundly influential. It is not surprising that while in Europe in the early 1950s it was not the heritage of Henry Moore or the biomorphic visions of the immediate post-war generation of British sculptors which had lasting impact, but the `humanity and the down-to-earthness’ of Romanesque sculpture.
Critics have tended to assess Madigan’s art as a restrained homage to the preoccupations of an earlier generation of modern figurative sculptors, and indeed several of her most successful torsos share qualities intrinsic to Gaudier-Breszka’s work, for example. Nonetheless, although figurative concerns have largely remained central, the parameters of Madigan’s art are larger than such a characterisation would allow.
Torso (1954) is not based on the life model but on Madigan’s desire to explore and articulate generic human form. Executed in Adelaide, this was the first sculpture she completed after returning to Australia. In its stylised, attenuated form-somewhat removed from the spare late works-one is tempted to see the sinuous line of Indian sculpture. Madigan has said of it:
I think I was very concerned with understanding the body … not specifically as far as muscles went, but the way the inner structures-the rib cage and pelvis, two major inner structures-work together. Because I was so interested in the way it articulated, I didn’t deal with the arms or legs or head. I was not thinking of realism at all, but of the basic articulation: coping with a complex three dimensional form … I was never concerned to get a “type” of figure … I’m really only interested in the form.
Writers:
Edwards, Deborah
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 5 December 1926
- Summary
- South Australian born sculptor who concentrated on carving stone and wood to produce classically modern sculptures, mainly based on the human figure. Also an influential teacher of sculpture.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 12-Feb-19
- Age at death
- 93
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1926-01-01 End Date2019-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne
- Biography
- This entry is a stub. Please help the DAAO by adding a biography
In 1984 Milton Moon was awarded Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in the Queen’s Birthday Honours for his services to ceramics. Since then, he has received an Advance Australia Foundation Award (1992) as well as an Australian Artists Fellowship (1994-1998). Milton Moon has exhibited extensively throughout Australia and overseas, and is represented in public collections around the country.
Writers:
Nerina_Dunt
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 1926
- Summary
- Milton Moon has been a key figure in developing close links between Japanese studio pottery and Australia. In 2012 he wrote: 'I remain concerned, if a little obsessed, with the challenge of making pots, which although belonging to a ceramic tradition of some eight thousand years or more, are undeniably and uniquely Australian.'
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 6-Sep-19
- Age at death
- 93
Details
Latitude47.4925 Longitude19.051389 Start Date1922-01-01 End Date2019-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Budapest, Hungary
- Biography
- State Library of NSW biographical summary. “Georg N. Szirtes fled Hungary in 1949 to escape communist persecution as his father was a businessman. Surtees was also Jewish but despite persecution during World War II, his culture does not seem to have been a factor in his flight.
He arrived in Sydney, from Vienna, ca. 1951, taking the name George N. Surtees. Qualified as an artist, having trained in the Academy of Fine Arts, Budapest, he was also interested in industrial design. Initially he worked in Sydney for people like Paul Kafka but by the late 1950’s he struck out on his own, doing commercial display work. He also began to work as an interior designer.His heyday seems to have been the 1960’s-1970’s, when he did a lot of work for companies like Westfield, and Frank Lowy and John Saunders. He worked on the Boulevard Hotel in the early 1970’s and worked his Jewish networks, often called upon to design interiors reminiscent of the Eastern European interiors his clients had fled. He also worked as a graphic artist and examples of the range of his work are in this collection. Biographical note from Mitchell Library file.”
Writers:
Michael Bogle
Date written:
2015
Last updated:
2015
- Born
- b. 1 January 1922
- Summary
- Surtees trained in Budapest and worked in Sydney in interior design, commercial display, furniture and other design-related work for commercial clients.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-19
- Age at death
- 97
Details
Latitude-33.8262187 Longitude150.9414378 Start Date1991-01-01 End Date2018-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Greystanes, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 26 February 1991
- Summary
- Jess Nolan was an emerging South Australian artist who died in 2018.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 25-Jun-18
- Age at death
- 27
Details
Latitude-17.0568696 Longitude-64.9912286 Start Date1940-01-01 End Date2018-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Bolivia
- Biography
- Ruth(Ruthi)Eisner was born in Bolivia, in about 1940, to parents who had fled from Nazi Austria.When she was a teenager her family migrated to Australia, and she attended art school in Sydney. Her early subject matter included colourful scenes of people and markets remembered from her childhood in Bolivia. She exhibited, mainly at art societies in Ku-ing-gai and Turramurra for most of her life. She established a small studio based art class in her Turramurra home, encouraging her students to “kindly enjoy their creativity”.
Writers:
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2018
Last updated:
2018
- Born
- b. c.1940
- Summary
- Ruth Eisner was a child of refugees from Hitler who eventually settled in Sydney. While she exhibited in local art societies in Ku-ing-ai and Turramurra, she is principally remembered for being an inspirational teacher.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- Oct-18
- Age at death
- 78
Details
Latitude-19.8516101 Longitude133.2303375 Start Date1938-01-01 End Date2018-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Atnanker, Anmatyerr Country, Central Desert, NT, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. c.1938
- Summary
- After first working in batik, Kwementyaye (Kathleen) Petyarre turned to painting in 1987. Her precise paintings of her country and her culture led to her becoming one of the most celebrated artists from the country around Utopia station.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 24-Nov-18
- Age at death
- 80
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1938-01-01 End Date2018-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1938
- Summary
- Snow was one of the founders of BUGA UP, a loosely affiliated group of activists opposed to tobacco smoking & advertising. The group began ca.1979 & repurposed innumerable billboards & advertising hoardings; a spray can was the only requirement for admission to BUGA UP. In addition to his graphic work, Snow was also a letterpress printer and for some years, he printed the University of Sydney degrees for their Commencement.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-18
- Age at death
- 80
Details
Latitude55 Longitude-3 Start Date1936-01-01 End Date2018-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- United Kingdom
- Biography
- This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Date written:
Last updated:
- Born
- b. 1936
- Summary
- Muncaster was a designer working in costume design, notably costume developed for the Sydney Mardi Gras parade. He began designing costume for the parade in the early 1980s.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-18
- Age at death
- 82
Details
Latitude51.507222 Longitude-0.1275 Start Date1933-01-01 End Date2018-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- London, UK
- Biography
- Born in London in 1933. In 1952 she received a National Diploma of Art and Design from the Eastbourne College of Art, England, and in 1956 she gained an Interior Design Degree from the Royal college of Art in London, England. Before moving to Australia in 1961 Dorrough worked as an interior designer for Sir Hugh Casson in London and for a firm of architects (Harrison and Abramovitz) in New York City. In Australia, she worked in interior design for McConnell, Smith and Johnson and lectured in the architecture faculty at the UNSW. She later studied at the City Art Institute, Sydney, where she graduated with a Masters of Visual Art in 1984. In 2000 she studied Renaissance Painting Techniques at the Charlie Shead Studio School, Sydney, NSW.
She played a major role in the creation of the Crafts Council of Australia also designing their offices and the Crafts Council gallery, Sydney.
Dorrough works across different media including drawing, painting, printmaking (particularly etching) and sculpture. Dorrough is well known for her textile wall hangings, titled Twelve Hangings (1980) held in NSW Parliament House, depicting botanic images, as she is for her permanent mixed media installation of life-sized convict silhouettes, Convict Shadows (1991), at The Hyde Park Barracks, Sydney, NSW.
In 1987 Dorrough was awarded an Overseas Fellowship Grant Residency in Italy by the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council. In 1984 she received the Post Graduate Award for work towards her Masters Degree from the Commonwealth Department of Education. In 1978 Dorrough received a Senior Fellowship from the Craft Board of the Australia Council and in 1975 she was awarded a grant also from the Craft Board of the Australia Council. In 1956 Dorrough was awarded a Travelling Scholarship from the Royal College of Art, London, and she also won the Silver Medal from the College the same year.
Dorrough is represented in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, Ararat Gallery, Parliament House, Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (Powerhouse), Queensland Art Gallery, West Australian Art Gallery, Tamworth Art Gallery, Wollongong Art Gallery, The Orange City Collection, Arts Victoria Festival Collection, Melbourne Stage College Collection, NSW Kindergarten Teachers Union Study Collection and the Historic Houses Trust.
Dorrough has completed commissions for the Regent Hotel, Sydney; Hyde Park Barracks, Sydney; Bond University, Queensland; IBM Australia; and NSW Parliament House, Sydney.
Writers:
Stella Downer
Joanna Mendelssohn
Michael Bogle
Date written:
2007
Last updated:
2018
- Born
- b. 1933
- Summary
- Dorrough was born in London where she worked as an interior designer. She came to Australia via New York and continued her interiors work while lecturing at the UNSW. After 1964, she began exploring textiles and other media. She is well known for her textile wall hangings and installations commissions.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2018
- Age at death
- 85
Details
Latitude-34.9275 Longitude138.6 Start Date1931-01-01 End Date2018-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
- Biography
- Brian Smyth FDIA from South Australia is an Automotive Designer and is now retired.
Brian joined the Institute in 1963 and was President of the South Australian Council (possibly the second president replacing Hugh Whisson) from 1976 to 1979, and was made a Fellow in 1979. He spent ten years on the Administration Committee of the Design Council of Australia.
Brian joined Chrysler Australia in 1949 and was involved in the design of many vehicles including the Simca Station Wagon and the legendary Valiant. He also worked internationally and contributed to design programs in Detroit and also in South Africa.
When he left in 1977 it was noted that 'he left behind him at Chrysler Australia a well organized department with a number of trained stylists highly competent in the areas of clay modeling, colour and trim design, and general styling and design activities. Brian Smyth is a man of outstanding ability, experience and achievement in the field of industrial design.’ signed I.E. Webber, Deputy Chairman, Chrysler Australia.
http://www.dia.org.au/index.cfm?id=179
Writers:
Michael Bogle
Date written:
2015
Last updated:
2015
- Born
- b. 1 January 1931
- Summary
- Smyth was an automotive designer working initially for Chrysler Australia. In 1959 he was their senior stylist and became involved in the introduction of the US Valiant model into Australia, later becoming involved in Valiant Charger model. He retired in 1977.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-18
- Age at death
- 87
Details
Latitude48.856667 Longitude2.352222 Start Date1928-01-01 End Date2018-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Paris, France
- Biography
- Mirka Mora, the artist whose joie de vie enlivened Melbourne for many years, was born in Paris in 1928, the daughter of Lithuanian Jews, Leon Zelik and Celia Gelbein.After the Nazis invaded Paris she and her mother were arrested in the Velodrome d’Hiver roundup of 1942, the largest French deportation of Jews of the Holocaust, and taken by train to a concentration camp in Pithviers. Through a combination of fortunate events which included the kindness of strangers and her father’s ingenuity, they were released. Most of their fellow prisoners died at Auschwitz.In 1947 she married Georges Mora, who had been a fighter in the French Resistance and in 1951 they emigrated to Australia with their baby son Philippe, settling in Melbourne. They were by instinct urban dwellers so found an apartment at 9 Collins Street. It had a distinguished history as it had been used as a studio by Tom Roberts and Frederick McCubbin. They soon opened Mirka Cafe in Exhibition Street, where good food and sparking conversation made it a drawcard for Melbourne’s creative intelligentisia. Soon it was also exhibiting art painted by the habitués and their friends. Sunday Reed organized a rare exhibition of Joy Hester’s work. Charles Blackman held his first exhibition there. She combined her work in the cafe with parenthood, but always was making her art. She painted, drew, embroidered, made amusing lascivious dolls, decorated ceramics. There were no barriers with her art.In the late 1960s they moved to St Kilda to the Tolarno Hotel for which she painted murals. This morphed into the Tolarno Gallery, one of Melbourne’s leading art galleries. In 1970s, after multiple affairs by both parties she separated from Georges and later divorced, but remained close to him until his death.In 1978 she was commissioned to paint one of Melbourne’s Art Trams, a project by the state government in an effort to enliven the city. Her whimsical tram easily became the city’s favourite and in 1986 she was commissioned to create a ceramic mural at Flinders Street station. She also painted the foyer of Melbourne’s Playbox Theatre and in 2016 collaborated with the fashion designer Lisa Gorman.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2018
- Born
- b. 18 March 1928
- Summary
- Mirka Mora’s joyeous experimental art gave a bohemian flavour to Melbourne life, both with her former husband, the resistance fighter and restaurateur Georges, and then with her wide circle of friends and extended family.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 27-Aug-18
- Age at death
- 90
Details
Latitude-33.7750987 Longitude151.2844815 Start Date1928-01-01 End Date2018-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Harbord, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Charles Blackman was born in the Sydney harborside suburb of Harbord, the third child of Charles Cervic Blackman, a mechanical engineer, and his wife Marguerite Brown, who always preferred fantasy to reality. His father abandoned the family when the boy was four, leading his mother to work long hours at a waitress at Circular Quay – and when she could not cope the children were placed in Dalwood Homes. In primary school he was (briefly)taught by Rah Fizelle. He left school at 13, after an extended bout mumps which confined him to bed. His mother gave him paints to keep him occupied. In 1942 he was employed by the Sydney Sun, first as a copy boy and later as an art cadet. In about 1947 he enrolled in painting classes under Hayward Veal at the Meldrum School of Art, but did not find this to his taste. However he did enjoy the drawing classes at SORA (Studio of Realist Art)and the Sketch Club in Haymarket.The New Zealand poet, Lois Hunter, introduced him to modern art and he began to read twentieth century European literature. Her edition of Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror introduced him to the work of Odilon Redon. In 1948 he followed Hunter to Brisbane where he met other modernist artists and poets, including his future wife, Barbara Patterson. In 1951 Blackman and Patterson moved to Melbourne where they married, spending the following years. In 1952 Blackman came to the attention of the art patrons John and Sunday Reed, with whom he later quarrelled, as well as the art critic Alan McCulloch. Accounts of the unsolved murder of Barbara’s childhood friend, Betty Shanks, inspired his first series of schoolgirl paintings. Barbara was slowly going blind, and so he read to her children’s and fantasy literature, which came in turn to influence his own art, especially Alice in Wonderland. In 1959, encouraged by Bernard Smith, he joined with fellow artists to assert the value of the figurative image in the Antipodeans exhibition, and designed the exhibition poster. On seeing his paintings Sir Kenneth Clark suggested he exhibited in London.The Blackman family arrived in London on 2 February 1961, and soon joined the lively expatriate community of Australians. In 1966, missing the sunshine and the beaches, they returned to Australia, travelling first to Perth, Melbourne, Brisbane but ultimately to Sydney.In June 1978, in part because she was irritated by his constant infidelity, Barbara wrote a formal resignation from their marriage, giving him two weeks notice. Blackman subsequently painted a series of nightmare paintings, based in part on Fuseli’s horse, using the actress Kate Fitzpatrick as his model.A relationship with a 19 year old student, Genevieve de Couvreur, led to his second marriage. He continued to admire Barbara and at his 50th birthday presented her with the large canvas, Fifty Flowers (with a white cat in the corner).He first stayed at Buderim, on the Gold Coast, in 1979 and by 1981 was spending most of his time there, painting on themes of lovers, living in idyllic lush tropical beauty. In 1982 he collaborated with the Sydney Dance Company in Dialogues, Daisy Bates and later Spindrift for the Western Australian Ballet Company. In 1984, after the birth of their second child, Blackman and Genevieve separated.From 1985 he began to base much of his work on the butterflies and vegetation of north Queensland, travelling with the poet Al Alvarez. He also worked closely with the Sydney print workshop, Port Jackson Press.In 1989 he married Victoria Bower, whom he later also divorced. His later exhibitions of recent work were not well received by the critics, who noted their uneven quality and bulk production. However the 1993 retrospective, Charles Blackman: Schoolgirls and Angels at the National Gallery of Victoria, demonstrated the full range of his poetic vision.In his last years Blackman suffered from dementia and his affairs were managed by the Charles Blackman Trust, established by his accountant Tom Lowenstein. He died a week after his 90th birthday.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2018
- Born
- b. 12 August 1928
- Summary
- The Antipodean artist Charles Blackman was best known for his paintings of schoolgirls and the whimsy of Alice in Wonderland. He was a part of the circle of artists and writers who congregated at Heide, and in 1959 was one of the figurative artists who signed Bernard Smth’s Antipodean Manifesto.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 20-Aug-18
- Age at death
- 90
Details
Latitude-38.15 Longitude144.35 Start Date1928-01-01 End Date2018-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Geelong, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- William (Bill) Salmon was born in Geelong on 9 April 1928, but spent his early years on one of the properties managed by his father, John Walter Salmon. His mother, Clarice Bennett Taylor, encouraged him to think of a career in architecture, but he was not interested. His paternal grandfather had been a doctor in Creswick. Daryl Lindsay, another doctor’s son, was a family friend and encouraged the boy to think of art. As a compromise, after leaving Geelong College, he studied commercial art at Swinburne Technical College and worked for a time as a designer for Prestige Fabrics.After the War he travelled to London where he continued his studies at the Slade and then the Academia di Belle Arti, in Florence.In 1953 he and his first wife, Adele Love, returned to Australia where he taught for the South Australian School of Art. In 1958 they moved to Sydney where he taught at East Sydney Technical College while holding frequent exhibitions of his bush landscapes at Macquarie Galleries. Sydney enabled him to renew his friendship with David Strachan, whose father had also been a doctor at Creswick. Along with other similarly inclined artists, including Donald Friend and Russell Drysdale, they enjoyed frequent painting expeditions to the old gold mining town of Hill End.In 1963 when Jeffrey Smart relocated to Italy, he invited Salmon to take his place on the ABC’s radio program, The Argonauts. Salmon adopted the name Apelles for these broadcasts. He soon made the transition to television, presenting programs on Roundabout and On the Inside. His television interview subjects included Donald Friend, Sidney Nolan and Lloyd Rees. He also made programs on Fred Williams and John Olsen. In 1970 he married Rosemary Clynes.He remained committed to country life. He designed and built the house at his farm Goannamanna, near Blackheath in the Blue Mountains. The bush, with its trees and rocks of the mountains became the subject of many of his paintings. He was an active member of the local bushfire brigade and some of the subjects of his paintings were of landscapes regenerating after fire. In the early 1980s the family moved to a farm near Dungog, which also became the subject for his art.In his later years he became an innovative farmer, always aware of changes in the environment.
Writers:
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2019
Last updated:
2019
- Born
- b. 9 April 1928
- Summary
- William Salmon described his art as emerging from the landscape. He trained initially in graphic arts at Swinburne Technical College and worked as a textile designer then studied in the UK and Italy before returning to Australia where he taught in SA and NSW. In 1963 he began to broadcast for the ABC's Argonauts children's program and also presented specialist art programs for ABC television.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 27-Oct-18
- Age at death
- 90
Details
Latitude53.7975 Longitude-1.543611 Start Date1927-01-01 End Date2018-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Leeds, Yorkshire, England, UK
- Biography
- Donald Brook was born in what he later described as “an industrial slum” in Leeds, Yorkshire,on 8 January 1927. His father was a traveling salesman, a position that enabled the family to move to “a cultural wasteland of lower-middle class environment”. A series of scholarships enabled him to study electrical engineering but he left the degree before graduating and was conscripted into the British Army. After military service he enrolled in an art degree at the University of Durham, under Lawrence Gowing. His sculpture teacher, JR Murray McCheyne, introduced him to Scandinavian influences,but he was more influenced by the humanist approach of Germaine Richter, Reg Butler and Alberto Giacometti. On graduation he was awarded a scholarship to the British School in Athens, for Crete, but did not attend. Instead he travelled through Greece and Crete, admiring especially Cycladic sculptures. He then spent a year in Paris where he worked for the Societé CIAM. After returning to London he worked for a company making props for the film industry, including the armor for Richard Burton in Alexander The Great. It was at this time that he met his wife, Phyllis, a dancer.After a number of successful exhibitions, he was appointed to teach sculpture at what was to become the Ahmad’s Bello University in Zaria, Nigeria where he stayed for two years. On his return to London he held a number of successful exhibitions in London, before being approached to join the Digswell Trust in Hertfordshire. Here he worked in a community with Ralph Brown, Hans Coper, and Peter Collingwood. Henry Moore was a close neighbour.At Phyllis’s suggestion he applied to undertake a PhD in philosophy at the Australian National University, which he completed in 1967. They arrived in Canberra in 1962,where they found a small but lively intellectual community under the leadership of HC (Nugget) Coombs. His supervisor was the philosopher Bruce Benjamin. When Benjamin became ill with cancer the Brooks moved into the granny flat at the rear of the house and Phyllis cared for the children, including the future art historian, Roger Benajamin. It was at this time Brook began writing art criticism for the Canberra Times, under the editorship of John Douglas Pringle. He also designed exhibition spaces for temporary art exhibitions. While he was exhibiting in Canberra as well as at Gallery A in Melbourne and Sydney, Brook was also grappling with the problem of how art was regarded in relation to fashion. He started to see that many aesthetic judgements were best described as trivial.He was now looking for a regular source of income, so applied for a position at the Elam art school in Auckland. He did not take up the appointment as he was appointed senior lecturer at the newly formed Power Institute at the University of Sydney, where he commenced teaching in 1968. The same year he was appointed art critic of the Sydney Morning Herald. Although he had a fractious relationship with the professor, Bernard Smith, Brook made a lasting friendship with fellow lecturer David Saunders.Although he ceased making sculpture when he moved to Sydney University, this was where he made his first significant contribution to contemporary art. Along with Marr Grounds he established the Tin Sheds workshop, a joint venture between Fine Arts and Architecture to enable students to make art. Under their guidance the Tin Sheds becomes an effective nursery for conceptual art. The sculptor Bert Flugelman joined the Tin Sheds as tutor and also became a lifelong friend. These friends were especially valued in the years after 1968 when the Brook’s three year old son, Simon, was murdered – a crime that was to remain unsolved for almost 40 years.In 1969 Brook delivered the second Power Lecture,Flight From the Object, which became one of the most important contributions to conceptual art in Australia. Brook’s rigorous philosophical approach to art and ideas enabled his next appointment as the inaugural Professor of Fine Arts at Flinders University.In Adelaide in 1974 Brook initiated the creation of the artist run Experimental Art Foundation (EAF) with Ian North, Clifford Frith, Phil Noyce and Bert Flugelman (who had moved from Sydney at his suggestion). Brook retired from Flinders University in 1989, but continued to write, talk and mentor successive generations of artists until shortly before his death.
Writers:
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2018
Last updated:
2018
- Born
- b. 8 January 1927
- Summary
- The. Yorkshire born Donald Brook first established a reputation as a sculptor, but his most significant impact on Australian art was as the intellectually rigorous critic, professor and art theorist whose ideas exerted a profound influence on at least two generations of Australian artists, curators and writers.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 17-Dec-18
- Age at death
- 91
Details
Latitude-33.0111111 Longitude151.7077778 Start Date1925-01-01 End Date2018-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Redhead NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1925
- Summary
- Naughton was a painter primarily of "Outback" scenes and scenery. He began his career as a graphic designer and illustrator for advertising agencies in Australia and in the UK. He was Managing Director of he Nichols-Cumming agency in Sydney, later establishing Keith Naughton Studios. He closed the Studio by 1975 and went on the road painting. In the 1990s, he took up political cartooning for the Newcastle Herald.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-18
- Age at death
- 93
Details
Latitude47.4925 Longitude19.051389 Start Date1921-01-01 End Date2018-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Budapest, Hungary
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1921
- Summary
- Scheinberg was the principal of the Holdsworth Galleries, Woollahra, Sydney. The Holdsworth opened in 1969 and closed in 1995-96 on her retirement. Her papers associated with the Gallery were presented to the National Library of Australia.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1-Jan-18
- Age at death
- 97
Details
Latitude-38.3399766 Longitude143.5858537 Start Date1920-01-01 End Date2018-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Colac, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 28 August 1920
- Summary
- Awarded MBE 1977 and AM, 1988 "For service to art as an illustrator of botanical specimens".
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 26-Dec-18
- Age at death
- 98
Details
Latitude-32.7218138 Longitude152.1440889 Start Date1961-01-01 End Date2017-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Nelson Bay, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1961
- Summary
- Herbert was a film maker, forming a company "Arcadia Pictures" with Sophie Jackson while attending the City Art Institute. After further training at AFTRS, Sydney, he produced a number of short films, features and TV series. He also worked on a number of films as art director, stylist and props acquisition.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 28-Jun-17
- Age at death
- 56
Details
Latitude-34.9275 Longitude138.6 Start Date1956-01-01 End Date2017-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
- Biography
- caricaturist, cartoonist, illustrator and painter, was born in Adelaide, but the family moved to Goroke in Western Victoria when he was nine months old then onto Condobolin. He moved to Sydney and studied at Beacon High School in 1967 then transferred to Newington College. A brilliant caricaturist, he began drawing cartoons professionally in 1983. He first drew for the Bulletin and for the Sydney Morning Herald , resigning from the latter in 1994 and moving to the Daily Telegraph-Mirror (swapping places with Suzanne White) . Now he is at the Australian .
By 1998 Leak had won 8 Gold Stanley Awards from the Australian Black and White Artists’ Club as Artist of the Year, including 1987-89, 1991-92, 1994 (Suzanne White won in 1990 and Eric Löbbecke in 1993) and 1996 [presumably also 1995 and 1997]. He was voted best caricaturist in 1989, 1991, 1994, best humorous illustrator in 1988-89, 1991, 1994, best general illustrator in 1987, 1989, and best cartoon done on the night in 1987 (awards listed only to 1993 in Lindesay: see also Inkspot ) He has also won 7 Walkley Awards for cartoon of the year, including 1996 (see Inkspot 28, Spring 1997). His paintings had been hung in the Archibald Prize 8 times by 1998 (more since) and he had both a portrait of Robert Hughes and a cartoon of cricketer Mark Taylor in the National Portrait Gallery.
Just quietly , Nurse and The man of action , published in the Australian on 21, 29 and 30 July 1997, were exhibited in Bringing the House Down: 12 Months of Australian Political Humour (Canberra: National Museum of Australia/ Old Parliament House [OPH] exhibition, 1997), cats 57, 9, 91. In 1998 he showed more cartoons and spoke about his work at the OPH cartooning seminar. He was also in Bringing the House Down 2001 (4 works) and doubtless in between. Included in State Library of New South Wales [SLNSW] exhibition Australians in black & white : (the most public art) in 1999, he gave a lecture at the library on 1 March 1999. He lectures and talks regularly, e.g. on radio, as well as publishing anthologies of his cartoons and occasionally writing on the subject. A selection of his cartoons, Drawing Blood , was published by Allan and Unwin in 1998.
He drew a version of 'for gorsake stop laughing’ for the Stanleys (Black and White Artists Club Awards) 1989 (SLNSW) – an acknowledged tribute to Stan Cross .
In 2002 Leak was hosting Radio National’s weekly arts’ program, 'Nighclub’.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1956
- Summary
- Leak began his career with art lessons, briefly attending the Julian Ashton School, Sydney. In 1982, he began cartooning, working for the Bulletin, then the Sydney Morning Herald and News Ltd. He was a multiple entrant to the Archibald Portrait Prize and won multiple awards (Walkley, Stanley Award) for his illustrations and cartoons. He also published a novel and books of his cartoons.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-17
- Age at death
- 61
Details
Latitude42.3636331 Longitude-87.8447938 Start Date1954-01-01 End Date2017-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Waukegan, Illinois, USA
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1954
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2017
- Age at death
- 63
Details
Latitude-23.3782137 Longitude150.5134227 Start Date1950-01-01 End Date2017-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Rockhampton, Queensland, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1950
- Summary
- Irving, after brief training at Swinburne, he worked with Hector and Dorothy Crawford's film studio, Melbourne. With Claudia Karvan, he filmed "Love my Way" and was involved in film and TV productions such as "Newsfront, "Water Rats", "Mushrooms", "My Brilliant Career" and others. In retirement, he took up teaching at the Australian Film, TV and Radio School.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-17
- Age at death
- 67
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1943-01-01 End Date2017-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- When Peter Pinson was a student at North Sydney Boys High in the 1950s, art was not taught at this selective school. However a change in the school curriculum meant that from 1962 onwards all NSW school children would learn art and as a result many school leavers, including Pinson, were offered scholarships to train as high school art teachers.After completing his studies in art at East Sydney Technical College and Sydney Teachers College he was employed as an art teacher at Bathurst High. In 1964, his last year as a student, Pinson was awarded the watercolour prize in Sydney’s Mirror-Waratah Festival. He was encouraged to develop his art further, and the landscape around Bathurst became the subject of paintings he developed for the NSW Travelling Art Scholarship, which he was awarded in 1968.In London Pinson completed a Masters at the Royal College of Art. While he was in London Pinson became interested in Zen Buddhism, which was to become a significant influence on the way he approached art.On his return to Australia in 1971, Pinson taught at Wollongong Institute of Education before being appointed as Senior Education Officer at the National Gallery of Victoria.In 1977 he returned to Sydney as a senior lecturer in art in the innovative art education program at the Alexander Mackie College of Advanced Education. In 1991 when the college joined the University of New South Wales and was renamed College of Fine Arts, Pinson was appointed as an Associate Professor and was later promoted to Professor.Pinson was a thoughtful and supportive teacher, encouraging many artists at the start of their careers. His own art continued to show the influence of his London years, with intensely coloured works that reflected both his pleasure in the small details of domestic life and his love of visual and verbal puns.In 1986 he was appointed Offical Military Artist, an appointment that led him to visit military bases around Australia. The appointment led him to look again at the work the Surrealist Eric Thake had painted during in World War II. He saw similarities between his whimsical approach to art and that of Thake.Pinson preferred to work on paper, using water based acrylics. His interest in the medium led him to join the Australian Watercolour Institute, and in 2003 he was elected President.In his years at the College of Fine Arts Pinson also curated a number of exhibitions on distinguished Australian artists, many of whom were colleagues and friends. On his retirement he established an art gallery in Woollahra where he exhibited the work of many of his former colleagues and friends.In 2014 the gallery closed and Pinson spent his last years concentrating on his own art, described by David van Nunen as being “characterised by emphatic design; painterly surfaces; a generally subtle palette offset with passages of pungent colour; flatness; and a feeling for pattern that relates to synthetic cubism and art deco posters.”
Writers:
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2017
Last updated:
2017
- Born
- b. 9 October 1943
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 25-Jun-17
- Age at death
- 74
Details
Latitude-34.9275 Longitude138.6 Start Date1942-01-01 End Date2017-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Adelaide
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1942
- Summary
- Ceramist Liz Williams received an Australia Council grant for travel and research, which she undertook in Mexico and America in 1991. She was also an Australia Council Studio residency recipient, based in Barcelona during 1994-95. Williams has exhibited in Australia and overseas and is represented in the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 24-Mar-17
- Age at death
- 75
Details
Latitude51.27452185 Longitude0.196116556 Start Date1939-01-01 End Date2017-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sevenoaks, Kent, UK
- Biography
- Ti Parks was born in England in 1939. He studied painting and printmaking at Bromley College of Art in Kent and at the Slade School in London.
From 1964-1973 he lived in Melbourne and in 1973 he represented Australia at the 8ieme Biennale de Paris with a major photographic and collage work called “Polynesian 100.” The following year, in 1974, he was appointed Senior Visiting Lecturer at Elam School of Art in Auckland, New Zealand. He subsequently returned to London in 1975.
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 15 March 1939
- Summary
- The experimental artist Ti Parks had a major influence on the development of conceptual art in Australia, especially in Melbourne.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2017
- Age at death
- 78
Details
Latitude-33.6055342 Longitude150.821953 Start Date1939-01-01 End Date2017-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Windsor, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Robin Norling, painter and draughtsman (particularly of the figure), teacher and gallery director, was born in Windsor, New South Wales, in 1939 but grew up in Taree, New South Wales. He studied at the National Art School, Sydney Teachers College and the Royal College of Art, London, UK.
In 1961, aged only twenty-two and still a student at Sydney Teacher’s College, he won the Sulman Prize, for a mural design, Sea movement and rocks . In 1962, having just started teaching art at Macquarie Boys High School, Norling was awarded the New South Wales Travelling Art Scholarship, which allowed him to travel to Europe and North Africa with his new wife, art teacher, Elaine Odgers. In 1966, the two of them began their slow return to Australia, driving through Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, immersing themselves in the many cultures they passed through.
On his return to Australia, Norling returned to secondary school teaching and, in 1970, was appointed as a lecturer in art education at Alexander Mackie College of Advanced Education. In the same year he began writing and presenting a weekly ABC radio program aimed at youth, entitled Young World of Art , which ran for four years. From 1978 to 1986 he was senior education officer at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, during which time he curated a number of educational exhibitions, including Light and Shadow and Composition is Artist’s Glue. This position gave him a remarkable opportunity to study, at his leisure, some of the greatest paintings in the country, including works by less well-known artists such as the British Victorian painters Lord Frederick Leighton and Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Norling realised that these artists were more than the sentimental storytellers that contemporary taste held them to be.
In 1986 Norling left his position at the Gallery and took up a position at Meadowbank College of TAFE, teaching painting and drawing. In 1997 he retired from teaching and returned to full-time painting. From 2000 he shared a studio and directorship of Patonga Bakehouse Gallery on the New South Wales Central Coast, with fellow artist Jocelyn Maughan.
Norling is represented in the collections of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Charles Sturt University (Goulburn campus) and the University of Sydney.
Acknowledgments to Peter Pinson, for his introduction to Robin Norling, Phillip Matthews, 2010, for much of the information contained herein.
Writers:
Cooper, JonathanPinson, Peter
Jonathan Cooper
Date written:
2017
Last updated:
2017
- Born
- b. 1939
- Summary
- Norling began his career in sign-writing, later training in painting at the National Art School, Sydney, and the Royal College of Art, London, UK. He was a secondary school teacher, lecturer at Alexander Mackie (later City Art Institute), Meadowbank TAFE, ABC presenter and educator at the Art Gallery of NSW. He also worked as a curator and writer during his diverse career.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 20-Jan-17
- Age at death
- 78
Details
Latitude53.5111779 Longitude-2.937562183 Start Date1937-01-01 End Date2017-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Maghull, Liverpool, England
- Biography
- Alun Leach-Jones was the eldest child of a Welsh elementary school teacher father and a Scottish mother. His parents had met in Liverpool, but shortly after Alun’s birth the family returned to his father’s home in rural North Wales where he became the local schoolmaster, and his son’s first teacher. Alun did not speak English until he was ten. In 1947 an uncle, who was recovering from the War, showed him how to paint watercolours. When the family returned to Liverpool, Alun joined his uncles’ Post Office club, and was commissioned to paint murals, his first professional experience. From the age of 14 he worked at the Solicitor’s Law Society, making illuminated manuscripts for presentation. A workmate, Ronald McKenzie, introduced him to art, and they travelled to Paris where he saw Gauguin, and to the Prado in Madrid. Art became increasingly important and he enrolled in evening classes at Liverpool College of Art. In 1959 Leach-Jones travelled to London to see New American Painting at the Tate, an exhibition that introduced him to Abstract Expressionism, and changed the way he thought about colour and form.The following year he travelled to Adelaide as an assisted immigrant, where he worked at various jobs including as a library assistant, before enrolling in night classes at the South Australian School of Art where he said his “real professional life started”. It was also where he met his wife, fellow artist Nola Jones. Kym Bonython noticed Leach-Jones’ constant visits to his gallery, and encouraged the budding artist by giving him a place to live in the gallery in return for assistance with installing exhibitions and caretaking duties. Leach-Jones’ interest in art books at the Mary Martin bookshop piqued the attention of Max Harris, who commissioned him to illustrate a book, and introduced him to Sidney Nolan which gave him a sense that art could be a career.The South Australian School of Art also led him to an interest in the possibilities of printmaking, led by Udo Sellbach, Karin Schepers and Geoffrey Brown.In 1964 Leach-Jones and his wife Nola travelled to England where she studied at the Chelsea School of Art, while he became involved in the Contemporary Art Society. He shared a studio with the English abstract painter Brian Plummer. Consequently he met other artists including Patrick Heron and Norbert Linton. London finessed his screen-printing technique and he started to make images of intricate abstract beauty, with the generic title “Noumenon”, which he described as “the idea of perceiving a purely intellectual entity”. He continued working in this direction on his return to Australia, this time to Melbourne, in 1964. The same year he held his first successful solo exhibition at Australian Galleries, which was soon followed by exhibitions in other cities. His meditative intricate abstract works led to him exhibiting in The Field in 1968 and being regarded as one of Australia’s leading abstract artists. In 1969 he represented Australia at the Bienale del Sao Paulo, in Brazil.The same year he was appointed as a teacher at the Prahran College of Advanced Education, also taught at the National Gallery of Victoria School. This was followed by an appointment at the Victorian College of the Arts in 1972 and the City Art Institute (later known as the College of Fine Arts, UNSW) in 1978. His significance as a printmaker was first recognised in 1967 when he was made a Print Patron of the Print Council of Australia, and his achievement in a British context was recognised in 1990 when he was made an Honorary Life Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers, UK.The significance of Alun Leach-Jones as a printmaker as well as a painter was early recognised by the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Australia Council which, in 1974, chose him to exhibit at the Lalit Kala Academy in New Delhi. This was followed by other exhibitions and residencies in Malaysia, Singapore and New York.In 1980 Leach-Jones undertook a residency in Berlin, at the Kunstlerhaus Bethanian. His studio was next to the death zone of the Wall, place of concrete, barbed wire and dead animals.From this came a turning point in his art, with the series “The Romance of Death” which was triggered in part by the efforts of those trying to cross the wall.
In the 1990s, influenced by what he described as 'Welsh melancholy’ he made a series grouped under the title “The Instruments for a Solitary Navigator”. He later described these as “like a slime trail left by the snail behind him”.In 1999, encouraged by his friends Lenton Parr and Robert Klippel, he began to make sculpture which was the subject of several of exhibitions in commercial galleries.Towards the end of his life there was a renewed interest in the mid-century Abstract artists and the way the daring young men who painted in precise colours had helped shape modern Australian art.
Writers:
AngelaTandori
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2017
Last updated:
2018
- Born
- b. 3 January 1937
- Summary
- Alun Leach-Jones was one of the generation of artists who helped define Australian colourfield art in the 1960s. Hie first came to prominence exhibiting in The Field in 1968 with paintings of smooth intricate patterning, indicating a search for abstract transcendence. His ideas and his art easily transformed into silk screen prints and in his later years he also exhibited sculpture.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 24-Dec-17
- Age at death
- 80
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1937-01-01 End Date2017-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- This record is a stub. You can help by adding more detail.
Writers:
Date written:
Last updated:
- Born
- b. 24 September 1937
- Summary
- In the 1960s Melbourne artist became well known for his lively hard edge abstract paintings which were based on images discovered on cereal packets. Later he gave the same magnified scrutiny to knitting patterns and then elements of suburban culture. In 1970 he turned from painting to systematic photographic observation. Rooney has also written extensively on Australian art as art critic for both The Age and The Australian.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2017
- Age at death
- 80
Details
Latitude-32.256944 Longitude148.601111 Start Date1935-01-01 End Date2017-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Dubbo, New South Wales, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1935
- Summary
- Hall trained as an architect at Sydney University, later tutoring after 1963 in addition to his architectural practice. He also painted and drew, exhibiting with Barry Stern Gallery, Janet Clayton Gallery and others. In the 1980s, he began to build stringed instruments with An Morison and Isa Coello from workshops in Alexandria and elsewhere.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-17
- Age at death
- 82
Details
Latitude-34.9275 Longitude138.6 Start Date1933-01-01 End Date2017-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
- Biography
- Sydney Ball was born on the 29th of October 1933 in Adelaide, South Australia, the son of Lillian and Sidney Ball. Because of his father’s war service he was awarded a repatriation scholarship to St Peter’s College. On leaving school he undertook a series of jobs including jackaroo and bank clerk.After enrolling in architectual studies with Wladyslaw Dutkiewicz at the Workers Education Association he began to work as an architectural draughtsman, a discipline that influenced his later work. He joined the Royal South Australian Art Society’s weekend classes, and began to think of studying art full time. After taking some classes with James Cant, John Dowie and Dora Chapman at the South Australian Institute, he realised he needed international experience in order to fully develop as an artist.In 1962 Ball travelled to New York and enrolled in classes at the Art Students League, studying lithography with Harry Sternberg and painting with Theodoros Stamos. He scoured both public art museums and commercial galleries, enticed by Matisse, as well as exhibitions by Hans Hofmann, Morris Louis and Mark Rothko. He exhibited at New York’s Westerly Gallery, and his work was favorably noted by Donald Judd.The young Australian moved easily into the New York Creative milieu. Stamos introduced him to his colleagues, including Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell. Subsequently he was invited to Mark Rothko’s house for Thanksgiving.In 1965 Ball returned to Australia via Japan, where he visited the shrines at Kyoto and Nara, sparking a lifelong interest in Asian philosophies and religions.On his return to Adelaide Ball was appointed lecturer at the South Australian School of Art, where one of his students was Margaret Worth who he later married. He exhibited with some critical success in Perth, Sydney and Melbourne, which brought his work to the attention of John Stringer and Brian Finemore who were planning an exhibition of Australian colourfield art to open the new National Gallery of Victoria. As well as Ball’s work being included in the exhibition, he designed the lithograph exhibition poster.In 1969 the Ball family returned to New York, but the marriage ended in 1971. Ball came to know the critic Clement Greenberg and through him others American artists who shared his passion for pure colour, including Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski and Jack Bush. He especially admired Helen Frankenthaler, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko’s approach to colour. After Rothko’s suicide he was asked to clean the studio.In 1972 he returned to Australia, eventually settling in Sydney with an appointment a senior lecturer at the City Art Institute. He bought land at Glenorie, north of the city, and commissioned architect Glenn Murcutt to Design the house & studio which was completed in 1983. This became his base with his partner Lynne Eastaway until his death.He continued to explore different systems of belief and their visual expression, from China and Tibet, Korea, India and the paintings by Aboriginal artists in a cave near his home.After some years when abstract painting was out of favour, a revival of interest in both colour and the culture of the 1960s brought renewed attention to Ball’s art. In the last years of his life Ball’s work was included in a number of major survey exhibitions. In 2008 Anne Loxley curated a national touring exhibition, Sydney Ball: The Colour Paintings. Sydney Ball died on 5 March 2017, at home in Glenorie, two days after suffering a stroke.
Writers:
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2020
Last updated:
2020
- Born
- b. 29 October 1933
- Summary
- The Adelaide born Sydney Ball was a painter of pure colour and abstract form, and one of the first of the post-World War II artists to understand that New York, not London was the place to see and explore new art.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 5-Mar-17
- Age at death
- 84
Details
Latitude-34.9275 Longitude138.6 Start Date1933-01-01 End Date2017-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Adelaide, SA, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1933
- Summary
- Sydney Ball was one of the first of his generation to look to New York instead of Europe for inspiration. He consistently painted large abstract works in clear, pure colour.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2017
- Age at death
- 84
Details
Latitude57 Longitude-4 Start Date1927-01-01 End Date2017-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Scotland, UK
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1927
- Summary
- Grant was an industrial designer with studies at the Royal College of Art, London, Illinois Institute of Technology, USA. He designed work for Expo '67 Montreal, Toyo Kogia, Davis Furniture NY. He was the principal of Kjell Grant Design, Melbourne and has produced furniture for Innerspace and others. A designer lecturer at RMIT, Melbourne.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-17
- Age at death
- 90
Details
Latitude52.0809856 Longitude5.127683969 Start Date1925-01-01 End Date2017-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Utrecht, Netherlands
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1925
- Summary
- Huveneers was a graphic designer beginning his career in the Netherlands, the UK, finally in Australia in 1968. Much of his work was in advertising and marketing and by 1970 he established a studio, Huveneers P/L. Amongst his commercial work was the corporate identify for Australia Post.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-17
- Age at death
- 92
Details
Latitude16.8305877 Longitude96.2191864 Start Date1925-01-01 End Date2017-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Yangon (Rangoon), Burma
- Biography
- Image and short biographical entry in Australian Black-and-White Artists Club Book of Originals (1986), AGNSW (178.1988.1-102).
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1 January 1925
- Summary
- Milligan was an illustrator for the Fairfax press in Sydney and a painter. He trained at Goldsmiths, University of London after the 1939-45 war. Arriving in Australia in 1951, he worked as a glassware engraver (probably for AGM), then worked for Fairfax. He also painted abstracts, took portrait commissions and illustrated books for his brother Spike Milligan.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-17
- Age at death
- 92
Details
Latitude57 Longitude-4 Start Date1922-01-01 End Date2017-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Scotland
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1922
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2017
- Age at death
- 95
Details
Latitude-33.7569444 Longitude151.0775 Start Date1921-01-01 End Date2017-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Cheltenham, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1921
- Summary
- Brett was an internationally acclaimed marine painter. He appears to be a self-taught painter whose knowledge of ships and the sea came from an early career as a sailor on Australian coastal steamers.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-17
- Age at death
- 96
Details
Latitude48.2 Longitude16.366667 Start Date1920-01-01 End Date2017-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Vienna, Austria
- Biography
- painter, was born in Vienna in 1920, he and his family had lived in Warsaw until forced to flee in 1937 because of the Nazis. He worked in Melbourne 1937-48, where he was an active member of the Contemporary Art Society – and a communist – along with his friends Noel Counihan and Vic O’Connor . They painted the life they saw on Melbourne streets. He first exhibited with Boyd and Counihan at the University of Melbourne in 1939. Bernard Smith wrote in 1943 that Bergner, Boyd and Perceval constituted 'the most vital movement in Australian art today’. Some of Bergner’s paintings were the first to address the specific plight of Aboriginal Australians, according to Mellick. 'He recalled: “I did not know what an Aborigine was. He did not look like a Negro, more like a Jew… I painted these people with the faraway look in their eyes from generations before. They were displaced and I felt I identified with them.’ Works included Two Women 1942 (NGV) – one an Aboriginal.
One of the first things Bergner did in Melbourne was to set up a Yiddish theatre. His father Melech Ravitch was a Yiddish poet who had translated Kafka from German into Yiddish in the year of Kafka’s death (1924), but Bergner’s first strong engagement with Kafka was in Melbourne, as he later recalled (quoted Rubin and Mellick). Paintings after he moved to Israel permanently in 1948 continue to take themes from Kafka’s novels and short story 'Metamorphosis’, e.g. The Metamorphosis 1975 (artist’s collection). Retrospective exhibition, Israel, in 2000.
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Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 13 October 1920
- Summary
- 20th century Melbourne painter. Contemporary of Boyd and Perceval and active member of Contemporary Art Society with Noel Counihan and Vic O'Connor. Bergner's paintings were among the 1st to address the specific plight of Indigenous Australians and later work took inspiration from the works of German writer Franz. In Tel Aviv, a member of a circle of artists centred in the popular Cafe Kassit, where he painted a large mural.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 18-Jan-17
- Age at death
- 97
Details
Latitude-37.247494 Longitude144.4552171 Start Date1962-01-01 End Date2016-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Kyneton, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- Silversmith Robert Foster set up F!NK and Co in 1994, joined by partner Gretel Harrison in 1997. Foster wanted a business that would support his one-off handmade works, starting with production of his now well-known aluminium F!NK water jug.
From the outset, F!NK was envisaged as a company of designers and many acknowledge Foster’s generosity and enthusiasm in providing them with a start. He insists on a close connection to the tooling part of the process to ‘maintain the sensitivity and integrity of the design’.
F!NK objects are now sold extensively in Australia and overseas. Increased demand for the F!NK water jug led Foster to explore offshore manufacturing, and he proceeded to have jug forms made in China, mostly for assembly in Australia.
Foster’s work is in the collection of the Powerhouse Museum, and was included in the Museum’s 2007 exhibition 'Smart works: design and the handmade’.
FROM THE DESIGN INSTITUTE OF AUSTRALIA’S HALL OF FAME AWARD 2019:
Robert Foster was born in Kyneton, Victoria to art teacher parents who also painted and made pottery. He studied gold and silversmithing at the Canberra School of Art, now ANU School of Art, under renown silversmiths Ragnar Hansen and Johannes Kuhnen. He graduated in 1985 with a Bachelor of Arts (Visual) and a Post Graduate Diploma of Arts (Visual) in 1986. He went on to establish a studio, Fink & Co in 1993 and rapidly became a major figure in the ACT and national design industry.
Best known for designing tableware, lighting, furniture and other objects, he also had a number of major sculpture commissions including Ossolites in the foyer of the ActewAGL building in Canberra. Each piece he made is imbued with a distinctive personality and movement; objects ‘that might, Nutcracker-suite style, come to life as the owner sleeps.’
Foster’s iconic Fink jug epitomises his design ethos and technical prowess and is a landmark achievement in Australian design. When commissioned to create the jug by Canberra restaurant The Republic, Robert took aluminium tubing, an everyday yet sustainable material, and fashioned it into a sleek, economically-viable product. The original tooling involved old pieces of steel from his father’s tractor and wood from a fence post. The Fink jug now features in collections both nationally and internationally including New York’s Museum of Modern Art, London’s Victoria and Albert Museum and major Australian institutions including the National Gallery of Australia.
He won numerous awards including the ANU Alumnus of the Year award in 2015. He regularly lectured, gave specialised workshops and was a key-note speaker at international conferences.
Following his untimely death in 2016, two grants were set up in Robert’s name to ensure his dedication to helping others continues. One is the ANU Robert Foster Gold & Silversmithing Honours Scholarship and the second is the Capital Arts Patron’s Organisation’s Robert Foster Memorial Award.
Writers:
Powerhouse Museum
staffcontributor
Michael Bogle
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2019
- Born
- b. c.1962
- Summary
- Foster studied silversmithing at the Art School, ANU, founding the Canberra-based jewellery and household object design company F!NK + Co in 1993. In 1997, Gretel Harrison was a partner in FINK + Co. Foster was elected to the Design Institute of Australia's Hall of Fame in 2019.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-16
- Age at death
- 54
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1956-01-01 End Date2016-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1956
- Summary
- Patterson trained at Sydney Technical College & Sydney College of the Arts. She began costume work in TV, later moving into film. She frequently collaborated with directors Jane Campion and Gilliam Armstrong. Her earliest work was contemporary costume design (Sweet and Sour, Dancing Days) and as her career expanded, she moved into period costume & production design. (The Piano, Portrait of a Lady, Far From the Madding Crowd).
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1-Jan-16
- Age at death
- 60
Details
Latitude-33.37877205 Longitude147.9534388 Start Date1954-01-01 End Date2016-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Forbes, New South Wales, Australia
- Biography
- Ian Kenneth Willding was born at Forbes, NSW in 1954, the son of Kenneth Willding and Beryl (née McCarney). After initially training as a chef and working in Sydney, he moved to Adelaide in 1989. For the next sixteen years he worked as an artist in residence at the Suneden Special School. He also forged close links Nunga and gay communities, supplementing his income by working as a carer. Although he had left Forbes his art continued to reference memories of his childhood. His synaesthesia meant that these paintings, especially Dust of My Fathers (2008, have an immediacy in their evocation of times past.In 1996 he became involved in the Red House Group of community artists, an association that would last the rest of his life. His involvement in community arts led to his 2009 venture of curating Kumqwot, an exhibition of work by gay and lesbian artists. He held a number of solo exhibitions of his own work, notably Ceaseless Patterns of Being, which indicated his growing interest in Asian spiritual values, and Native Tongue III of 2009, which recalled the only time he ever heard Wiradjuri being spoken.In 2011 Tandanya Cultural Centre honoured him with a solo exhibition, Family Matters: A Wiradjuri Story in which he drew on his own research and his mother’s knowledge of their family history. He had always wanted to travel, but for most of his life such adventures had appeared to be impossible. Shortly before he died, he is friend Samuel Schmid travelled with him to Europe, going by train through Switzerland, Austria, Italy and Poland, seeing so much of the art that he had long admired in reproduction.In January 2017, just after he died, Adelaide’s Gallery M honoured him by showing Ian Willding, Retrospective.
Writers:
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2018
Last updated:
2019
- Born
- b. 10 October 1954
- Summary
- Ian Willding, a Wiradjuri man, developed his art while working for many years at the Suneden Special School in Adelaide. His inspiration however came from his childhood in Forbes, in rural NSW. From 1996 onwards he was associated with the Red House Group of community artists, and also curated exhibitions of works by gay and lesbian artists.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 9-Aug-16
- Age at death
- 62
Details
Latitude-31.6535192 Longitude116.6726927 Start Date1939-01-01 End Date2016-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Northam, WA, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1939
- Summary
- Conceptual artist concerned with the politics of representation, appropriation and particularly photography, working frequently with text, found images and assemblage.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 11-Sep-16
- Age at death
- 77
Details
Latitude29.974498 Longitude32.537086 Start Date1938-01-01 End Date2016-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Suez, Egypt
- Biography
- Emanuel Raftoplouos was born in Suez, the multicultural seaport city in north-west Egypt. His mother, who had Italian heritage spoke to him in Italian, while his father, whose heritage was Greek, spoke in Greek. He was educated at the British school which gave him an easy command of English. It was here that he was introduced to painting and drawing.In 1956, in the lead up to the Suez crisis, his family made the prudent decision to leave Egypt and emigrate to Australia, where they settled in Sydney. Although he wanted to study art, his father wished for him to have a profession. The compromise was that he enrol in architecture at the University of Sydney. However Raft, as he had renamed himself, surreptitiously enrolled in painting classes at Bissieta’s art school. Architecture was soon abandoned.In 1959 he sailed for Milan, where he studied at the Brere Academy, where Bissietta had also studied. Here he was joined by Philipa Watkins, who he had met as a fellow art student in Sydney. Together they travelled to London, the standard destination for young Australians visiting Europe. Raft began to exhibit paintings burnt and seared with a blow-torch, as well as elaborate jewellery, which he called “wearable sculpture”. These were well received in both Australia and England. In 1968 two of his paintings were selected for the National Gallery of Victoria’s landmark The Field exhibition. The following year his marriage to Watkins ended.In 1978, three years after his second marriage to the designer Helen Thaw, Raft and his family settled permanently in Sydney. Although he had a successful career in England, teaching as well as making art, he missed the sun. He joked “the rising damp was too much for me”.In 1981 he was appointed lecturer in art at the Alexander Mackie College of Advanced Education, a position he held until his retirement in 1996 as it transformed into the City Art Institute and the College of Fine Arts, UNSW. He bought a house in the country near Lot, in France, where he stayed in the European summers. After Helen died in 2008 there was less travel.
His third wife, the sculptor and jeweller Sylvia Ross, was a long time colleague at the College of Fine Arts. In 2015 as the National Gallery of Victoria prepared to revisit The Field for its 50th year celebration, the curators discovered that several works were missing. Raft’s two Monoliths”, in the collection of Kym Bonython, had been destroyed some years before in Adelaide’s Black Thursday bushfires. He agreed to recreate them. As Raft was weakened by leukaemia the works were completed with the assistance of fellow artist and former student David Eastwood.
Writers:
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2022
Last updated:
2022
- Born
- b. 7 February 1938
- Summary
- The Egyptian born Emanuel Raft brought a cosmopolitan perspecive to the way he approached painting, sculpture and design. He was also a teacher and mentor who influenced generations of students.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 18-May-16
- Age at death
- 78
Details
Latitude-37 Longitude144 Start Date1937-01-01 End Date2016-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Victoria
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1937
- Summary
- Stitt was an artist, illustrator, graphic designer and animator trained at Melbourne Technical College (later RMIT) and began working in film in the late 1950s. As his career evolved, he also began working as a cartoonist. Later in his career, he turned to animation and special effects. He was often engaged in the film industry working with Philip Adams and Fred Schepisi.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-16
- Age at death
- 79
Details
Latitude40 Longitude-100 Start Date1936-01-01 End Date2016-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- USA
- Biography
- George Henry Freedman, (6 March 1936–21 July 2016) was Australia’s leading interior designer from 1970 until a younger generation (including some architects and designers he trained) became prominent in Sydney during the 1990s. Born in Brooklyn, New York, he studied architecture at Syracuse University (1953–1958) but did not graduate. Influenced by his father, a paint company’s colour decoration adviser, he first worked as a designer and artist in London, Amsterdam and New York before he was despatched to Sydney in 1969, by New York design consultancy Knoll International, to deliver Manhattan-modern executive offices to help internationally rebrand the British colonial origins of the Bank of New South Wales (now Westpac). During 1970–1971, Freedman worked part-time for Sydney decorator-antique dealer Leslie Walford, and formed a personal and professional partnership with Neville Marsh, a successful decorator from Perth. Trading as Marsh Freedman Associates after 1972, they designed many prestigious Sydney commercial and residential interiors, often including Freedman’s own furniture designs (most built in-situ but including a restaurant cocktail trolley collected by the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences). Marsh Freedman Associates’ most significant project was designing two floors of executive offices atop a new Martin Place tower for the State Bank of New South Wales (1985–1988). Across eighty rooms, Freedman and his team provided one of the world’s finest curations of postmodern (1970–1990s) perceptions of interior design excellence. Freedman later specified colours and finishes to update two Sydney heritage monuments: the Powerhouse (Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, 1988) and the Queen Victoria Building (historic markets to a modern shopping centre, 2009).As well as designing interiors for some of Sydney’s most prestigious and prosperous people and organisations, MFA created Sydney’s most magnetic transmillennial restaurants, notably Berowra Waters Inn, 1976; Claudes, 1981; Kinselas, 1983; Taylor’s, 1984; Chez Oz, 1985; Bilsons, 1988 (renamed Quay, 2004); Treasury, 1992; Ampersand, 1998; and Buon Ricordo, 2007.In 2005, Freedman was described by The Sydney Morning Herald as ‘the Godfather of Sydney interior design’. He was recognised by design and architecture industry experts for his daring and widely emulated combinations of colours, inventive uses of materials, relentless attention to detail, and commitment to high-quality furnishings (often imported signature classics). He was respected also for his sophisticated understandings of optical perception and volumetric manipulations of interior space; talents exemplified with his optically and geometrically sophisticated scheme for Kraanerg (1988), one of three Sydney Dance Company ballets for which he designed the sets. With his American and European architecture and arts knowledge, he was highlighted by design writers as practising more like an architect than many Sydney colleagues who were educated as interior decorators and designers. He worked with Sydney’s leading architects of the late-twentieth century—including Glenn Murcutt, Ken Woolley, Peter Stronach, Lionel Glendinning and ecological design pioneer, Sydney Baggs. Freedman also trained some of Sydney’s outstanding younger architects and designers—including Iain Halliday, Sam Marshall, Stephen Varady, William MacMahon, Arthur Collin, Robert Puflett, Tim Allison and his late-career partner, Ralph Rembel. In 2005 the Royal Australian Institute of Architects (NSW Chapter) awarded Freedman Rembel an Interior Architecture commendation for its design of executive offices at the AMP building overlooking Circular Quay.Freedman’s 1970s and 1980s furniture designs, often finished with luxury European veneers and eye-catching details, were often promoted in Australia’s leading home furnishing magazines, especially Belle, Vogue Living and Interior Design. He was a Fellow of the Design Institute of Australia and the Academy of Design Australia, and a regular judge for the annual Dulux Colour Awards. During the late 1980s, Neville Marsh retired from Marsh Freedman Associates to live in Rome and Freedman continued to practice as George Freedman Associates (with Robert Chester and Sam Marshall). In 1996 he appointed Ralph Rembel as his business partner and in 2002 their practice was renamed Freedman Rembel. In 2010, Freedman and Rembel dissolved their practice and Freedman joined PTW (Peddle Thorp and Walker) architects as Head of Interior Design (while continuing to advise his existing private clients. In 2014, Freedman married psychologist Peter O’Brien at a ceremony in New Zealand.
Writers:
staffcontributor
Davina Jackson
Date written:
2017
Last updated:
2017
- Born
- b. 6 March 1936
- Summary
- Freedman trained as an architect. His interior design career began with Kahn & Jacobs Architects, a New York City firm. He later shifted to London, then back to New York working for Knoll International. He arrived in Sydney in 1969, forming a partnership with Neville Marsh in 1971. Freedman's practice later became Freedman Rembel in 2002. The practice was associated with PTW (Peddle Thorp Walker) architects after 2010.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 21-Jul-16
- Age at death
- 80
Details
Latitude-42.880556 Longitude147.325 Start Date1934-01-01 End Date2016-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Hobart, TAS, Australia
- Biography
- Tasmanian born artist mainly known as a printmaker, Bea Maddock also worked in painting, drawing and photography.
Beatrice Louise Maddock was born in Hobart, Tasmania, in 1934. Beatrice and her twin sister, Frances, were the youngest of the four children of two amateur artists, Henry Mervyn Maddock, an Anglican clergyman, and Thelma Annie. The family lived in various country parishes of Tasmania.
In 1956, Maddock graduated with a Fine Art degree from the Hobart Technical College where she had studied part-time under Jack Carington Smith, Dorothy Stoner, Jack Koskie and Stephen Walker. During her studies, she worked at the Visual Aids Centre at the Tasmanian Education Department. Maddock taught in high schools while studying art education at the University of Tasmania. Artist and former teacher Jack Carington Smith encouraged her to apply to the Slade School of Art in London. She was accepted, and left in 1959 to pursue postgraduate painting and printmaking with William Coldstream, Anthony Gross (etching) and Ceri Richards (lithography).
During her European journey, she traveled in Scotland, England, France, Holland, Italy, and Germany. She studied at the Academi de Bell Arti in Perugia, Italy, on a one-month scholarship. She went to churches and sketched in notebooks, observing Masaccio’s paintings and other religious sculptures. Because of the language barrier and the poor teaching at the provincial school, Maddock and her fellow student Murray Walker quit the classes to spend most of their time in the landscape. Maddock found great interest and inspiration in the art and landscape of Umbria and Tuscany. She painted works like Italian landscape (1961) outdoors on small canvases she carried. At the Slade School, she had been criticized for drawing too well and using too many colours, a palette she had been taught in Tasmania. After mainly working in tones of green, her Italian experience diversified her palette again. In Paris, she was impressed by the works of Georges Rouault, the French Fauvist and Expressionist painter and printmaker. Her print works at the Slade, like her 1960 Self-portrait , were influenced by Rouault’s emphatic gestures and strong black outlines. She admired German Expressionism in Munich and Essen, and would later study German Expressionist prints at the National Gallery of Victoria Print Room when living in Melbourne in 1964. Maddock travelled back to Australia by boat in 1961, stopping in Bombay, India. There, she was deeply confronted by the poverty, and she considered her experience in India as a milestone.
Upon her return to Australia, Maddock spent two years in Launceston, studying ceramics, teaching, painting, and printing. In 1964, she had her first solo exhibition in Launceston: Paintings, Drawings, and Prints by Bea Maddock. She then moved to South Melbourne, where she worked in a furniture factory to make ends meet. The city influenced her Figure series, which she would work on until 1968. Maddock moved back to Launceston in 1965 to teach ceramics, printmaking, drawing and basic design. Even after she moved, her works were still based on her Melbourne experience.
Bea Maddock won many prizes including the Tasmanian Drawing Prize in 1968, with Figure in a place , and the F.E. Richardson Print Prize in 1969, with Midnight (part of the Day series).
By the late 1960s, the artist established herself as a printmaker and in 1970, the National Gallery of Victoria Art School in Melbourne invited Maddock to teach printmaking. There, she was also able to dedicate time to her own work with the advanced printmaking technology, and started making photo-screenprints and photo-etchings. Her promotion of these two practices through teaching was extremely important in Australian art schools. In 1973, Maddock was appointed Senior Lecturer in Printmaking at the Victorian College of the Arts (formerly National Gallery of Victoria Art School).
During the 1970s Maddock worked mainly in series which paralleled the sequential nature of newspapers, as she was commenting in her work on the omnipresence of mass media. She used newspaper clippings and other found materials in her work, like the photograph of a criminal in a local newspaper she used in the photo-etching Philosophy I (1972).
In 1974, she won the 4th prize at the International Print Biennale in Poland for the photo-etching Square (1972) and received her first commission, from the Print Council of Australia, to produce a member print. A Creative Arts Fellowship at the Australian National University of Canberra allowed her to spend all of 1976 on her own work. She then received a Commission (1977) from the Visual Arts Board for the VIIth International Exhibition in New Delhi, for which she produced ten prints – the Journey series, Four by Two , and Two by Two . The same year, the Commonwealth Games Print Portfolio in Edmonton, Canada, commissioned her to produce a print. She traveled to Canada, then the United States, where she saw the work of Jasper Johns at the Whitney Museum of American Art, a Paul Cezanne exhibition at the MOMA and other public collections in New York. Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol were important influences on Maddock’s work, with their extensive use of serial imagery, grid format, and photography. Numeral 1 (1984) is an example of one of Maddock’s responses to Jasper Johns’ serial work.
From 1979-80, she was Acting Dean at the Victorian College of the Arts and worked on a commission of twelve encaustic panels for the High Court of Australia, Canberra. She resigned from her Senior Lectureship at the Victorian College of the Arts in 1981, and became part-time lecturer at the Bendigo College of Advanced Education in 1982. Living in Macedon, Maddock created the Access Studio, a space for ex-students to use. Sadly, the 1983 Ash Wednesday bush fires destroyed Maddock’s Macedon studio and house. (She would later recreate the Access Studio at the Red Lion paper mill in Dunolly.)
Maddock toured New Zealand and gave lectures, along with her exhibition Bea Maddock Prints 1960-1982. She returned to teaching in Launceston, Tasmania, for one year until 1984, when she resigned from teaching altogether in order to devote herself entirely to her own work. Maddock had always had a strong desire to educate, but she knew that time consuming teaching was incompatible with her career. The following year, she was appointed member of the Council of the Australian National Gallery and was also Chairperson of Ritchies Mill Arts Centre in Launceston.
In 1987, the Artists in Antarctica Program invited Maddock on a trip to Antarctica. It inspired her Forty Pages from Antarctica , a suite of etchings. That year, she also produced, under the commission of the Australian National Gallery, the encaustic panels We live in the meanings we are able to discern for the ANZ Bicentennial Art Commission.
Text is a feature of Maddock’s visual language. The Parliament House Construction Authority commissioned Maddock to design two posters using quotes chosen by historian Manning Clark. Completed in 1989 for the Manton exhibition, Queensland Art Gallery, the four panel encaustic painting Tromemanner – forgive us our trespass is a good example of the importance of words in Maddock’s art.
Maddock’s work is held in the collections of the Australian National Gallery in Canberra, all State galleries and other collections in Australia, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the National Gallery in Washington.
Maddock is a Member of the Order of Australia.
Writers:
Drouin-Le, Vy
Date written:
2009
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1934
- Summary
- Bea Maddock was one of the nation's most accomplished contemporary printmakers. She worked across a range of media including encaustic painting, screen-printing, drypoint, handmade paper and . She also had a brief teaching career at the School of Art, Launceston CAE. Perhaps her best known work is Terra Spiritus: With a Darker Shade of Pale, a monumental 52-sheet panorama of the entire coastline of Tasmania.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2016
- Age at death
- 82
Details
Latitude-36.840556 Longitude174.74 Start Date1932-01-01 End Date2016-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Auckland, New Zealand
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1932
- Summary
- Bolster founded the Aladdin Gallery, Elizabeth Bay, Sydney with Thomas Bolster in 1964 (some sources cite 1967). The gallery exhibited work from Asia and the Pacific as well as design and craft by Australian artists. The Bolsters moved to South Australia in 1982.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1-Jan-16
- Age at death
- 84
Details
Latitude-23.3782137 Longitude150.5134227 Start Date1931-01-01 End Date2016-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Rockhampton, Qld., Australia
- Biography
- Dell Claire Scott was born in Rockhampton in 1931, the second child of Barney Scott and his wife Bronwen neé Milner. Scott worked as a projectionist in Yeppoon but, starstruck by the movie business, he left the family for the United States. Her mother remarried Thomas Clarke, a labourer and timber-getter, and the family moved to a farming district some 26 kilometres north of Rockhampton. Dell attended The Caves State School where she demonstrated a love for drawing. She drew every day, usually in the evenings by the light of a carbide lamp. On completing primary school, she boarded in Rockhampton and worked in various businesses including a steam laundry and a couple of Greek cafés. When waitressing in one of these cafés she met her future husband Cliff Nash, a third-generation miner who worked as a fitter and turner for Mount Morgan Mine. They married in 1956 and daughter Leonie was born in 1957, their only child. Dell Nash found the mining town west of Rockhampton fascinating and often returned to the subject of Mount Morgan in her career as a painter. The family relocated to Rockhampton around 1963 when Cliff Nash obtained a position as chief engineer for the abattoir owned by T. A. Fields Pty Ltd at Nerimbera. Throughout the 1960s, her main focus was in turning the company house into a home, creating gardens and playing tennis. Health issues forced her to adopt a more sedate lifestyle and she joined the Rockhampton branch of the Royal Queensland Art Society. Her art practice did not flourish until Mervyn Moriarty founded the Australian Flying Arts School (subsequently Flying Arts/ Alliance) in Brisbane in 1971 and brought painting workshops to regional Queensland. Nash repeatedly credited Moriarty and AFAS with opening up her life with art. Bela Ivanyi, who had joined AFAS as co-pilot and tutor in 1974, instigated annual workshops near Yeppoon on the Capricorn Coast. The Cooee Bay Artist Workshops provided opportunities for ongoing professional development for Nash and fellow-artists such as Carmen Beezley-Drake, Linda Frawley, Rita Kershaw and Olga Morris for almost 4 decades. Ivanyi continued to mentor the largely regional clientele, bringing with him a series of high-profile contemporary guest tutors including Roy Churcher, Roy Orloff, Stanislaus Rapotec, Colin Lanceley, Fred Cress and Irene Amos. These influences gave Nash the confidence to paint boldly. AFAS and later Queensland Arts Council exhibitions in Brisbane included work by Nash. She became a prominent supporter of the Walter Reid Centre in Rockhampton, and exhibited regularly and collected prizes in local competitions such as Blackwater, Emerald, Gladstone, Gympie, Mackay and Rockhampton. In 1984, she enrolled in the Capricornia Institute of Advanced Education and completed a two-year course in etching, lino-print and screen-print, obtaining a Fine and Applied Arts Diploma. Painting landscapes, however, remained her favourite medium, largely due to her reverential connection to her environment. She sketched in ink, charcoal and pastel then completed the work in her studio.Her success was confirmed when Double Heads Yeppoon (1984), a work featuring the volcanic plug that juts into Rosslyn Bay, was selected for ‘Queensland / Works 1950–1985: A Survey of 80 Painters’ at the University Art Museum, University of Queensland. In the same year, the semi-abstract Rolling Hills, Tanby (1985) won the Bundaberg Sugar Company prize of $2000.The Queensland Arts Council and Rockhampton Art Gallery joined AFAS in showcasing Central Queensland contemporary artists and a number of her works were selected for travelling exhibitions, mostly to regional Queensland, in the 1990s and the early 2000s. Others were sold through local and Brisbane galleries. In all, Nash established a significant profile in the 1980s and 1990s.Dell and Cliff Nash owned a beach house in Zilzie, south of Cooee Bay, and retired there. Nash embraced the burgeoning coastal art scene. She continued to sell though Rockhampton galleries Biroo Gallery and Spiral Gallery; a gallery in Emu Park known as ‘the’ Gallery and The Mill Gallery in Yeppoon; and spaces such as Gnomes Restaurant, Rockhampton and Rydges Resort, Yeppoon. Rockhampton’s daily Morning Bulletin consistently featured and photographed Dell Nash as did, on occasion, Brisbane’s Courier-Mail. In 1996, Rockhampton Art Gallery honoured Nash, then aged 65, with a retrospective exhibition as part of a series to recognise the contribution of artists from Central Queensland.Nash continued painting and frequently won additional regional art competitions. She developed a canny sense of what might appeal: Cloncurry was awarded the Ernest Henry Art Prize, Cloncurry in 1996; Hills and Houses of Mount Morgan took the acquisitive $1000 prize in the Mount Morgan Inaugural Spring Fair in 1997. She engaged across the community, sharing skills and insights with TAFE students and high school students from St Ursula’s College in Yeppoon, Rockhampton Grammar, Rockhampton Girls Grammar and Rockhampton High School. Always keen to explore new perspectives, Nash experimented with modelling and exhibited a bust of her granddaughter Courtney in ‘The Quarry Studio exhibition’ in Walter Reid Art Centre Gallery in December 2004. She attended art workshops in Brisbane led by John Rigby and continued to participate in the Cooee Bay Artists Workshop. One of the last she attended was in 2013, under tutor Joe Furlonger, just three years before her death. Nash’s husband, who suffered from motor-neuron disease, died in 2011. She participated in ‘Reflections of Summer’, a group exhibition in The Mill Gallery, that same year. She continued to paint and exhibit after moving to Oak Tree Retirement Village, Yeppoon. The deep love of the natural world that was so apparent in the beginning of her career never left her. She died in 2016, aged 84. Art critic and gallery director Sue Smith, writing in an email in 2020, observed, ‘Looking again at her work after many years I’m quite struck by its strong similarity to work by another Rockhampton artist, Carmen Beezley-Drake. This might be partly explained by the fact that Dell and Carmen and others in CQ were regular attendees at the annual three-day Cooee Bay artists workshops – I think these two and others were very strongly influenced by the workshop tutors, especially Bela Ivanyi.’
Writers:
Lesley Synge
Date written:
2020
Last updated:
2020
- Born
- b. 22 October 1931
- Summary
- Dell Nash was a contemporary impressionist landscape artist of Central Queensland known for her instinctive feel for line and vivid colour and strong psychological and emotional response to physical locations. A student of the Australian Flying Art School in the 1970s she began exhibiting in the 1980s, collecting many awards in regional art shows.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 7-Jun-16
- Age at death
- 85
Details
Latitude-25 Longitude133 Start Date1930-01-01 End Date2016-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Australia
- Biography
- Carl Nielsen was born in Australia in 1930. He completed an Industrial Design Diploma at Melbourne Technical College (now RMIT) in 1952. He moved to Sydney, first working as a photographer, then in furniture and construction and then as a design assistant at Amalgamated Wireless Australasia (AWA) Ltd. After a few years working in London, Nielsen returned to Australia to set up his own design business in 1960. In 1965 Nielsen was elected Federal President of the newly established Industrial Design Institute of Australia (DIA) and he also began teaching at University of New South Wales (UNSW). In the 1970s his company became Nielsen Design Associates Pty Ltd (NDA) and produced many notable products. His spouse Judy Sternberg worked at NDA as a director/business manager. Nielsen became more involved in design education and in 1976 he was appointed as Head of Industrial Design and Principal Lecturer at Sydney College of the Arts (SCA). In 1984 he and his wife Judy resigned as Directors of NDA though the company continued. Nielsen completed a Masters degree at SCA before the design school was amalgamated with the Sydney Institute of Technology to become the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS). Nielsen was appointed Associate Professor in the Design Faculty at UTS. In 1990 Nielsen was a founding councillor of the Australian Academy of Design and in 1992 he was elected Life Fellow of the Industrial Design Institute of Australia. Nielsen retired from teaching at UTS in 1999, and was appointed an Adjunct Professor from 2000-2003.
Writers:
Powerhouse Museum
Michael Bogle
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2016
- Born
- b. 1930
- Summary
- Industrial designer and design educator. He studied at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and established a private practice as Carl Nielsen Design ca.1961, which became Nielsen Design Associates after 1971. Nielsen was a founding member of the Society of Designers for Industry, NSW Chapter and held many posts in national professional design organisations.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-16
- Age at death
- 86
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1929-01-01 End Date2016-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
- Biography
- painter and etcher, was born in Sydney. She studied at East Sydney Technical College until 1949, including etching under Herbert Gallop. However, she did not begin exhibiting her prints until 1963, when she showed at Joy Ewart 's Workshop Art Centre, Willoughby, which she had helped set up. Since its demise she has exhibited with Artarmon Galleries, e.g. Alan Bond Sydney Development etching c.1988, and Northern Approaches 1964-65, etching (edn 30), purchased from Artarmon Galleries by Joan Kerr.
This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1929
- Summary
- Painter and etcher Elizabeth Ursula Rooney helped set up Joy Ewart's Workshop Art Centre at Willoughby. She studied etching under Herbert Gallop.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- Mar-16
- Age at death
- 87
Details
Latitude-33.7962 Longitude151.2827 Start Date1927-01-01 End Date2016-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Manly, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Ceramic artist and designer, was born in Manly, NSW, and attended Balgowlah Heights Infants School on the first day it opened. He lived in Balgowlah until his early teenage years and remembers being the escort for the first Miss Manly Mardi Gras in the early 1960s. He studied sculpture and ceramics at East Sydney Technical College and is said to have been the first student to be awarded the new Ceramics Certificate at the 'Tech’ in 1964. His ceramic works are in major galleries, including the Powerhouse Museum and Manly Art Gallery & Museum. He has also worked as a commercial designer. In the late 1950s Alistair McCrea, CEO of the Australian Speedo Company, hired him to revolutionise its men’s leisurewear. His range of Speedo designs (1960-62), largely from the Powerhouse Museum’s archive, was shown in a retrospective at Manly Art Gallery 25 January-2 March 2002, combined with a fashion parade held in conjunction with the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.
Travis began flying huge kites in the 1970s and constructed them as suspended forms from the early 1980s, e.g. hanging along the nave of St Stephen’s Anglican Church, Newtown, for the first (and only) Sydney Festival of Mediaeval Music and Architecture in 1982 (when Joan Kerr gave the inaugural Blacket Memorial Lecture). From the 1960s onwards he has taught in countless workshops and classes on issues of colour, form and design.
Writers:
Staff Writer
stokel
Michael Bogle
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 1927
- Summary
- Travis is a noted colour consultant, kite-maker, ceramic artist and designer. Travis was hired by Alistair McCrea to revolutionise Speedo's range of men's leisurewear, now archived in the Powerhouse Museum. His large-scale kites have been adapted for interior design commissions and performance art events. He later lectured at the Shillito School of Design and the College of Fine Arts, Paddington.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2016
- Age at death
- 89
Details
Latitude51.507222 Longitude-0.1275 Start Date1923-01-01 End Date2016-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- London, England
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1923
- Summary
- Joynes was an embroiderer and needleworker working in Sydney. She was an active member of the Embroiderers Guild NSW, exhibiting in their exhibitions and other venues and publishing a number of publications on her art forms. With Prue Socha and Pat Langford she also founded the Creative Embroidery Association, Sydney. The Australian Museum relied on her skills as a textile conservator for a number of years.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1-Jan-16
- Age at death
- 93
Details
Latitude52.52 Longitude13.405 Start Date1918-01-01 End Date2016-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Berlin, Germany
- Biography
- sculptor, was born in Berlin, Germany, on 25 November 1918. In 1951 she came to Melbourne – a city which struck her then as a sculptural desert – and spent the next eight or nine years adjusting to her new life, having her children and augmenting the family income by making and designing jewellery. Only a few sculptures were produced during this period, but in 1959 King, who had mostly worked in wood and stone, started welding. Her initial training had been as a wood-carver in Germany (1935-38), then at the Royal Academy in London and the Glasgow School of Art. After the war she had worked in London, where she held her first solo exhibition in 1949. A chance to travel to France and New York in 1950 confirmed the latter as the most exciting city she had experienced. There she saw Jackson Pollock’s paintings and made contact with members of the New York School, as well as exhibiting in a group show. Back at London she met and married an Australian artist, Graham King.
King’s early steel sculptures reflected a break with the past in the demands made by her use of a new material and in the inspiration and challenge offered by the vast spaces of the Australian landscape. Later she began to make steel maquettes: some complete in themselves, some models for large-scale works. Her first commission for a large sculpture came in 1971 with the RAAF Memorial in Canberra, followed in the same year by the Fred Schonell Memorial Fountain at Queensland University. These projects introduced King to collaborative work with engineers and welders and to the sort of detailed preparation with models and computation drawings critical to the monumental Forward Surge (1974-82), commissioned by the Victorian Arts Centre. Other works commissioned since the mid-1970s include sculptures for the University of Melbourne, La Trobe University, the Australian National University, Woden Valley Hospital, the State Bank of Victoria, the NSW Royal Blind Society Sculpture Award, ICI House in Melbourne, the McClelland Gallery Sculpture Park and the State Superannuation Board.
From 1969 King held regular solo exhibitions and participated in group shows and, from 1980, in the Sculpture Triennial exhibitions. She was a founding member of the Group of Four in 1953 and its successor during the 1960s, Centre Five. Both organisations aimed to promote public understanding and acceptance of sculpture, particularly through lectures and exhibitions, and were critical in creating a more receptive climate for it. Her educational interests also involved her in lecturing in sculpture at the School of Early Childhood Studies (1961-75) and at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in 1976-87.
King is represented in institutional, state and regional galleries and in private collections in Australia, Europe, UK and USA. In 1984 she was awarded the Member of the Order of Australia. Further recognition of her contributions and achievements has come with honorary doctorates from Deakin University (1990) and RMIT (1993).
Writers:
Kirby, Sandy
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 25 November 1918
- Summary
- King is a prolific and successful sculptor. Her involvement in the Australian art scene throughout her career has been immense and she is well recognised through commissions and awards.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 23-Apr-16
- Age at death
- 98
Details
Latitude-42 Longitude173 Start Date1918-01-01 End Date2016-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- New Zealand
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1918
- Summary
- Higgs trained as a commercial artist, later working as a textile designer at Claudio Alcorso's Silk and Textile Printers, Sydney. In 1948, she returned to New Zealand to continue her career.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1-Jan-16
- Age at death
- 98
Details
Latitude51.507222 Longitude-0.1275 Start Date1957-01-01 End Date2015-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- London, England, UK
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 29 June 1957
- Summary
- Andrew Sayers was one of the great curatorial communicators and enthusiasts for Australian art. His time at the National Gallery of Australia led to significant redefinitions of Australian art. As well as his own painting, which he kept private for many years, he is also remembered as inaugural Director of National Portrait Gallery of Australia.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 11-Nov-15
- Age at death
- 58
Details
Latitude52.561928 Longitude-1.464854 Start Date1948-01-01 End Date2015-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- England, UK
- Biography
- This obituary was written by Grace Cochrane AM, independent curator and writer, Sydney; former senior curator of Australian decorative arts and design, MAAS, Powerhouse Museum.
Reproduced in part from [https://maas.museum/inside-the-collection/2015/03/04/obituary-john-smith-designer/]
It is very sad to hear of the death on 24 February 2015, of John Smith, a key figure in furniture designing and making in Australia for over 40 years. Smith and his partner, ceramic artist and designer Penny Smith, migrated to Tasmania as ‘10-pound Poms’, in 1970, and it was here that I met them after ‘crossing the ditch’ from New Zealand in 1972. After bravely battling recurrent bouts of cancer for some years, John Smith died with his family around him, at their weekender on Bruny Island.
Smith’s contribution to his field is respected and admired by many friends, colleagues and past students. He had moved to Hobart from the UK to take up a position as a design lecturer at the Tasmanian School of Art, later part of the University of Tasmania, combining teaching with his practice as a designer-maker, specialising in furniture design but also working on architectural and sculptural projects.
Born in Chesterfield in England in 1948, Smith completed a Pre-Diploma of Art at the Chesterfield School of Art in 1967 and a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Furniture), at the High Wycombe College of Art and Technology in Buckinghamshire, in 1969. From his initial appointment in Hobart as a lecturer in graphic design, he soon changed to teaching 3-Dimensional Design. He was appointed Head of the Design in Wood/Furniture Design program in 1981 and ran the department until retiring in 2007. In 1991 the Centre for Furniture Design was also established at the School and, under his direction, focussed on design research for industry with post-graduate students. The School says of his passing: “John’s influence as a designer of great skill and vision, as well as a teacher and mentor, has been exemplary and will be sadly missed by his colleagues.”
The initial 3-D Design program aimed to produce graduates able to apply design skills and ideas to the needs of industry, and was the first wood-oriented design program to be established in a university School of Art in Australia. It was broadened into the Design in Wood course in 1981, largely because it was seen that Tasmanian industry was not employing designers, and the notion of training a designer-maker who could, instead, sometimes contract out aspects of their work to industry was seen as the most realistic direction to take. To tailor the course more specifically to Tasmanian needs, it was decided to concentrate on local timber as a resource and also develop the making skills related to design. The Design in Wood course became part of the four-year degree program, and a number of those in the strong local resource of woodworkers were closely involved in planning and teaching.
As Smith said:
“an art school environment is an ideal position from which to study the designing-making process. If you want advice on whether to use finger-joints in the construction of a cabinet, don’t just ask a cabinet-maker who might say ‘use secret mitred dovetails’; also ask a sculptor who might say ‘why make it in wood?’ or ask the ultimate philosopher, the lay person in the street, who might just simply say ‘why bother’… If you are serious, you must have something to say and design is a language which helps you articulate your ideas.” (Smith in Cochrane, 1992, p 393)From 1990 the School offered a master’s degree, funded as part of the recent federal compensation to the Tasmanian government for the legislation that banned forest logging in the Lemonthyme Valley. During this time, a number of international furniture-makers were invited to teach there, and the School mounted the exhibitions Design in Wood, showing the work of graduates, students and staff in 1981; the Huon Factor, looking at the use of Tasmania’s special timber species in 1989; and in 1991 the exhibition Splitting Heads, in association with the first Hobart Design Triennial and the Critical Vision symposium.
Smith was a member of the Tasmanian Woodcraftsmen’s Association (founded 1976), and was involved in the Hobart Summer Schools of the early 1980s. He served on the boards of a number of organisations including the Visual Arts/Crafts Board and the Design Committee of the Australia Council; was a founding member of the Australian Academy of Design and one of the original members of the Furniture Designers Association (FDA). He received grants from the University of Tasmania, Arts Tasmania, the Australian Research Council and the Australia Council, including residencies in Barcelona and Los Angeles.
Throughout this time, Smith continued with his own designing and making practice. While exploring a Tasmanian identity in his work he was also interested in contrasts and connections with other places, while considering the sculptural relationships between furniture and architecture. Within his design practice he worked speculatively for exhibitions, produced products for a specialised retail market and carried out public and private commissions.
He was attracted to contemporary design forms as well as to the use of non-timber materials. In the mid-1970s he designed a large geodesic dome as a house, with triangular components made in fibreglass and perspex; he and Penny built it on Mt Nelson and lived there, working in their adjacent studios. Later, they built their second similar, smaller home on Bruny Island in the D’Entrecasteaux Channel. Penny explained:
“The Geo-dome Observatory came about from building experiments over the years, and has become the repository of the sum of our multiple parts. It’s a work in progress. Here reside the spoils of our respective endeavours – mementos of and from various friends and family members – of our travels and our art.”Over these decades Smith won a number of design prizes. In 1983, for example, he won a furniture design competition for restaurant and kiosk furniture, organised by the Crafts Council of Tasmania and judged by Tapio Periaenen (managing director of the Finnish Crafts and Design Council). His work is in the International Design Centre, Berlin, and in public collections in Poland and Japan. In Australia he is represented in the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney; Parliament House, Canberra; the National Gallery of Victoria; the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart; the Design Centre of Tasmania’s Wood Collection, Launceston; the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), Hobart; the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston; and the Hobart City Council. [...]
Writers:
Michael Bogle
Date written:
2019
Last updated:
2019
- Born
- b. 1 January 1948
- Summary
- Smith was a furniture design and maker who initially trained in the graphic arts, later turning to 3-D design. Appointed Head of Wood/Furniture Design at the University of Tasmania, Hobart in 1981, he went on to establish the Centre for Furniture Design, an influential for in furniture design and manufacture in Australia.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-15
- Age at death
- 67
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1945-01-01 End Date2015-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1945
- Summary
- Smith was a documentary film maker and a member of the Sydney Film-makers Coop. She founded her company, Smith Street Films, in 1987 and created her first film, "Eora" the following year. She produced films for the ABC, TAFE NSW and worked for the Aboriginal Legal Service. Her journalism appeared in the "Sydney Morning Herald" and the "Koori Mail".
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1-Jan-15
- Age at death
- 70
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1939-01-01 End Date2015-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1939
- Summary
- Vernon Treweeke has been called "the father of psychedelic art in Australia" and was a close associate of Brett Whiteley, who he had known from his school days. He also exhibited with the Central Street Gallery.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2015
- Age at death
- 76
Details
Latitude-45.874167 Longitude170.503611 Start Date1938-01-01 End Date2015-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Dunedin, New Zealand
- Biography
- Colin Lanceley, painter, sculptor and printmaker, was born in Dunedin, New Zealand in 1938 and raised in Australia, as his family relocated to Sydney in the following year. In 1954 at the age of 16 Lanceley was apprenticed as a colour photo engraver in the printing industry in Sydney. He also attended evening classes taught by Peter Laverty at North Sydney Technical College. Lanceley subsequently enrolled at the East Sydney Technical College in 1956, where he graduated with a Diploma in Art in 1960. After his student days, Lanceley, together with Michael Brown and Ross Crothall, formed the Imitation Realist Group (1961) and exhibited work at John Reed’s Museum of Modern Art in Melbourne and at the Rudy Komon Gallery in Sydney. This trio of artists enjoyed playing a game they called ‘aesthetic chess,’ where they made impromptu arrangements of the everyday contents of their pockets (for example coins, keys etc.), often laid out on a table at a cafe in Sydney’s Taylor Square.
As the recipient of the prestigious Helena Rubinstein Travelling Scholarship in 1964, Colin Lanceley travelled to Italy and the UK, where he remained throughout the 1960s and 1970s. He held his first London exhibition at Marlborough Gallery in February 1966. In the course of becoming a well-travelled artist, Lanceley embarked on numerous trips across Europe, visiting France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Poland, Hungary, Austria, Holland, Belgium and Crete. He spent extended periods working in France and Spain and during his time in England he lectured part-time at the Bath Academy of Art, Gloucestershire College of Art and Design, and the Chelsea School of Art, London. After his prize win at the Europe Prize for Painting held in Belgium in 1980, Lanceley continued his art practice in Burgundy rather than London. Lanceley married his wife Kay Morphett during his time aboard and they had two sons.
Lanceley, along with his family, returned to Australia in 1981, whereby he renounced the badge of expatriate artist. He was appointed as a lecturer at the City Art Institute in Sydney, serving in this post from 1983-86. Lanceley’s artistic reputation and influence was recorded in a 1987 publication by Craftsman House, with an introduction by Robert Hughes and an interview by William Wright, followed in the next year by an ABC film, ‘Colin Lanceley – Poetry of Place’ directed by Andrew Saw.
Significantly, in 1990 Colin Lanceley was awarded the honour of the Order of Australia (AO) for Service to Art. In the subsequent year he was presented with a Creative Arts Fellowship from the Australian Government and was also invited to lecture and exhibit at the Arts Club of Chicago, USA. Lanceley’s role as an honorary lecturer continued as he delivered the 1993 Lloyd Rees Memorial Lecture, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, in 2000 he lectured at the Bathurst Regional Gallery and in 2001 he was invited to lecture at the New York Studio School, Manhattan, USA. His artistic influence has also been furthered through the official roles in which he has serving, including his post as a member (appointed 1994) of the National Gallery of Australia’s Council and Chairman of the Advisory Board of the National Art School, Sydney (appointed 1998).
Lanceley has exhibited his work extensively since 1962 in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, Canberra, and internationally in England, Switzerland, Belgium, USA, Poland and Japan. A large survey exhibition of Lanceley’s work was held at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1987, followed by ‘Australian Collection Focus – Colin Lanceley’ in 2001. Lanceley’s work has also been included in several major group exhibitions including Perspecta at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1983, the Biennale of Sydney in 1986 and the Great Australian Art Exhibition in 1988.
Lanceley has received a range of awards during the course of his artistic career, including the Young Contemporaries Art Prize from the NSW Contemporary Art Society (1963), the Scottish Arts Council Prize at the 1967 Edinburgh Festival, two prizes at the 1968 Krakow International Print Biennale and the Europe Prize for Painting in Belgium in 1980. His artistic commissions have included designing mosaics for the Australian International Aquatic Centre, Homebush, Sydney (1994), painting the ceiling of the Lyric Theatre, Sydney (1998) and creating a large glass work for the County Court of Victoria, Melbourne (2002).
Lanceley’s iconic and brightly coloured works, presenting abstract scenes built up from fractured geometric shapes, incorporate three-dimensional crafted and painted wood elements fixed to canvas supports. Collage has served as the recurring basis of his work, which has also been inspired by literary sources, for example the writings of T.S. Eliot.
The art of Colin Lanceley is represented in prominent Australian and international collections including the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; Bezalel National Museum, Jerusalem; Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Paris, France; Contemporary Art Society and the Tate Gallery, London, England; Kunstvrein, Hamburg, Germany; Museum Narodowe, Warsaw, Poland; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, USA; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; and The National Gallery, Washington, USA.
Writers:
ecwubben
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 1938
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 30-Jan-15
- Age at death
- 77
Details
Latitude56.7823936 Longitude8.2414749 Start Date1935-01-01 End Date2015-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Agger, Jutland, Denmark
- Biography
- Leif Kristensen (1935–2015) was a Danish architect, educated at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts School of Architecture in Copenhagen, who came to Sydney in 1962 with plans (not successful) to work for Jørn Utzon’s team building the Sydney Opera House. Instead he joined the Government Architect’s Branch of the New South Wales Public Works Department, working as personal assistant to senior architect Peter Hall –– who later became one of the trio of government architects who completed the Opera House after Utzon’s departure. After four years of architecture school, Kristensen worked for Copenhagen architect Erik Ejlers. In 1964 he won registration to practice in New South Wales and in 1967 he and his second wife, Christine Wing, built a house and studio on bushland at Arcadia. As a government architect, Kirstensen’s most significant project was the Marsden Hospital for handicapped children in Parramatta – which won the NSW RAIA’s Sir John Sulman Medal (best public building in the state) for 1969–70.After leaving the government in 1969, he began a practice specialising in aged care facilities. His notable projects included Towradgi Park, Juliana Village (NSW merit award 1982), Norby Retirement Village and Abel Tasman Village.During the late 1980s, Kristensen again worked at the Sydney Opera House, reviewing and designing various fitouts and facility improvements.
Source—Drew, Philip. 2015. 'Leif Kristensen (1935–2015).’ Architecture Bulletin (Obituary), Spring edn, p. 36.
Writers:
Davina Jackson
Date written:
2016
Last updated:
2016
- Born
- b. 17 June 1935
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2015
- Age at death
- 80
Details
Latitude-32.916667 Longitude151.75 Start Date1934-01-01 End Date2015-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Newcastle, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1934
- Summary
- Cooper began his career as a landscape painter, later turning to illustration and paintings of birdlife. He illustrated the book "Portfolio of Australian Birds" (1967), "Parrots of the World" (1978) and other works.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-15
- Age at death
- 81
Details
Latitude-42 Longitude173 Start Date1933-01-01 End Date2015-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- New Zealand
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1933
- Summary
- Digby was an artist and designer working in costume and set design for the Australian Opera, the Australian Ballet and other performing arts companies. He also worked as a book illustrator producing covers for some Patrick White novels and children's books such as Bottersnikes & Gumbles and a treatment for Waltzing Matilda. He had a parallel career as a painter.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 10-Apr-15
- Age at death
- 82
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1932-01-01 End Date2015-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1932
- Summary
- Hood worked as a naval architect designing yachts and commercial vessels in Australia, the Pacific, Guyana and Bangladesh. He established a design firm in 1963. His work on the Hood class yachts produced a number of variants of Hoods (20s, 23s and more recently a Hood 28ML. He is celebrated as the designer of the America's Cup yacht, the 12 metre "Dame Pattie" launched in 1967.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-15
- Age at death
- 83
Details
Latitude-27.467778 Longitude153.028056 Start Date1931-01-01 End Date2015-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Brisbane, QLD, Australia
- Biography
- Elizabeth (Betty) Ann Dewar Cameron was born in Brisbane in 1931 the the second child and only daughter of William Dewar Cameron and Vida Margaret née Hutton. Her talent was evident at an early age as she was 13 years old when she was awarded The Sunday Mail Child Art Contest in 1944 and 3rd prize the following year. Cameron took her initial art studies under the tutelage of Patricia Prentice at Somerville House, Brisbane and also studied art privately with Caroline Barker and Richard Rodier Rivron.
The Younger Artists Group (YAG) of the Royal Queensland Art Society (RQAS) was founded in 1941 and several artists who have made a significant contribution to art in Queensland had their beginnings here: Patricia Prentice, John Rigby , Margaret Olley , Margaret Cilento, Peter Abraham, Harold Lane, Joy Roggenkamp and Betty Cameron herself. Cameron was regarded as one of the most promising of the Younger Artists Group members when she began to exhibit in 1948 as one of the four paintings she exhibited that year, 'Frosty morning’ was purchased by the Darnell Fine Arts Committee of the University of Queensland. Subsequently, Betty Cameron received the 2nd prize awarded by the RQAS as an encouragement award at the Annual General Meeting in 1949.
She became Chair of the Younger Artists Group and was instrumental in the push to establish a travelling art scholarship. By the middle of 1950 the RQAS decided to provide a grant up to £150, provided a matching amount of £150 was raised by the YAG by 30 June 1951. Their efforts (which included a exhibition of the works by Cameron, Betty Quelhurst, Peter Abraham, Kenneth Roggenkamp and Theodore Klettke at the Moreton Galleries, Brisbane in June 1950) were successful. On 19 September 1951 a selection committee comprising Dr Gertrude Langer, Robert Haines and Vida Lahey awarded her the scholarship. Her work was included in the 1951 'Exhibition of Queensland Art’, at the Queensland Art Gallery and also in the early exhibitions 'Queensland Artists of Fame and Promise’ and 'L. J. Harvey Memorial Prize for Drawing’.
With the assistance of YAG scholarship Betty Cameron studied in London under Stuart Ray at the South West Essex Technical School but such was her proficiency that, after two terms study, he suggested she apply to enroll at the prestigious Royal College of Art, London. She was successful and was awarded the Princess of Wales Scholarship for the best female student. An appeal conducted by the Courier Mail, Brisbane, in 1953 provided the additional funds so she was able to complete her three year course of study.
She returned to Brisbane in 1957 with her British husband, the painter Roy Churcher. Together they set up a studio and gave classes in the attic of the Royal Queensland Art Society’s premises in the School of Arts Building, Ann Street. At the end of the year they took over classes at St Mary’s Studio, Kangaroo Point when John Molvig departed for a tour to Melbourne and central Australia. Portraiture was her major interest when she returned to Brisbane although she occasionally painted landscapes. She exhibited a 'Portrait of an old woman’ in the Australian Women’s Weekly Portrait Prize in 1957 and an unfinished portrait of Robert Haines, the Director of the Queensland Art Gallery, in the Centenary Eisteddfod in 1959, together with a 'Portrait of J. V. Duhig’. Later that year, however, Cameron gave up painting to devote herself to rearing her four sons. After some years as a secondary school teacher she began to teach at Kelvin Grove Teachers’ College. In 1971, when her youngest son started school she became a full-time lecturer there. She took her academic career seriously enough to undertake an MA from the Courtauld Institute in London. Her thesis was on Jon Molvig, later the subject of a book and she was awarded the degree in 1977. Two years later she was appointed senior lecturer at what was then the Preston Institute of Technology in Melbourne, a move that entailed her leaving her family in Brisbane for the first year. Her outstanding abilities combined with her administrative and networking capacity led to her becoming head of school. In 1983 she was appointed Chair of the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council, and in 1984 was Deputy Chair of the Council. Her generous inclusive approach and administrative capacity brought her to the attention of Janet Holmes a Court and in 1987 she was invited to apply for the position of Director of the Art Gallery of Western Australia. In 1990 she was appointed Director of the National Gallery of Australia where she became known as “Betty Blockbuster” for the magnificent range of exhibitions she organised.After she retired in 1997 she made a series of television programs on art for ABC Television. She also returned to her first love of drawing as, with failing eyesight she revisited her favourite works of art and drew them to fix them in her mind. The resulting books, Notebooks and Australian Notebooks combine fine drawing with written observations that are like love letters to art.
Research Curator , Queensland Heritage
Writers:
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2011
Last updated:
2015
- Born
- b. 11 January 1931
- Summary
- Betty Churcher, who was the first woman to head both a state and national art gallery, had an extraordinary career in arts education and administration in Australia. This was a change in direction from the expectations of her early years when she was regarded as one on Queensland's most exciting young painters. In her "retirement" she returned to art, and to drawing
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 31-Mar-15
- Age at death
- 84
Details
Latitude-32.916667 Longitude151.75 Start Date1929-01-01 End Date2015-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia
- Biography
- advertising and comic strip artist, was born in Newcastle, NSW. After completing his schooling at Cooks Hill Intermediate High, he became a window dresser for a soft-goods firm, then an artist in the company’s advertising department. He moved to Sydney in 1945 where he worked with department stores and advertising agencies. Then he worked for years for H. John Edwards, drawing over 150 issues of Tim Valour (the first few issues included a pirate adventure Rip Weston by Les Such), about 50 issues of The Crimson Comet , many issues of Biggles , and fillers and covers. He produced Catman in 1958 for Frew Publications and Captain Strato for Young’s Merchandising. In 1959 he did The Phantom Commando for Horwitz Publications and began work on Air Hawk and the Flying Doctors . The strip appeared simultaneously in the Sun-Herald and the Perth Weekend Mail and was subsequently syndicated internationally for 8 years. A series of Air Hawk comics were published from the late 1950s to early 1960. The strip ceased production in 1986 (though reprinted in the SMH until the early 1990s). Dixon won the 1985 Stanley for Best adventure/illustrated strip for Air Hawk .
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1929
- Summary
- Prolific Australian post WWII comic book and newspaper strip artist ("Air Hawk and the Flying Doctor") and others. Worked on storyboards, advertising, comics after travelling to the USA in 1986.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 7-Jul-15
- Age at death
- 86
Details
Latitude-31.9559 Longitude115.8606 Start Date1927-01-01 End Date2015-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Perth, WA, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 23 November 1927
- Summary
- John Baily was Director of the Art Gallery of South Australia during the Dunstan years. Nationally he endeared himself to artists and curators for his intellectual generosity as the first Chair of the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council. He is also the painter of lyrically beautiful landscape watercolours.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 19-Nov-15
- Age at death
- 88
Details
Latitude50.0619474 Longitude19.9368564 Start Date1926-01-01 End Date2015-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Krakow, Poland
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1926
- Summary
- Gross was a film animator, director and producer. He became a film maker in Poland in 1947, later moving to Israel in 1950 working as a cinema photographer. In Israel, he began his independent film career producing unconventional imagery and topics. Immigrating to Australia in 1968, he first worked in TV, later returning to film. After 1977, Yoram Gross Films created feature length animated films.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-15
- Age at death
- 89
Details
Latitude53.8 Longitude-2.6 Start Date1925-01-01 End Date2015-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Lancashire, England, United Kingdom
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1925
- Summary
- Colligan was a painter and designer with training from colourist Phyllis Shillito, East Sydney Technical College. He became an interior designer and colour consultant founding Glasebrooks Paints Colour Studio. He later moved into theatre and TV. In 1982, he became the President of the Royal Art Society of NSW and was active in the visual and performing arts in the Port Stephens and Newcastle areas.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-15
- Age at death
- 90
Details
Latitude51.7687323 Longitude19.4569911 Start Date1924-01-01 End Date2015-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Lodz, Poland
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1924
- Summary
- Wrobel was a private gallery curator ( Woolloomooloo Art Gallery ) and collector working with his partner Elinor Wrobel until his death. He also trained in jewellery design and founded a firm "French Jewellery" (date unknown) and after learning to sail, he began to design and build sailboats campaigning with his yacht Mirrabooka.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-15
- Age at death
- 91
Details
Latitude-19.8516101 Longitude133.2303375 Start Date1924-01-01 End Date2015-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Kabararrji (Bentinck Island) , NT, Australia
- Biography
- Born circa 1924 on Bentinck Island (Kabararrji )in the Gulf of Carpentaria, Gabori grew up traditionally hunting, fishing and gathering. In the 1940s after a combination of drought and rising tides led to conflict among the Kaiadilt people, missionaries deported the entire population to Mornington Island where she lived for many years. Originally a weaver, Gabori first began exhibiting her paintings in 2005 at the Mornington Island Arts and Crafts Centre. She had a solo exhibition in 2005 at the Woolloongabba Art Gallery and was a finalist in the Xstrata Indigenous Emerging Artist Award in 2006. Her work was subsequently purchased for the permanent collection of the Queensland Art Gallery and in 2012 her work was included in the National Gallery of Australia’s National Indigenous Art Triennial.The income from her painting enabled her to return, with other women, to Bentinck Island.As is the custom, on her death her name was changed to Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda.Mirdidingkingathi means someone born in MirdidingkinkiJuwarnda is a dolphin, her totem.
Writers:
Allas, Tess
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2007
Last updated:
2020
- Born
- b. c.1924
- Summary
- As with other Kaiadilt women, Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori wove grass nets and carved coolamons for many years before she began to paint. Her first exuberant abstract paintings were exhibited in 2005 at the Mornington Island Arts and Crafts Centre, and soon attracted national attention. In 2016, the year after her death, QAGOMA honoured her with a retrospective survey of her work.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 12-Feb-15
- Age at death
- 91
Details
Latitude-33.283333 Longitude149.1 Start Date1924-01-01 End Date2015-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Orange, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1924
- Summary
- Dixon was a National Art School trained artist and designer. He had a teaching career in Bathurst NSW, later Goulburn NSW. He worked across a range of media including pottery, sculpture and print-making. Retiring to Canberra, he continued his painting and drawing, largely based on nature studies. He remained an active environmentalist throughout his career.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-15
- Age at death
- 91
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1922-01-01 End Date2015-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, VIC, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1922
- Summary
- Jennie Boddington was the first curator of photography to be appointed in Australia. She was responsible for the National Gallery of Victoria's photography collection from her appointment in 1972 to her retirement in 1994. She was also a distinguished contributor to Australian cinema
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 15-Nov-15
- Age at death
- 93
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1922-01-01 End Date2015-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne
- Biography
- Ray Crooke is one of that generation of Australian artists who was only able to complete their art education after serving in the armed forces during World War II. As with fellow post-war artists Guy Warren and Tony Tuckson that war time experience shaped both his sensibility and his approach to art. Crooke was the second son of Gordon Crooke, an art loving accountant, and his wife Euphemia a nurse who had experienced a childhood on Aboriginal missions. After leaving school at the standard age of 15 he worked in an advertising agency while taking classes at Swinburne Technical College.In 1940 he enlisted in the Australian Army, first serving in the Victorian Scottish Regiment before being transferred to Western Australia. His unit was then transferred to northern Queensland coastal bases, a move that gave him a lifelong love of the tropics.After the War the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme enabled Crook to complete his art studies at Swinburne, where he was taught by Sir William Dargie, Rodger James and Alan Jordan among others.In 1951 he married June Bethell and in pursuit of the strong clear colours of the north, Crooke moved north, first to Cairns, then Thursday Island and later to Yorkey’s Knob. The tropics gave him his subject matter and coloured his approach to art, but there was little chance of becoming a professional artist so far away from the city, so in about 1955 the family returned to Melbourne.After a string of successful exhibitions in commercial galleries throughout the 1960s and after his portrait of George Johnston was awarded the 1969 Archibald Prize, he felt confident enough to permanently leave the city and return to north Queensland, eventually settling in Cairns.
Writers:
staffcontributor
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2011
Last updated:
2016
- Born
- b. 12 July 1922
- Summary
- Crooke began his career as an artist at a Melbourne advertising agency while taking courses as Swinburne Technical College. After 1939-45 war service, he taught, painted and worked as a textile designer. His first solo show was held in 1959 and he became well-regarded for his evocations of Australia's tropical north. He had considerable success locally and internationally, later settling in Cairns.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 5-Dec-15
- Age at death
- 93
Details
Latitude-27.467778 Longitude153.028056 Start Date1921-01-01 End Date2015-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Brisbane, Qld, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1921
- Summary
- Williams was a career Royal Australian Navy officer (retired 1971) who also co-founded the surfwear brand Pratts with his brother Bill, making board shorts and bikinis from a factory in Long Reef NSW on Sydney's northern peninsula. Pratts had retail outlets in Dee Why and Chatswood.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-15
- Age at death
- 94
Details
Latitude-33.8225666 Longitude151.1923402 Start Date1921-01-01 End Date2015-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- St Leonards, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1921
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- May-15
- Age at death
- 94
Details
Latitude48.2 Longitude16.366667 Start Date1920-01-01 End Date2015-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Vienna, Austria
- Biography
- painter, was born Judit Kaszab in Vienna, Austria, on 15 August 1920, to Hungarian parents Imre Kaszab and Ilona, née Kont. Her parents soon separated and Judith went with her mother back to Hungary to live with her grandmother. She wanted to be an artist from an early age, even though she had little experience of galleries and paintings; when she was twelve (1932) she drew a charcoal portrait of her grandmother (reproduced in Klepac). She began her studies at the Academy of Art in Prague in 1938; the following year she married Jancsi (John) Kampfner, a man twice her age.
The outbreak of World War II changed everybody’s life; in the Kampfners’ case, Jancsi was sent to forced labour camps in Poland and Kiev and Judith’s mother was sent to Auschwitz. Judith worked in a factory under the assumed name of her Catholic maid Maria Koperdak, putting her artistic skills to use after hours as a forger of papers and passports. When the war ended, her husband returned; their first child was born on New Year’s Eve 1945.
Life in post-war Europe had little to offer them. The Kampfners and their (now two) sons obtained permission to migrate to Australia. They arrived at Sydney in 1951, living first at Bondi and later Woollahra. Judith soon made contact with other Sydney artists – including Michael Kmit, Paul Haefliger, Jean Bellette and Desiderius Orban—and established herself as a portrait painter. Although she has revisited Europe several times, undertaking several important portrait commissions there and gaining an international reputation, she became an Australian citizen in 1957.
Judith Cassab is a prolific and accomplished artist, able to paint portraits in a single sitting if necessary. Her portraits have won many awards, several of them twice: the Archibald Prize (1960 and 1968), the Australian Women’s Weekly women’s prize (1955 and 1956) and the Helena Rubinstein Prize (1964 and 1965). Her exhibition credits are prodigious. Judith Cassab was awarded the Order of Australia in 1988, the Bicentennial year.
Writers:
Callaway, AnitaKerr, Joan
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
1992
- Born
- b. 1920
- Summary
- Painter born in Austria. Resident of Sydney she is a prolific and accomplished artist, able to paint portraits in a single sitting if necessary. Cassab has also worked as a muralist providing a mural for the Rex, Potts Point, Sydney in 1953.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2015
- Age at death
- 95
Details
Latitude-32 Longitude147 Start Date1920-01-01 End Date2015-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- New South Wales
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1920
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-15
- Age at death
- 95
Details
Latitude-33.7962 Longitude151.2827 Start Date1920-01-01 End Date2015-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Manly, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Peter Rushforth was born in Manly, NSW in 1920. From 1942 to 1945 he spent three years as a prisoner of war in Changi. On his return to Australia he enrolled in the arts course at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and continued his studies at the National Gallery School in Melbourne. In 1951 he relocated to Sydney where initially enrolled in a sculpture course at East Sydney Technicl College, but soon became their first full time teacher in ceramics. The same year he set up a studio at Beecroft in the northern suburbs. He travelled extensively in the UK, Denmark and the USA on a Churchill Fellowship and spent time working in Japan. In 1966, he moved to Church Point, NSW. In 1978, on his retirement, he relocated his studio to Shipley in the Blue Mountains and became a full-time potter. He was a maker of high-fired stoneware vessels in a woodfired kiln with chun, tenmoku, limestone and ash glazes, wax resist, brush or inlay decoration. In 1985, he was awarded the Order of Australia for his services to ceramics and, in that year, the National Gallery of Victoria held a retrospective exhibition of his work, which is marked with an impressed or incised 'PR’.
Writers:
Judith Pearce
7write6
Date written:
2013
Last updated:
2021
- Born
- b. 4 December 1920
- Summary
- Peter Rushforth's pots are a synthesis of European and Japanese aesthetic influences. He came to an appreciation of the Japanese Mingei (folk) aesthetic in unusual circumstances as a prisoner of war in Singapore during the 1939-45 War. Later he became one of the nation's most influential ceramics teachers.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 22-Jul-15
- Age at death
- 95
Details
Latitude-33.88477 Longitude151.22621 Start Date1915-01-01 End Date2015-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Paddington, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- caricaturist, cartoonist, illustrator, journalist and cartoon historian, was born Anthony Raftopoulos in Paddington, NSW, son of Denis Raftopoulos who migrated to Australia in 1902 but returned to Greece for a wife (and a war). Tony Rafty, as he was known, was educated at Rose Bay Public School and the Central Technical College, Ultimo, until forced to leave at the age of 14 due to his parents’ poverty. He and his brother Stan then worked as golf caddies.
Tony’s first job as a cartoonist in 1939 was with the Referee (a sporting paper then in Ezra Norton’s stable, along with Smith’s Weekly ). He joined the Sun Associated Newspapers group in 1940 but enlisted in the AIF in 1941. He was a war artist and correspondent in New Guinea until discharged as medically unfit with malaria seven months before the end of the war. A month later he was back in New Guinea as artist-correspondent for Associated Newspapers (also other WWII stations: see file). Some of his wartime drawings were reproduced in Pix (see file). In 1948 he became the first Australian to draw an Australian comic book (acc. Lindesay). Ron Tarrant in the Secret Service , compiled from comic strips drawn in 1940-41, was published by the NSW Bookstall Coy, acc. Rafty c.v. He also created the strip Mugs the golfer .
He freelanced from 1957 to 1962 then rejoined the Sun and Sun-Herald as cartoonist, illustrator and sporting cartoonist, remaining until 1981. A book of caricatures, Tony Rafty’s Golfing greats with text by Terry Smith, was published by Rigby, Adelaide in 1983 (ML 796.3520922/1). He claims to have done about 20,000 drawings over half a century; 4,000 form the main part of his own 'World of Caricature’ collection. (Some were offered to the SLNSW in 1998 by his son, under the Taxation Incentive for the Arts scheme.) ML (PXD 764) has a collection of 8 placemats for the Australian War Correspondents Association Anzac Day luncheons 1989-97 and about 56 for Journalists’ Club dinners from 1989 to 1998 drawn by Rafty and other artists.
A noted cartoon historian, Rafty organised the exhibition Fifty Years of Australian Cartooning at the Sydney Journalists’ Club in 1964. It moved to Farmers’ Blaxland Gallery (11-19 September) and interstate to the Myer Mural Hall, Melbourne (November). 150 artists were represented, with biographical and career details in the catalogue compiled by Rafty and Brodie Mack . As Lindesay points out, it was the most comprehensive exhibition of Australian cartoons up to this time.
Rafty was elected president of the Australian Black and White Artists’ Club in 1975. He claims he was a founding member, presumably this must have been when the club was reformed in the 1930s as he’s not on the 1924 list (see Harry Weston ). He was smocked in 1988, elected a life member in 1991 and awarded a Silver Stanley in 1997. He continues to do cartoons, exhibiting The Wik time bomb , published in the Greek Herald in 1997, in Bringing the House Down: 12 Months of Australian Political Humour (Canberra: National Museum of Australia/ Old Parliament House exhibition, 1997), cat. 96. He is also a longtime member and former president of the Sydney Journalists’ Club and the War Correspondents’ Association. OAM awarded 1991. In 1997 he had been married for fifty years to Sheila; they have five children.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1915
- Summary
- Caricaturist, cartoonist, illustrator, journalist and cartoon historian. Rafty joined the Sun Associated Newspapers group in 1940 but enlisted in the AIF in 1941.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2015
- Age at death
- 100
Details
Latitude-24.838632 Longitude151.1093424 Start Date1955-01-01 End Date2014-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Monto, Qld, Australia
- Biography
- Gordon Bennett came to art as a mature adult, graduating in Fine Art at the Queensland College of Art, Brisbane, in 1988. He quickly established himself as an artist equipped both intellectually and aesthetically to address issues relating to the role of language and systems of thought in forging identity.
Much of Bennett’s work is concerned with mapping alternative histories and ideas in post-colonial Australia. He rejects racial labels and stereotypes. In 1995, as an act of personal liberation from preconceptions about his Indigenous heritage, Bennett created an ongoing, pop-art inspired alter ego, John Citizen, whom he says is 'an abstraction of the Australian Mr Average, the Australian Everyman’.
In the late 1990s, Bennett began a 'dialogue’ with the work of the late Jean-Michel Basquiat, a New York artist seen by Bennett as someone outside Australia who shared both a similar western cultural tradition and an obsession with drawing, semiotics and visual language. Bennett’s 'Notes to Basquiat’ culminated in a series of works produced in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York in 2001. Bennett’s subsequent 'Camouflage’ series (2003) references the war in Iraq and issues of secrecy. His most recent abstract works extend the notion of camouflage, dissolving the appearance of difference.
Since 1989, Bennett has held over 50 solo exhibitions and achieved national and international recognition for his work, with representation in biennales in Sydney, Venice, Kwangju, Shanghai and Cuba, and in major exhibitions of contemporary art in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, Prague (Czech Republic), Italy, Denmark, Canada, South Africa and Japan.
The Art of Gordon Bennett by Ian McLean (including an essay by Gordon Bennett), was published by Craftsman House in 1996. Bennett has received several major awards, including the Moët & Chandon Australian Art Fellowship (1991) and the John McCaughey Memorial Art Prize, National Gallery of Victoria (1997). His work is held in all major public art collections in Australia.
Writers:
Murray-Cree, Laura
Date written:
2006
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 9 October 1955
- Summary
- Acclaimed contemporary Indigenous artist, Gordon Bennett's work explores the role of language and systems of thought in forging identity. Much of his work is concerned with mapping alternative histories and ideas in post-colonial Australia.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 3-Jun-14
- Age at death
- 59
Details
Latitude12.5433216 Longitude104.8144914 Start Date1952-01-01 End Date2014-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Cambodia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1952
- Summary
- Bun Heang was an artist and illustrator who immigrated to Australia in 1980. His later career developed in the field of political cartoons with a particular interest in Cambodian developments. His work appeared in films, magazines, books and on-line.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-14
- Age at death
- 62
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1947-01-01 End Date2014-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1947
- Summary
- Robert Hunter is best known for his rigorous works, painted in shades of white. He was one of the artists exhibiting in The Field of 1968.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2014
- Age at death
- 67
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1943-01-01 End Date2014-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- This entry is a stub. Please help the DAAO by submitting a full biography
Writers:
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2014
Last updated:
2014
- Born
- b. 1943
- Summary
- Robert Jacks is one of the first generation of Australian artists to take nourishment from the post war American artists, rather than looking to Europe. He was one of the exhibitors at The Field in 1968
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- Aug-14
- Age at death
- 71
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1937-01-01 End Date2014-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- This entry is a stub. Please help the DAAO by writing a full entry
Writers:
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2014
Last updated:
2014
- Born
- b. 17 December 1937
- Summary
- As well as an extensive career as an artist Bill Wright became one of the most influential curators of contemporary art in Australia. After directing the 1982 Biennale of Sydney he was appointed deputy director of the Art Gallery of NSW where he mentored a generation of younger curators.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 31-Oct-14
- Age at death
- 77
Details
Latitude-37.805278 Longitude145.035833 Start Date1936-01-01 End Date2014-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Kew, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 12 October 1936
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 20-Feb-14
- Age at death
- 78
Details
Latitude-41.441944 Longitude147.145 Start Date1936-01-01 End Date2014-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Launceston, TAS, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1936
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 29-Mar-14
- Age at death
- 78
Details
Latitude51.507222 Longitude-0.1275 Start Date1931-01-01 End Date2014-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- London, , United Kingdom
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1931
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2014
- Age at death
- 83
Details
Latitude-33.7156888 Longitude150.3317665 Start Date1930-01-01 End Date2014-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Leura, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Professor Joan Kerr:Cartoonist and illustrator, produced cartoons and greeting cards in the late 1950s and 1960s. The Sydney Bulletin and London Punch were his chief cartoon outlets, but he also drew them for the Spectator and Lilliput , while in Australia his wordless, witty and satirical line drawings also appeared in K.G. Murray publications. Harvey’s Christmas cards were typically Australian versions on traditional English Yuletide themes: a kangaroo eating a plum pudding, Santa sunbaking or water-skiing, a man with a horse and buggy taking a Christmas tree to his rural Oz home (the NGA has an almost complete set). In the 1990s-2000s he designed, researched and wrote broadsheet Pictorial City Guides, the latest being Berlin (2001.
*Biography by Dr. Helen L. Hewson. *A student at Melbourne High School from 1944-1946, Tony Harvey indulged his passion for drawing and cartooning and dreamt of seeing the world. He read widely, borrowed from the Melbourne Public Library, frequented the National Gallery of Victoria and Ellis Bird’s secondhand bookshop discovering old engravings and copies of Punch, The Studio and Art in Australia. For a taste of the avant grade there was Gino Nibbi’s Leonardo Bookshop which played a pivotal role in freeing up literature and art in Australia throughout the 1930 and 1942 by stocking the latest art books and magazines. Critical of the conservative art scene, Nibbi published Stream, edited by Cyril Pearl with Dominic Leon’s Vorticist-inspired covers.In 1947 Harvey gained a free place to study commercial art at Melbourne Technical College where Alan Warren, Harold Freedman, Eric Smith and Ed Heffernan were teaching drawing, printmaking and lithography. Melbourne’s strong printmaking tradition can be traced to the NGV’s acquisition in 1891 of works by Durer, Rembrandt, Whistler and other artists. Familiar with the Claude Flight inspired relief printing among local printmakers during the 1940s, Harvey was also drawn to the work of British artists: John Piper, Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden and Paul and John Nash. In 1948 the Old Vic theatre Co. starring Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh staged Sheridan’s The School for Scandal in Melbourne. Cecil Beaton’s sets, incorporating gigantic line engravings of Georgian houses, were a spectacular introduction to theatre design for the young art student.
With savings from designing for Fortuna Fabrics, Sydney and drawing filmstrips for the Maxcraft Projection Manufacturing Co., Harvey sailed in 1951 to Europe. On reaching London he sent three cartoons to Punch signed 'John Harvey’ which were accepted. An invitation to submit drawings to a special exhibition of _Punch _illustrators in New York followed and his cartoons were reprinted in Pick of Punch Annual (1951- 2: 44,142,197). His work also appeared in Lilliput, Spectator and London Opinion.
The country’s emergence from the war years was celebrated with the Festival of Britain. In addition to the V&A and Tate and National Gallery collections the new Arts Council exhibited sixty painters and twelve sculptors in a show of British art over the preceding 25 years. At this time and of interest to Harvey was the modern graphic design infused with Scandinavian and European trends as seen in Graphis and _Gerbraugraphik, the art of the Polish poster school and the drawings of Tomi Ungerer and Andre Francois. From America there was the New Yorker with the cartoons of James Thurber and Saul Steinberg. Furthermore in Britain the union of text, illustration, typography and printing pioneered by William Morris flourished through the private presses, Nonesuch, Curnow, Golden Cockerel and others.
After sketching around Europe and Britain, Harvey returned to Australia during 1953 via the USA. In Melbourne the printmaking scene was vital and experimental centering on Harold Freedman, Tate Adams, Geoff Barwell and Ian Armstrong at Melbourne Tech. Harvey chose instead to design and print greeting cards for distribution on a larger scale than had been attempted by local artists like Helen Ogilvie and Harry Raynor.
Tony married Prudence Boileau, the elder daughter of Sir Gilbert Boileau and Chica Edgeworth Somers (later Lowe) in 1954. They moved to Richmond where he set up his commercial 'art card’ printery, first at 283 Bridge Road Richmond and later at 609 Bridge Road. He produced over 250 card designs using lino cuts and letterpress and ranging from religious art, native flora and fauna, Australia’s colonial history and Aboriginal designs as well as a unique and humorous exploitation of an antipodean Christmas celebrated by kangaroos, Santas and the traditional fare turned upside down,'down under’.
Max Harris wrote in the Observer(17 October 1959)of thethe superiority of Australian cards over their English equivalents: “...Australian designers have a fresh and unexploited slant on the festive season… The greatest designer is Anthony Harvey, who does his own colour printing with unusually rich and vibrant inks. He is the first artist to have taken Australian motifs of the conventional kind and given them high wit and sophistication…”
In an interview with Helen Hewson in August 1987, Harvey recalled his working method:
“First I cut out the design using lino-cutting and cheap Japanese woodcarving tools, gem razor blades and an umbrella rib. A design would often require 2 or 3 or 4 blocks to create the colour range and I would ink up the first image in black and print it onto a further piece of lino in preparation for cutting the next block and to ensure exact registration. To give variety to the designs and range of cards fine lines were introduced by letterpress and photo-processed blocks were made from my drawings, and used with linocut blocks.
“I had an electric American Chandler and Price platen press and it was all rather dangerous because there was the possibility of crushing one’s hand as you fed the card between the block and the ink rollers. It was a major problem ensuring the rich coloured oil based inks had dried properly before a card design was returned for further colour printing,or if complete, for folding. I invented several drying machines over the years.
“The second printery, an old dairy with brick walls and cement floor, was very cold in the winter. The press and printing functions were along one wall with a central bench for folding and sorting cards for storage or despatch. Along two walls were floor to ceiling shelving accommodating drying racks, labelled boxes and the numnbered printing blocks easily identifiable for future reruns.
“Although it might seem from the diversity of the designs that other artists were employed, I was a solitary worker and engaged family members to assist with folding and packing. I handled my own distribution using sample cards in albums which I showed to prospective buyers.
Anthony Harvey Greeting Cards were sold exclusively throughout Australia by bookshops, art galleries and craft shops, including Primrose Pottery, Isa Johnstone, Georges Pty.Ltd. Hicks Atkinson, Hawthorn Galleries, Norman Robb, Margareta Webber, Hill of Content, Burnes and Oates and the Literature Bookshops in Melbourne; Marion Hall Best, the Roycroft, Carl Plate’s Notanda Gallery, David Jonesand the Blaxland Galleries in Sydney; Mary Martin Bookshop in Adelaide and Fuller’s in Tasmania. The cards featured in newspapers and magazines including, Australian Letters (Dec.1959), Walkabout (December 1960)and Vogue and Australian House and Garden.
The advent of the UNICEF and charity cards made inroads into Harvey’s exclusive art market and he closed his printery in 1959 and joined Speciality Press, North Clayton as a production planner and graphic artist. A year later, accredited for his 'industrial experience’ he was accepted at Collingwood Technical School as a temporary art teacher. He moved with his wife and two young daughters, Georgia and Tracy, from Richmond to St Kilda.
Continuing as a teacher, in 1962 the family had settled at Eltham in a cottage on the property of builder/designer Alistair Knox. Harvey designed and printed a range of silkscreened cards for loyal clients which incorporated three and four colours producing softer tones and subtle gradations of colour and depth.
Reflecting on a decade of extraordinary creativity Phillip Adams observed:
“Anthony Harvey’s cards…were way ahead of their time. Splendid pieces of design evoking for me, the great graphic work of Eastern Europe… in particular of Poland. (Adams-Hewson, 5 Dec.1977.)
In 1989 the National Gallery of Australia acquired An Album of Greeting Cards 1954-1964 for its Australian Print Collection. Blue Island Press, Sydney began reprinting Anthony Harvey cards in 2014.
Harvey taught art and craft at Watsonia Technical School and attended evening classes at RMIT and Toorak Teachers’ College part-time to gain further qualifications. In 1963 he was appointed Head of Advertising Art at Prahran Technical College and also produced the Commercial Art Course for Stott’s Technical Correspondence College, Melbourne. Returning to Watsonia Tech. the following year he remained in the Victorian Technical School system until 1974. When he resigned to concentrate on his own work, he was the Executive Officer of the Art and Craft Teachers’ Association and the Teachers’ Representative on the Four Person Standing Committee for Art in Technical Schools.
Drawing on his teaching experience he wrote and illustrated The Australian boys’ book of crafts, pets, sports and hobbies (1968). With Prudence Harvey, a companion book for girls (1970) soon followed as well as New Zealand editions in 1971.
Throughout the 1960s Harvey drew for Punch, Spectator and the Sydney Bulletin. From this period a cartoon based on Sebastian Brandt’s woodcut The Banquet given by Dido to Aeneas in which Harvey depicted the plates and wine cups sliding off the table with the accompanying caption: “It’s the way they draw these wretched tables!” featured in The Bulletin Book(1966). Years later E.H.Gombrich used the drawing in The Image and the Eye (1944) as an example demonstrating problems of perspective in medieval art. Professor Joan Kerr noted: “Anthony Harvey is an interesting cartoonist—oddly un-Australian despite the subject matter, I felt, probably because he is so sophisticated and understated. (Kerr-Hewson, 11 March 2002).
Harvey designed an egg container in the shape of a hen, which was hand-made from strawboard and painted. Its popularity led to a version in clay from which a brass mould was made. Thousand of birds were produced in papier mache from the mould and were brightly decorated by all the family, in particular his father, Stan Harvey. The birds sold throughout Australia, was an essential ingredient for all designer kitchens according to Belle House and Garden and _Vogue.
Tony and Prue were divorced in 1978. He moved to East Melbourne and joined Australian Industrial Publications where he spent the next thirteen years illustrating technical manuals for battleships,aircraft and power stations, much of it classified. Independently he published ARTCARDS (1985), a folio of postcards including his own linocuts along with works by Durer, Aldus Munutius, Yasukini. He researched, wrote and illustrated The Melbourne Book(Hutchinson, 1982) with over 400 black and white drawings which was launched by Don Dustan, Minister for Tourism in Victoria in the Melbourne Town Hall on 30 November 1982.
Harvey’s final project was a series of Pictorial City Guides. “I design the sort of guide I would like to have for a visit to a city. An overview with clues to its character and shape, pictures of the significant features—historical, cultural and architectural” The drawing were always views of the front elevation and based on photographs and sketches made on location. The guides were created on a Macintosh LC11 with a simple MacDraw 11 program with each city contained on the one frame. This was compressed on a disc, turned into a negative by laser technology and used to produce a printing plate for photo-offset production. Tones were made with 1800 dots to the inch. Twenty-four world city guides were designed and sold in Australia, UK and the USA until production ceased in 2007. Over many years as a designer Harvey always adapted to innovative changes in printing technology.
Initially Anthony Harvey Pictorial Maps was based in Carlton where Tony lived with Ann Morton until her death in 1993. Subsequently he moved his studio to Port Melbourne where he joined Alison Rowlands who later became his wife. He died at Port Melbourne on 27 July 2014 and is survived by his wife and daughters, Georgia Phillips who is currently the custodian of his sketchbooks and albums and Tracy Harvey, an actress, writer, musician and artist.
.
'
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
drhle_hewson
drhlehewson
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2017
- Born
- b. 25 May 1930
- Summary
- Harvey was a designer,sculptor, cartoonist, illustrator, print-maker, map maker and author. He also had an extensive career as an educator in Victoria. Especially noted for his wit, humor and economy of line in his Punch and Bulletin cartoons and vibrant range of linocut and silk screen Australian greeting cards produced during the 1950s and 1960s.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 27-Jul-14
- Age at death
- 84
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1930-01-01 End Date2014-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Des O’Brien was born in Sydney in 1930 and studied at the National Art School, Darlinghurst, and, later, with Godfrey Miller who taught him figure drawing.
He is a respected editorial and institutional illustrator, designer, author and painter. However, his personal art, which includes genre scenes, geometric abstracts, still life, portraits, figure paintings and drawings, has seldom been exhibited and unlike his applied art is unknown to the public. He makes no distinction between his fine and applied art, believing each is more accurately characterised as a continuous development.
Some noted clients of O’Brien’s include John Fairfax, Associated Newspapers, OTC, Australia Post, Australian Wool Bureau, the Herald and Weekly Times, Reader’s Digest, Commonwealth Bank, and Qantas. He has also created advertising work for many corporations.
O’Brien is a recipient of a Bronze Medal from the Arts Festival of the Melbourne 1956 Olympic Games. He is also the author, designer and illustrator of the children’s picture book, The Frog and the Pelican, awarded a Bronze Medal from Leipzig in 1983 and the Australian Book Publishers Design Award. He was inducted into the Illustrators Hall of Fame in 1995. Since that time he has worked almost exclusively on his personal art and has produced limited edition artists books of his work.
His work is illustrated in The Arts in Australia Series, _Commercial Art _written by R. Haughton James, Longmans, Green and Co., 1963.
Writers:
samobrien
duggim
Date written:
2014
Last updated:
2014
- Born
- b. 1930
- Summary
- Des O'Brien is an Australian illustrator, graphic designer, painter and author. He trained at the National Art School, later joining Associated Newspapers. He formed a studio, O'Brien & Horrex, with his artist wife Jackie Horrex after 1955. He worked for publishers, advertising agencies and Australia Post.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-14
- Age at death
- 84
Details
Latitude51.507222 Longitude-0.1275 Start Date1929-01-01 End Date2014-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- London, England, UK
- Biography
- Painter, filmmaker, performance artist and printmaker, Richard Larter was born on 19 May 1929, at Hornchurch, Essex, the son of Thomas Larter, a claims assessor for a marine insurance company, and Dorothy Scarles, who had worked for the British War Office during World War I. His mother was proud of her French ancestry and encouraged her children to appreciate both the work of the French Impressionists and the more adventurous Surrealist work sold at the art gallery run by her friend Fred Mayor. However his parents were less supportive when the young Richard indicated he wished to be an artist – his mother saw his future as a doctor. Richard Larter’s first formal art education came during World War II in 1944 when St Martin’s School of Art in London was kept open by running occasional classes for school children. His loathing of upper class 'military pretensions’ came from his time in National service with the British army where he served in the medical corps after leaving school. After the army he enrolled at St Martin’s as a regular student, but left almost immediately because he could not stomach either the teaching or his fellow students, who he felt came from the officer class who he continued to despise. After leaving the army he worked from 1949 to 1952 at Perfect Lambert & Co as a trainee marine surveyor. When he could, the young artist travelled to Paris where he spent time at art museums, looking especially at the work of the Impressionists and meeting other would-be artists. In 1949 he travelled to Cornwall where he befriended the visiting American artist, Mark Tobey. The next year he travelled to Algiers where he worked with the ceramicist Zora Merabek while she was restoring the Marabout tombs. Back in London, at Perfect Lambert & Co, he met the 15 year-old Patricia Florence (Pat) Holmes who had come to be interviewed for her first job after leaving school. At the end of 1952 he left Perfect Lambert, moved out of his parents’ home and moved to Canvey Island at the mouth of the Thames to spend Christmas with Pat’s family. On 1 February 1953 a great storm in the North Sea flooded Belgium, Holland and southern England. Canvey Island was completely submerged and 58 people died. The Holmes family was evacuated to a local school and Richard Larter married Patricia Holmes on 18 February 1953. They both became involved in adult education classes at Toynbee Hall in London, where he studied drawing while Pat supplemented her basic education. He worked at various jobs, including being a photographic model, until 1954 when he enrolled as a trainee teacher at Shoreditch Teacher’s College. He supplemented his meagre stipend by working as a rock driller, so his attendance at class was best described as intermittent. In 1956, while working as an art teacher at Santley Street Secondary Modern School in Kentish Town, Larter was looking at the window of a medical supplies shop, saw a box holding hypodermic syringes and realised they could be used to draw lines in paint. He also saw the definitive exhibition 'This is Tomorrow’ at the Whitechapel Gallery, where he was impressed by the energy of Eduardo Paolozzi, an artist he had long admired. No London gallery was interested in the young Larter’s art, but the Chief Inspector for Art at London County Council encouraged him to enter the Paris Salon. His painting was accepted and hung, but in 1962, by the time this happened, the Larter family were in the process of immigrating to Australia where Richard was employed by the NSW Department of Education. Teaching in Sydney led to a friendship with Richard Cobb, who later became the manufacturer of fine artists’ paints. In 1963 the Larter family bought land and a small cottage at Luddenham on the western edge of Sydney, and Richard Larter began to teach at Liverpool Boys’ High School. Conditions at Luddenham were primitive – the water supply was a small dam and a tank – but the wilderness of the bush environment encouraged Pat and Dick Larter to develop their own reading and other interests apart from the Sydney art scene. Although commercial galleries continued to disregard his work of this period, Larter had more success in local art competitions. In 1964 Bath Night 1, entered in the Royal Easter Show, received a favourable comment from Daniel Thomas, curator of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The following year when Thomas judged the Berrima art competition he awarded the prize to Richard Larter. He alerted Frank Watters to Larter’s work, which led to an invitation to exhibit at Watters Gallery, a new commercial gallery founded by Frank Watters and Geoffrey Legge. Perhaps because of the isolation of Luddenham, both Richard and Pat Larter were keen to experiment with different technologies. From 1966 onwards they were working on sound pieces and later they collaborated on performances and films. In 1967, the year their youngest child Eliza was born, Richard was transferred to Penrith High School, which was closer to home. Despite being the subject of advocacy by the curator of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the first collection to buy his work was the fledgling National Gallery of Australia in 1970. At the end of 1972, Richard was sufficiently financially successful to leave school teaching and devote himself to art full-time. However his finances were sufficiently unstable for him to continually look for residencies and other opportunities to earn while making art. In 1974 the family left Australia when Richard was appointed for a 12 month visiting lectureship at the Elam Art School, Auckland. Although Richard was the subject of the appointment, Pat Larter also participated in lectures and performances for students. As she was no longer caring for pre-school children she began to assert her own identity as an artist. The persona “Dick & Pat Larter” began to make a presence in the ephemeral movement of International Mail Art, although Richard Larter was happy to tell all that the dominant persona in that art form was Pat’s. Despite his political radicalism Richard Larter’s art became increasingly popular with major institutions and corporate collections. In 1976 he began a long and fruitful connection with the Victorian Tapestry Workshop which created large tapestries out of several of his paintings, including Pretty As (1981) in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia. In 1978 and 1979 Richard Larter was an artist in residence at Australia Council-funded studios at Armidale and Wagga Wagga. Neither were particularly happy experiences. This was especially true of Wagga Wagga, where the studio was in a physically remote location, and Pat stayed in Sydney where she created a major mail art event, Art Core Meltdown. However they saw the advantages of living in a large country town as distinct from the fringes of an ever growing city and in 1982 they sold the house at Luddenham and moved to Yass, to a two storied house in the centre of the town. In 1991 Richard bought the house next door as a dedicated studio. This gave him sufficient space to work on a number of paintings at any given time. At about the same time Pat ceased to be his model, so Richard used photographic models from agencies in Canberra and Sydney for his figurative work. Both Richard and Pat began experimenting with photography and laser prints on canvas enabled by modern computer technology. In 1996 Richard was awarded the Joan & Peter Clemenger Prize for Contemporary Art. Richard and Pat Larter’s super scans were included in the 1996 Adelaide Biennial, which was the same year as a celebration of Larter films at the Melbourne Super Eight Festival. Their collaboration ended on 19 October 1996 when Pat died. In May 1999 Watters and Legge galleries combined to celebrate Richard Larter’s oeuvre with a 70th birthday exhibition that was a revelation to many who had not recognised the breadth of his achievement. Subsequent to this there have been a number of exhibitions in public art museums. In 2002 Kelly Gellatly curated 'Stripperama: Richard Larter’, at the Museum of Modern Art at Heide, which examined the figurative tradition in his art and in 2006 Joanna Mendelssohn examined the connections within the Larter family in 'Larter Family Values’ at Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre. In June 2008 there will be a Richard Larter retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia.
Writers:
Date written:
Last updated:
Status:
peer-reviewed
- Born
- b. 1929
- Summary
- Richard Larter first came to public notice in the 1960s with confronting works based on the female body, politics, and a sensibility informed by British Pop. However his work also celebrates place, mood and medium.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 25-Jul-14
- Age at death
- 85
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1929-01-01 End Date2014-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1929
- Summary
- England apprenticed in engineering, later taking a position with GM Holden. He campaigned in motor racing, joining REPCO in 1952 and by the mid-1950s, he was designing the Ausca sports car powered by a GM Holden engine. The car was complete by 1956. In the 1960s, he designed and built another Ausca motor racer using Volkswagen components.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-14
- Age at death
- 85
Details
Latitude46.8255578 Longitude16.0382213 Start Date1928-01-01 End Date2014-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sotina, Slovenia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1928
- Summary
- Curman was a commercial photo-lithographer initially working for the printer John Sands & Co., Sydney. A specialist in 4-colour printing, he worked for printers in Adelaide and elsewhere. After 1969, he became a principal in Associated Lithographics, then in 1979, he founded Curman Lithographics. In 2002, he was named Graphics Arts Person of the Year by Print21 , the official magazine of Printing Industries Australia.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-14
- Age at death
- 86
Details
Latitude-33.960707 Longitude151.1003611 Start Date1926-01-01 End Date2014-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Hurstville, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1926
- Summary
- Brabham, working with Ron Tauranac, developed the Brabham motor racing marque under the name of Motor Racing Developments (MRD) in 1962 while continuing a successful motor race driving career. He retired in 1971.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-14
- Age at death
- 88
Details
Latitude52.3744779 Longitude9.7385532 Start Date1924-01-01 End Date2014-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Hanover, Germany
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1924
- Summary
- Taft-Hendry was initially an art collector, later opening Galleries Primitiff, Woollahra in 1959, touring works from Papua New Guinea internationally in the 1960s. She formed a partnership with Leo Fleishmann until his death and continued the gallery afterward expanding into Pacific Island art. She was a benefactor of the University of Newcastle and the Australian Museum.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1-Jan-14
- Age at death
- 90
Details
Latitude55 Longitude24 Start Date1923-01-01 End Date2014-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Lithuania
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1923
- Summary
- Miksevicius trained at Darmstadt Werkstaetten, Germany immigrating to Australia in 1948. He exhibited initially with a Baltic-associated group "Six Directions" and took up teaching art in a Sydney high school. His work is modernist, but as Christopher Allen wrote in a 2019 review of a retrospective, difficult to categorise.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-14
- Age at death
- 91
Details
Latitude-31.0900743 Longitude150.9290159 Start Date1922-01-01 End Date2014-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Tamworth, New South Wales, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1922
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2014
- Age at death
- 92
Details
Latitude-33.7553899 Longitude151.1518099 Start Date1921-01-01 End Date2014-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Gordon, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Dorothea Margaret Bisset,known as Margaret, was the daughter of successful businessman and inveterate letter writer O.D. Bisset and his wife Gwen, recent immigrants from Britain who had settled at Warrawee north of Sydney. After attending Abbotsleigh, which had a well established lively arts program for its girls, she studied ceramics at East Sydney Technical College. As with most of her generation her life was reshaped by World War II. In 1942, at her 21st birthday party, her patriotic parents invited a group of visiting British airman to the party. One of the party was A. J. (Tony) Tuckson, a Spitfire pilot who shared her interest in the visual arts. The following May the couple were engaged, although Tuckson was then posted to Darwin. They were married on 23 November 1943. Their son, Michael, was born in 1945. Margaret and Michael remained in Australia at her parents’ home while Tony was posted back to England until early 1946 when he returned to Australia where he was discharged from the RAF. For the following three years the family lived at the Bisset family home. Tony studied art under the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme while Margaret resumed her pottery, studying under Mollie Douglas and Peter Rushforth. She joined them to become one of the founders of the Potters Society of Australia.In 1950 Tony joined the Art Gallery of New South Wales, where he eventually became Deputy Director. Gradually he ceased to show his art, so much so that even most of the gallery staff were unaware that he was continuing to develop his work, all in private. Their first house at East Gordon was the site of her first attempt at raku firing as she continued to experiment with ceramic forms.In 1958 she and Tony joined Dr Stuart Scougall’s expedition to Snake Bay, Melville Island where he commissioned works to enter the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. She was an active participant in recording the works as they were being made. The Tutini are among the gallery’s most prized possessions. The following year the Tucksons travelled on another collecting expedition to Arnhem Land. Margaret photographed the artists collaborating on the bark paintings that now form the core of the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ collection.In 1962 they moved to a new house in Lucinda Avenue Wahroonga. The house, designed by Russell Jack, took into account both Tony’s painting and Margaret’s ceramics as her studio included a kiln. The adventurous design included a long terrace so that the house backed directly onto the bush. Most of her works in public collections come from this period.In 1965 the Tucksons visited New Guinea for the first time, and Margaret developed a life-long passion for New Guinea ceramics. She made many return visits throughout the rest of her life. With Patricia May, who she met when May was first appointed to the NSW Gallery as curatorial assistant, she undertook many expeditions to record the work of individual potters as well as noting regional differences. Their book, The Traditional Pottery of Papua New Guinea remains the authoritative account of the field.In 1973, just before the Art Gallery opened its first dedicated gallery for Aboriginal and Melanesian art, Tony Tuckson died. Margaret ensured that his wishes about the display and the information on the artists were carried out. Although he had begun again to exhibit his paintings, his public profile was simply as an arts bureaucrat. In the decades after Tony’s death Margaret ensured that his thousands of paintings and drawings were all catalogued and then, with Watters Gallery. carefully released onto the market. She was the driving force behind the publication of the first monograph of his work and continued to generously encourage scholars and curators to see and know the full depth of his oeuvre. In this she was assisted by Richard McMillan, who wrote his masters thesis on Tuckson’s work and later by Ian Gunn. At the same time she continued to be an advocate for Papua New Guinea ceramics, supporting and encouraging potters to have faith in their work.A few days before she died she visited the Art Gallery of New South Wales, to see again the New Guinea work she had assisted in acquiring.
Writers:
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2014
Last updated:
2014
- Born
- b. 23 October 1921
- Summary
- Tuckson was a potter working first in low-fired earthenware. She expanded her interest to Papua New Guinea ceramic traditions publishing "The Traditional Pottery of Papau New Guinea" with Patricia May in 1982. She was a founding member of the Potters Society of Australia. After the death of her husband, the artist Tony Tuckson, she ensured that his position as Austrlaia's pre-eminent abstract painter was properly recognised.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 16-Aug-14
- Age at death
- 93
Details
Latitude-42 Longitude173 Start Date1920-01-01 End Date2014-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- New Zealand
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 20 October 1920
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 9-Apr-14
- Age at death
- 94
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1919-01-01 End Date2014-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1919
- Summary
- Spooner was an architect, graduating from Sydney Technical College with the conservationist Myles Dunphy. His career migrated toward landscape architecture after 1954 and became involved in highway design notably for the Sydney-Newcastle Freeway and commissions in South Australia and the Northern Territory. He became an lecturer at the UNSW developing their landscape architecture course, later becoming head of the department.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-14
- Age at death
- 95
Details
Latitude68.24170235 Longitude14.66708159 Start Date1912-01-01 End Date2014-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Helle, Norway
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1912
- Summary
- Halvorsen, son of a Norwegian boat-builder, designed and built motor yachts from shipyards in Neutral Bay, later Ryde, then Bobbin Head NSW. While the company's timber motor yachts were sold internationally, he and his company also designed and built sailing vessels. He was a celebrated sailing competitor.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-14
- Age at death
- 102
Details
Latitude-34.9275 Longitude138.6 Start Date1965-01-01 End Date2013-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
- Biography
- This record is a stub. You can help out by adding more detail.
Writers:
staffcontributor
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 22 April 1965
- Summary
- Hensel was an industrial designer employed by Nielsen Design Associates, Sunbeam and later principal designer for Sunbeam Australia.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 11-Jan-13
- Age at death
- 48
Details
Latitude-27.467778 Longitude153.028056 Start Date1957-01-01 End Date2013-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Brisbane, Qld, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 19 June 1957
- Summary
- Rogers was an illustrator, the founder of the Brisbane Book Illustrators Group, a lecturer at the Queensland College of Art as well as a painter. His illustrations and design appeared for the Univ of Queensland press, childrens' books and other publications. He helped establish the genre of illustrated books for older readers.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-May-13
- Age at death
- 56
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1953-01-01 End Date2013-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1953
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-13
- Age at death
- 60
Details
Latitude32.109274 Longitude76.5366901 Start Date1945-01-01 End Date2013-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Kangra, Punjab, India
- Biography
- Michael Anthony O’Ferrall was born in India, the son of Colonel John O’Ferrall of the British Army and his wife Valerie Minchinton. After India became independent the family returned to England. On completing school O’Ferrall left England to hitchhike across the then accessible roads through Turkey, the middle east, Afghanistan, India, Thailand and Malaysia before arriving at Perth on Christmas Eve, 1965.For the next few years he undertook various unskilled labouring jobs, including at the Whyalla shipyards, which involved working with asbestos.This gave him sufficient funds to enrol in a degree in Asian studies at the Australian National University. He had an active extra curricula life at the ANU, becoming active in the Poetry Society and Jazz Club as well as organizing events on campus. In September 1970, he married fellow student Ilse Alps.The couple moved to Sydney where some years later he became one of the early students to complete the new Diploma of Museum Studies at the University of Sydney.Shortly after completing his studies the O’Ferrall family, which now included a baby daughter Elvira, moved to Yirrkala where he became the community arts organiser. In 1979, after he was appointed lecturer at James Cook University, the family moved to Townsville. In 1984 he left academic life for Perth, when he was appointed the first curator of Aboriginal and Asian art at the Art Gallery of Western Australia.He became a pivotal figure in the west, an active advocate for Aboriginal artists. In 1988 he enabled the Gallery to acquire the Louis Allen Collection of Arnhem land and Tiwi art, which had previously been housed in the Unity States. He later used the Allen collection as the basis for his groundbreaking exhibition, K_eeper of the Secrets_. In 1990 he was curator for the first exhibition of Aboriginal art to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale. Even though only two artists, Rover Thomas and Trevor Nickolls, were represented he made sure that viewers understood the diversity of Australian Aboriginal visual traditions. He also foresaw the need to encourage Indigenous Australians to become curators within the system rather than limiting themselves to be makers of art. He was responsible for the Art Gallery of Western Australia establishing an Indigenous curatorial internship.In 1995 O’Ferrall formally ended his employment at the gallery, but continued to be involved with the collection and staff, and was a significant contributor to the Indigenous Art book published by the gallery in 2001.He conducted many independent workshops for artists around the state. In 2010 he discovered he was suffering from mesothelioma, a legacy of his early career in the shipyards.
Writers:
akirpalani
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2013
- Born
- b. 9 May 1945
- Summary
- Michael O'Ferrall was one of the key curators in fostering recognition of the complexity of Aboriginal art. He worked closely with Aboriginal communities, especially in Yirrkala and Western Australia.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 13-Feb-13
- Age at death
- 68
Details
Latitude-27.467778 Longitude153.028056 Start Date1945-01-01 End Date2013-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Brisbane, Qld, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1945
- Summary
- John Peart's lyrical abstract paintings were first exhibited in Sydney in 1965, and his career kept very much in the same direction of sweetly beautiful abstract painting.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 10-Oct-13
- Age at death
- 68
Details
Latitude-33.8797123 Longitude151.2561988 Start Date1942-01-01 End Date2013-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Bellevue Hill, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- painter, cartoonist and art director, was born in Bellevue Hill [Rose Bay, acc. NGA], Sydney, on 21 January 1942. He attended Cranbrook 1952-59. While studying art at East Sydney Technical College in 1960 he submitted cartoons to the Bulletin . In 1961 he enrolled in Architecture at university (SU and/or UNSW). He was in trouble for obscenity for the cartoon The Gas Lash in the UNSWstudent publication Tharunka’s 1964 Orientation Week issue. Fifty years … says that he contributed both to Tharunka and Sydney University’s Honi Soit . In his third year of Architecture he returned to ESTC to study art, completing three of the five years of the course. In 1962 he won the Mirror Art Award. In 1963-64 he attended the Mary White Art School at the Rocks while simultaneously (1963-65 [1962-64 [ sic ] acc. McCulloch]) working as art director of Oz and being its major contributor of drawings and cartoons. The prosecution of Oz in 1964 for breach of the Obscene and Indecent Publications Act concentrated on a Sharp cartoon, The Word Spread Round the Arms (about an Ocker surfie), published in issue 6 (February; almost the same time as the similarly controversial The Gas Lash in Tharunka ), which consisted (almost) only of words (ill. Lindesay WWW , 159). Within weeks of Tharunka’s editors being convicted over The Gas Lash , Neville and Walsh were sentenced to six months gaol with hard labour and Sharp to four months, though all three were later released on bail pending an appeal, which was upheld. According to Coleman (p.12):
“The case caused such a sensation that it figured in the 1965 State election when the Opposition Leader Bob Askin, following Oz , made it his policy to abolish censorship. He won the election and that was the end of trial-by-magistrates in obscenity cases in New South Wales. It all added to the glory of Oz , Martin Sharp and cartoonists.”
A subsequent $300,000 libel suit, the departure of Sharp and Neville for England via Asia in 1966 to establish London Oz , the cancellation of advertising and the continued refusal of Gordon & Gotch to distribute Oz finally resulted in its demise (Lindesay, WWW , 156-160).
In December 1965 Sharp held a solo exhibition, Art for Mart’s Sake , at Clune Galleries, Potts Point. Martin Sharp Cartoons was published in 1966. Some of his cartoons also appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald , e.g. one about Prince Charles coming to school in Australia in 1965: “I sincerely hope he’s funnier than his father” . Others are [Aborigine in garbage tin with man bending over it] “You wouldn’t give us any trouble like those boongs in Los Angeles, would you Jacky” n.d. (ill. Coleman & Tanner, 74, 184). His cartoon Loading Up , published in the Australian 1965, about the Menzies government arms’ spending increase, is ill. King, 174.
Sharp lived and worked in London in 1967-69. He came back to Australia in 1970 then returned to collect his portable artworks for The Incredible Shrinking Exhibition group show, which opened at the Yellow House on 1 April 1971. He remained in London 1971-72 painting murals and publishing his Art Book etc..
Hamilton Art Gallery owns Sharp’s etching of Luna Park, Just For Fun? (clown on stage) 1981, ill. Hansen, cat.260 (the Hogarth Gallery’s copy was used in the 1999 S.H. Ervin Gallery show). Posters designed for the Nimrod Theatre are at ML POSTERS 810/1-7. On 4 March 2001 Dahlia Stanley was auctioning his silkscreen prints, Tiny Tim Eternal Troubadour Opera House 1982 , Kaspar (Nimrod November 7), The Venetian Twins and Art Sale for Land Rights n.d.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
staffcontributor
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 21 January 1942
- Summary
- Late 20th century Sydney artist. Sharp's 1964 cartoon "The Word Spread Round the Arms", published in "Oz" was seen to breach the Obscene and Indecent Publications Act and resulted in charges being laid against Sharp and his editors. Later, after reprising his antipodean success with the London edition of "Oz", he returned to Australia where he founded the Yellow House at 59 Macleay Street Potts Point.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Dec-13
- Age at death
- 71
Details
Latitude-31.5021772 Longitude150.6804062 Start Date1940-01-01 End Date2013-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Quirindi, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Lila Lawrence, painter, screen-printer, ceramicist and weaver, was born on 2 July, 1940 in Quirindi, NSW and attended school there until the age of 15. She has lived in a number of places with her parents, mother Leah Olive Beale (née Suey) and father, Claude Beale, including Gunnedah, Curlewis and Tamworth before settling in the Wollongong region on the South Coast of NSW. Encouraged by her friend and fellow artist, Mabel Dungay, Lawrence attended art classes at West Wollongong TAFE in 1998 and was awarded her Advanced Diploma of Visual Art in August 2006. Lawrence is an artist member of the Boolarng-Nangamai Aboriginal Art & Cultural Studio based in Gerringong on the NSW South Coast and in 2006, as a member of this organisation, her work was included in their NAIDOC exhibition at Wollongong City Art Gallery and another exhibition titled “Looking through European Eyes”, also held at the Wollongong City Art Gallery, in which Illawarra Aboriginal artists were asked to respond to works from the Gallery’s Colonial collection. Lawrence has also exhibited at the Karoona Gallery, West Wollongong TAFE in 2004 and at the 2005 and 2006 Royal Easter Show. Lawrence stated in an interview with the author that her paintings, which are created using make-up brushes, are landscapes that “reflect from my memories of places and land I have travelled throughout my life.” Lawrence also conducts workshops at Boolarng-Nangamai in weaving, storytelling and cultural awareness. Lawrence said in the same interview that being a member of Boolarng-Nangamai also enables her to practice her Aboriginal culture and to be with her people.
Writers:
Allas, Tess
Note:
Date written:
2007
Last updated:
2011
Status:
peer-reviewed
- Born
- b. 2 July 1940
- Summary
- Lila Lawrence is a painter, printmaker, weaver and ceramicist who works out of the Boolarng-Nangamai Aboriginal Art Studio in Gerringong, NSW. Her paintings often depict personal memories of her life and the landscapes of places she has travelled through.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 24-Apr-13
- Age at death
- 73
Details
Latitude52.52 Longitude13.405 Start Date1936-01-01 End Date2013-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Berlin, Germany
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1936
- Summary
- Gunter Christmann was one of the group of young artists who exhibited at Central Street in Sydney in the 1960s.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2013
- Age at death
- 77
Details
Latitude-37.560833 Longitude143.8475 Start Date1935-01-01 End Date2013-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Ballarat, VIC, Australia
- Biography
- Gwyn Hanssen Pigott had an established reputation in England and France through her inclusion in significant exhibitions and prominent collections before she returned to Australia. Although we in Australia know little of this aspect of her career, her nomination as a Fellow of the Society of Designer Craftsmen in London in 1963 indicates the high regard in which her ceramics were held. This profile has now been reasserted on a broader scale through the significant achievement in her Still Life groupings. Evidence of this profile is to be found in her receipt of numerous awards, inclusion in many public collections and successful solo exhibitions in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, St. Louis, New York and London. These works, produced from the late 1980s, are the culmination of forty years of dedication and commitment to her craft.
The tradition of functional ceramics has informed her career and an astonishing consistent quality of clarity of vision and precision of execution has been manifested throughout. The still, calm presence of artists such as Piero della Francesca and Giorgio Morandi have been acknowledged influences which she then transforms with the sensate experience of the potter. To hear Hanssen Pigott speak of the qualities of tension of the forms, the defining character of rim, foot and profile, the volumetric presence of the interiors and the penetrations into surrounding space is to appreciate how important these properties are to potters such as Leach, Cardew, McMeekin and Hanssen Pigott. It also emphasises how poorly such values have been regarded within the framework of European art history.
As a Fine Arts student at the University of Melbourne Hanssen Pigott passed through the displays of Chinese ceramics at the National Gallery of Victoria on her way to the painting galleries which were the principal focus of the course. She responded to the presence of the ceramics in the famous Kent Collection (both the serenity of the Sung pieces and the vitality of the Neolithic wares inspired her). There she also saw the work of Harold Hughan, Australia’s first exponent of stoneware, who told her of Bernard Leach’s A Potter’s Book when she visited him. She decided to devote her third year thesis to contemporary Australian pottery and, unusually for the period, she was permitted to do so. Armed with this aspiration and the inspiration of Leach’s book she visited other potters to try to elucidate in contemporary pieces the spirit that Leach venerated. She heard that Ivan McMeekin had just returned to Australia after four years experience with Michael Cardew at the Wenford Bridge Pottery, Cornwall. When she visited him at Mittagong she recognised the qualities she had intuited both in his own work and in the pots he collected. Hanssen Pigott then terminated her academic studies and became his apprentice for three years from 1955. She recalled: “Ivan taught me how to read pots: with my eyes and hands. He taught how to know the qualities of clay bodies, the subtle differences of glaze surface and depth, about thoroughness and patience and the futility of short cuts” (Hanssen Pigott, 1991, p. 46).
The philosophy and publications of Bernard Leach had a profound effect on pottery in post-war Australia. Consequently Hanssen Pigott travelled to England to further her studies with him (at his Pottery at St. Ives), and other major potters of the time, Ray Finch at the Winchcombe Pottery, Bernard Leach, Michael Cardew at the Wenford Bridge Pottery and Alan Craiger-Smith at the Aldermarston Pottery. She states:
Those five years, in rural workshops, taught by generous and enthusiastic masters who had given so much of their life’s energy and understanding to their craft, nourished and formed me as a potter and confirmed my choice of vocation. Here I was witness to the daily commitment to quality, the constant curiosity and change, the personal involvements with the history of the craft and the obsessive reaching for deeper insights (Hanssen Pigott, 1991, p. 47).
While most Australian potters followed Leach in looking towards China (and later Japan) as the source of their inspiration, Hanssen Pigott was largely focused on Europe.
Her apprentice years ceased when she set up a pottery in London with the Canadian writer Louis Hanssen (who she met while at the Leach Pottery and later married). She established a friendship with the Austrian potter Lucie Rie who became an important mentor and through her met the German potter Hans Coper. To her understanding of the integrity of the country based potters she added an appreciation of European elegance and sculptural presence which their work manifested. If there was a lasting influence on Hanssen Pigott’s work it is to be found in the refined forms of Rie. Coper’s 1965 exhibition at the Berkeley Galleries, London, however, had an effect which she only fully assimilated decades later, “I walked down the steps into a place so still; held, not immediately by the pots themselves, but by a sense that the space between the pots were recognised forms too: negatives.” (Hanssen Pigott, 1991, p. 47).
Three years earlier (1962) on a visit to Paris Hanssen Pigott saw an exhibition of French traditional wood-fired pottery from Haut-Berry at the Museum of Folk Art and Tradition and was attracted by their freshness and vigour. In this work she discovered a European tradition of long wood firing which paralleled that of Japan but was quite without its self-consciousness. Subsequently she purchased a house in Achères in Central France and set up a pottery. The first pots she produced, with dense vitrified bodies, were strongly influenced by the local examples which she described as “unpretentious but rich in a way I could easily relate to with their ash glazes, celadons and proto-porcelain type glazes.” (Hanssen Pigott, p. 1971, p. 4).
It was not long, however, before she began using porcelain refining the glazes and using the wood firing to produce more subtle effects. It was her response to the clay, form, glazes and firing that was important. For Hanssen Pigott there was no sense in separating production ware from one-off-work as an expression of the potter’s personality as, “One is expressing oneself in everything, absolutely everything. In the way you make the glaze, the way you pack the kiln, it is all yourself.” (Hanssen Pigott, 1971, p. 5).
The death of her husband in 1968 and the social unrest at the time introduced a period of dissatisfaction and soul searching. Like many of the 1960s generation she meditated and experimented with communal living. She lectured at several European institutions and worked with the Bread and Puppet Theatre of Vermont before deciding to return to Australia in 1973. Hanssen Pigott taught at the East Sydney Technical College for a time then settled in Tasmania with John Pigott where they established a pottery at Linden Rise, Kingston in 1975 with the help of a Crafts Board Grant. (John Pigott set up another pottery at Lower Longley in 1979). The stoneware items they produced there made use of local clays and glazes. Hanssen Pigott then undertook a year’s tenancy at the Jam Factory Workshop, Adelaide in 1980. During this year she shared a gas-fired kiln which gave her greater control, especially in relation to celadon glazes, which she adapted for a range of dinner wares. She also started to decorate her pieces with blue geometric patterns inspired by Nigerian indigo dyed textiles. Subsequently she was invited to continue the production pottery established by Kelvin Grealy at the Brisbane College of Advanced Education (now the Queensland University of Technology) at Kelvin Grove. She built a wood-fired kiln and remained potter-in-residence until 1988 when she established a pottery at Netherdale in the Mackay hinterland. It was in Queensland that the various strands of her life melded in a remarkable way.
While in Paris she saw an exhibition by the Italian artist Giorgio Morandi, who was new to her, “I found his early work disturbing. There was austerity in his drawings and etchings, 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 and describing.” (Hanssen Pigott, 1987, p. 12).
But it was not until 1988 that the idea of constructing still life groupings inspired by Morandi’s painted assemblages evolved. It would also, of course, be mediated through the groupings of ceramics that form when production wares are displayed and used.
During these years in Brisbane the support of artists such as Madonna Staunton and Leonard Brown was especially gratifying to Hanssen Pigott. They were responsive to her work. The Garry Anderson Gallery in Sydney represented Staunton, who produces extremely reductive collages, and Brown who paints subtly tonal canvasses. Hanssen Pigott’s work meshed very well with the refined and intellectual style this gallery promoted. Her first exhibition with his gallery was later the same year.
After the 1986 wood firer’s conference in the Latrobe Valley Hanssen Pigott was invited to use Heja Chong’s Bizen kiln. She prepared for the firings by producing shapes unrelated to Eastern traditions some of which, such as the tapering and mallet shaped vases, find parallels in Morandi’s early paintings. She first exhibited a group of these pieces at the 'Australian Crafts 1988’ exhibition at the Meatmarket Craft Centre and received a Bicentenary Crafts Award. She did not pursue Bizen style firings as she found the markings of the pieces too complex to create her still life groupings. Her first specific still life works were made during her period at the Fremantle Art Centre in early 1989 and formed the basis of her exhibition at the Garry Anderson Gallery later that year.
At the same award she introduced the first group of her 'Inseparable Bowls.’ Hanssen Pigott has always worked in a domestic scale and bowl forms are of great importance to her, but the modest dimension of her pieces tend to be overlooked in group exhibitions. Group of bowls both create a stronger presence and emphasise the tension of from relationships.
One of the enduring qualities of her work is her deep reverence for the tradition, materials and processes of her craft,
The qualities that make you ask how can such a simple thing as a bowl, something you eat from, last in time and still be magical, still be elusive in this century? How can something so simple be so alive and lasting? . . . I was not interested in being a potter for the sake of earning a living, making functional pots, putting my hands in clay, expressing myself, adopting a lifestyle-none of those things. It was the curiosity about the quality, the essence of the pots (Hanssen Pigott, 1989).
Hanssen Pigott underwent a practical training through the system of apprenticeship and not the 'hot house’ tertiary education system where every student is expected to develop a unique style.
Her development as a potter focused on interior qualities. It is this element of the still life works that shines forth in the still calm and the quiet presence. Hanssen Pigott’s forms, composed as there are of rounded wheel-thrown forms, are even more restricted than the forms chosen by Morandi, and with the restrained glaze colours are as subtle as Morandi’s most reticent watercolours. Although Morandi’s work may have been the initial inspiration the groupings have asserted their own individuality. 'Still’ lifes is also something of a misnomer when we consider the jauntiness of works such as Jug Parade 1995 or the slow, lateral movement of her landscape groupings.
Her preference for wood firing also introduces the idea of transformation. In preparing the pieces for glazing it is her response to the form and the character she wishes to develop that determines the colour and finish of the glaze. She then responds to subtle changes breathed on the surface of the glazes and the variation of the forms that enhances their initial character which prompts their selection for specific groups. She selects and places and works with a group of pieces until a resolution is established – it is essentially an intuitive process. Hanssen Pigott speaks of her response to her arrangements,
As we look, volumes turn to line, and interior colours float from thin rims, making an echo. Kinship of form, tone, line and remembrance, brings the pots together and holds them there. We, at whim, can change all that: can pour the jug, test the ties, change the stillness: watch the play. I love to tread the fine line between the static and the lively, the seductive and the pretty (Hanssen Pigott 1995).
Essentially these pieces have become non-functional 'art works’ though informed with the entire history of traditional ceramics. These essentially European objects have become true objects for contemplation in the Eastern tradition. Hanssen Pigott acknowledges that the pieces could be arranged differently (In fact, in her more recent works Hanssen Pigott offers alternate settings for the selected group which evoke different emotions in the potter and viewer.), but it requires a high level of visual sophistication to be aware of the forms and tensions of the grouping. Despite the easy rapport such works foster with the viewers most would defer to Hanssen Pigott’s own arrangement.
In 1992 Hanssen Pigott was awarded a three year Artist Development Fellowship from the Visual Arts and Crafts Board of the Australia Council. She moved from her rural retreat in the Mackay hinterland to Bundamba, a suburb of the old industrial town of Ipswich (now a dormitory suburb for Brisbane) to be closer to support and resources.
Significant honours have continued to be awarded to Hanssen Pigott including a Visual Arts and Crafts Emeritus Award in 1997; an Australia Council Fellowship in 1998; and Order of Australia Medal in 2002, all in recognition to her contribution to the field of ceramics in Australia. For a practicing potter, however, the greatest honour has been a survey at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 'Gwyn Hanssen Pigott: A Survey 1955-2005’ in 2005.
Hanssen Pigott’s work is a telling rejoinder to some contemporary 'post-modern’ ceramists who play with the concepts and traditions of pottery without having the technical skills (or as profound a knowledge of pottery’s own history) and others who promote the gratuitous appeal of colour and style.
It is work in which the quality of making is an intrinsic part of the overall effect. Hanssen Pigott is an artist who understands her material and the processes of throwing and turning; and who appears to relish the delight of battling with them to achieve a dynamic control between balance and freedom. But more than this, these are pots which refer to the way we often take 'the domestic’ for granted. By encouraging us to meditate on the importance of everyday objects, Gwyn Hanssen Pigott restates a commitment to ceramics which is especially welcome at a time when post-modern cynicism offers stimulation but no solutions (Copper, 1993, p. 5).
Writers:
Cooke, Glenn R.Note: Primary Biographer
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2010
- Born
- b. 1935
- Summary
- Gwyn Hanssen Pigott was one of Australia's most distinguished potters whose career extended over more than five decades in Australia, England and France. She has worked and exhibited extensively and established an international reputation for her exquisite works from her base in Queensland.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 6-Jul-13
- Age at death
- 78
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1934-01-01 End Date2013-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Janet Mansfield (1934-2013) was born in Sydney, NSW. She became interested in pottery as a young mother, attending evening classes, then studying ceramics at the East Sydney Technical College (now the National art School) from 1964-1965. Setting up her studio at Turramurra in the north of Sydney, she began making thrown domestic stoneware, handbuilt garden pots and thrown and assembled sculptural pieces.
Students from ESTC had set up the Ceramic Study Group in 1963 with Peter Rushforth as patron. Mansfield became president of the group from 1968-69 and later a life member. This was the first of many senior positions she occupied in national and international craft and ceramic organisations over the years, including president of the Australian Potters’ Society from 1985-86 and of the International Academy of Ceramics from 2007.
In her professional practice she used grants to study in Japan and the UK, and to research salt glazing. In 1977, she moved with her family to 'Morning View’, a property near Gulgong, NSW, where she continued to make salt-glazed and anagama wood-fired vessels using local Gulgong clays. With Gwyn Hanssen Pigott and Peter Rushforth, she is one of Australia’s most revered wood-firers and her work is represented in major public collections in Australia and overseas.
She was also a significant publisher and author, having written several major books on Australian and international ceramics as well as numerous journal articles. After editing Pottery in Australia from 1976-1989, she established a new international journal – Ceramics: Art and Perception – in 1990, followed by Ceramics Technical in 1995. These were published in Paddington, NSW, where she also ran the Ceramic Art Gallery on Glenmore Road until her retirement in 2005. (The task of editing the two journals has now been taken over by Elaine Olafson Henry.)
In 1987, she was awarded an Order of Australia, and she held many other national and international awards for her contribution to the arts and to ceramics.
Throughout her career she was passionate about sharing her love of clay with others. From her base in Gulgong she invited international artists to share their insights with Australian practitioners at nine triennial events – Woodfire (1989), Fire-Up (1992), Claysculpt (1995), Hyperclay (1998), Clayfeast (2001), Clay Modern (2004), Clay Edge (2007), Clay Energy (2010) and Clay Push (2013). She died on 4 February 2013, just before this last event was held.
Her work is marked with an impressed 'JM’.
Writers:
Judith Pearce
Date written:
2013
Last updated:
2013
- Born
- b. 19 August 1934
- Summary
- As a speaker, writer, publisher, juror and convenor, Janet Mansfield put Australian ceramics on the international stage. Her magazine "Ceramics: Art and Perception" set a new standard as a high quality journal dedicated to ceramic art. As a master potter, she made stong woodfire and salt-glazed works, many of which now reside in public and private collections.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 4-Feb-13
- Age at death
- 79
Details
Latitude-33.7660606 Longitude151.1601121 Start Date1932-01-01 End Date2013-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Killara, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1932
- Summary
- Andrews was a garden designer with training at the Ryde TAFE College. She worked as Judy Andrews Garden Design, Gordon specialising in domestic garden design. Her Rumsey Rose Garden, Parramatta Park received an award from the Horticulture Research Intl Association.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1-Jan-13
- Age at death
- 81
Details
Latitude-35.3596404 Longitude145.7347999 Start Date1931-01-01 End Date2013-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Jerilderie, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1931
- Summary
- Fox was a milliner, training in Sydney 1949-1958, later moving to London working for Otto Lucas, Hardy Amies and others. He kept a studio in Bond Street and made over 350 hats for the Queen of England and other members of the royal family. Recipient of many British honours, he also designed hats and headgear for film.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-13
- Age at death
- 82
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1928-01-01 End Date2013-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- Sculptor, was born in Melbourne, the younger of two daughters of ceramic designer Harry Redpath and his wife, Dorothy. Her formal art training began as a commercial art course in 1943 at Swinburne Technical College, but tuberculosis combined with a long convalescence interrupted her studies. In 1946 she resumed study at Swinburne, but switched to painting. Discontent with both her work and the medium led Redpath to enrol in sculpture at the Royal Melbourne Technical College (now RMIT)where she studied from 1949 to 1951. Her studies were largely self directed as she found no contemporary sculpture of interest to her in Australia, however her work soon attracted the attention of the sculptor Karl Duldig. She first exhibited with the Victorian Sculptors’ Society in 1950, and she was awarded the Society’s Stanley Hammond Prize in 1953. She also contributed to their activities as a council member and, later, as vice-chairman until her resignation.The quality of her work led her to be invited by recent immigrants,Julius Kuhn (later Kane), Inge King and Clifford Last, to join them in what became known as the Group of Four. The group exhibited in 1953 and 1955. By this time Redpath was also teaching art at a girl’s school.In 1956, with savings from two years of teaching, sales and commissions, she sailed for Europe. In Italy she studied at the Universita per Stranieri, Perugia. Later, when based in Rome, she cast two bronzetti, her interest in the potential of bronze as a medium having been aroused in Melbourne.On her return to Australia she continued to work in wood. In 1958 she was awarded the commission for for a mural based on Milton’s Areopagitica for the Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne. It was carved in silky oak. In 1960 she was selected for the National Gallery of Victoria’s Six Sculptors exhibition, the first local demonstration of modernist sculpture.But by 1961 she decisively turned to bronze with Dawn figure which was a plaster cast envisaged for casting. It was awarded the Mildara (later Mildura) Prize for Sculpture. In the same year she was awarded both the Italian Government Travelling Scholarship and the Dyason Bequest travelling scholarship. In Milan in 1962 Redpath pursued further studies at the Academia di Belle Arti di Brera, gaining foundry experience on the recommendation of her teacher, Luciano Minguzzi. Two large sculptures and twelve bronzetti cast there and formed the basis of her Gallery A exhibition in Melbourne the following year. One of the sculptures gained Redpath her second Mildura Prize for Sculpture in 1964. In 1966 she won the Transfield Prize for Sculpture.Her most significant commission was the Treasury Fountain (1965-69) for the Secretariat Building in Canberra. James Gleeson described this as 'less a decoration than a morality in water and metal’'. The year after its completion she was awarded an OBE for her services to art.
Other commissions include Extended Column (1972-75) for the School of Music, Canberra; Sculpture Column (1969-72) for the Reserve Bank of Australia, Brisbane; and Bronze Reliefs (1964) for BP Australia, the Victorian Coat of Arms for the Arts Centre of Victoria (1968), Facade Relief (1970-72) for the Victorian College of Pharmacy, the Sydney Rubbo Memorial Capital (1970-73) at the University of Melbourne and Paesaggio Cariatide (1980-85) for the State Bank of Victoria, Melbourne.
Redpath regularly travelled between Italy and Australia, living and working in both countries. In 1972-74 she was awarded a Fellowship in the Creative Arts, Australian National University, Canberra. Then she worked out of her Milan studio (1974-85) before returning to develop her existing studio and production base in Melbourne. In the late 1970s Redpath ceased studio work, but instead described her sculptural ideas and projects in a manuscript, Ideas and Images. Her final commission, Paesaggio Cariatide was received in 1980 and is installed at the State Bank Centre in Bourke Street, Melbourne. The work was donated to the McClelland Gallery in 2003.
She continued to make was maquettes until the last years of her life.
She is represented in the National Gallery of Australia, the state galleries of Victoria, NSW and WA, in regional and institutional holdings and in private collections in Australia, Italy, UK and USA. In 2006 she was awarded an honorary doctorate by Swinburne University.
Writers:
Kirby, Sandy
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2013
- Born
- b. 20 November 1928
- Summary
- Norma Redpath was a leading sculptor of the generation who emerged after World War II. Her success was even more remarkable as her career was forged at a time when it was especially difficult for women to succeed as artists. In 1956 she made the first of many visits to Italy, and there is a strong Italian influence in her work.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 12-Jan-13
- Age at death
- 85
Details
Latitude-33.8125405 Longitude151.1115717 Start Date1927-01-01 End Date2013-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Ryde, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1927
- Summary
- Carrol trained as a milliner at Moray Millinery, Sydney working in women's millinery, then transferred her skills to theatre, television and film in the mid-1960s. She also taught at NIDA, TAFE NSW and the Australian Forum for Textile Artists' Fibre Forum and elsewhere. She also tutored privately.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1-Jan-13
- Age at death
- 86
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1926-01-01 End Date2013-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- painter, printmaker, teacher and critic, was born in Melbourne. She studied at the National Gallery School under William Dargie, Alan Sumner and Murray Griffin in 1945-49, winning prizes for drawing and still-life painting. Sumner sent some of his students, one of them Braund, to the George Bell School for extra study, which proved a major influence. While still students at the NGV Braund and Judy Hunter had modernist works accepted by the Contemporary Art Society (Vic.) for exhibition (c.1943). They were threatened with expulsion from the CAS because they were reported in Truth as saying they had entered the works for a lark. Braund apologised and continued in the CAS, but Hunter employed lawyers, refused to apologise to John Reed and did not exhibit again with the CAS (Furby, p.91).
After finishing classes with Bell in 1949, Braund studied in England (1950-51). She rejoined the Contemporary Art Society in 1952 and in 1954 became a regular 'Thursday night’ participant at the George Bell studio until Bell’s death in 1966. Bell appreciated her ability to use form, colour and surface to create good pictorial design, and Braund became a confident exponent of Bell’s teaching ideas. She taught art at three Melbourne schools in the 1950s, gave talks on ABC radio in 1961-64, and reviewed children’s books for the Australian in 1969-77.
Instead of feeling victimised by being a woman artist, Braund stated in 1979 that she was glad that 'the collectors aren’t interested because it means that people buy my paintings because they like them, not because they are good investments’. She works in oil, gouache or watercolour, her later work being more angular in the treatment of figures and more abstract during the mid-1960s. Two excellent gouaches, The Art Class 1960 and Bathers, Sandringham 1979, were auctioned at Christie’s Sydney on 14-15 August 1994, lots 186, 194E.
In 1992 Christopher Heathcote noted that many artists who came to maturity in the 1950s have been 'unjustly neglected’ and that Braund was no exception. She held her first solo exhibition in 1952 and has exhibited consistently ever since. Her work is held in many collections: the National Galleries of Australia and Victoria, the Queensland Art Gallery and regional and university galleries. She has travelled extensively: to England and Europe in 1950-51, to Greece in 1958, as well as visiting the Mediterranean, India and Asia.
Writers:
Mahoney, Bronwyn
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
1992
- Born
- b. 1926
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2013
- Age at death
- 87
Details
Latitude-27.467778 Longitude153.028056 Start Date1924-01-01 End Date2013-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Brisbane, Qld, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 27 April 1924
- Summary
- Howel 'Jim' Chesterfield, sign writer, was born in Brisbane in 1924. He attended Rainworth State School, married Ann, and worked as a farm hand. Chesterfield produced many signs for shops and offices and real estate agents in Brisbane and south east Queensland under the company logo he started as "JC Signs".
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2-Jun-13
- Age at death
- 89
Details
Latitude48.2 Longitude16.366667 Start Date1923-01-01 End Date2013-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Vienna, Austria
- Biography
- Bert Flugelman was born in Vienna, where as a child he haunted museums and art galleries near his grandmother’s home. Once he sheltered from a rainstorm in the gallery for Secessionist art, and became entranced by Schiele, Kokoschka, and Klimt. His life changed in 1938 when the Anschluss led to Hitler’s Germany annexing Austria, and he fled.Flugelman was a 15 year old refugee, with no English when he came to Australia, so took labouring jobs in the bush. Later he enlisted as a non-combattant in the Australian army. At the end of the war he considered his future, and thought again of art. Supported by the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme he studied painting at East Sydney Technical College under Frank Hinder. At the end of his course Flugelman and his wife Rosemary travelled to Europe for adventure and exposure to art. He was struck down by poliomyelitis and fled to London for medical care at the Fever Hospital. He later credited that experience with making him take painting seriously. A fellow Australian, Cedric Flower, heard of his illness and approached the Royal Academy on his behalf. The three year grant he received from their Benevolent Fund enabled him to both survive financially and to establish his career as an artist. Years later, in Australia, Flugelman started a similar fund for Australian artists.After he recovered they traveled to New York, where he discovered a love of making sculpture. He continued so paint for some years, but it is as a sculptor that he has made his greatest impact.Shortly after returning to Australia in 1956 he began teaching part-time at East Sydney Technical College. In 1968 Donald Brook successfully argued that the University of Sydney’s new Department of Fine Arts should work with the Faculty of Architecture to create an experimental art workshop at the old tin sheds on City Road. Flugelman became the first tutor at the Tin Sheds,where he stayed for over five years. His experimental approach combined with a rigorous work ethic influenced the next generation of Australian artists, including the young Imants Tillers. Later he moved to Adelaide, and became involved in the fledgling Experimental Art Foundation and ran the Sculpture Department at the South Australian School of Art. In 1984 he moved to Wollongong University, to head the Sculpture Department at the Art School. He retired from formal teaching in 1990 but continues to mentor young artists and encourage a questioning generosity of spirit.
Writers:
Joanna Mendelssohn
Eric Riddler
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2016
- Born
- b. 28 January 1923
- Summary
- Sculptor, painter, and mentor to many younger artists, Bert Flugelman came to Australia as a refugee shortly before the outbreak of World War II. In the 1970s he oversaw the radical artists associated with the Tin Sheds Gallery.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 26-Feb-13
- Age at death
- 90
Details
Latitude52.2319581 Longitude21.0067249 Start Date1921-01-01 End Date2013-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Warsaw, Poland
- Biography
- Binem (William) Grunstein was born in Warsaw on 26 February 1921, the son of Herszl Grunstein and his wife Sarah (Kuperman). His parents and almost all of his family were killed in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941, but Binem escaped to the countryside where he was able to survive by working as a farm labourer. He was joined by his brother Mark, but as the farm could not conceal two fugitive Jews they were captured.Grunstein’s ability to paint portraits of his Nazi captors led him to survive as he was transferred to a total of 14 prison camps, painting portraits at ever location. After the war he met Chana (Hania) Bornstein, another survivor. He came to Australia as an assisted immigrant in 1949, where he worked as a kitchen hand for the Australian army camp at Casula. In 1951 Chana joined him and they were married at the Great Synagogue in Sydney on her arrival.He returned to painting while working full-time as both a kitchen hand and making dresses, and later managing a dress factory. He also studied art and fashion at East Sydney Technical College. He became an active member of the Royal Art Society of NSW, and in his later years taught with them as well as exhibiting with them. He had frequent exhibitions at the Holdsworth Gallery, and his work was acquired by the Sydney Opera House.
Writers:
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2013
Last updated:
2013
- Born
- b. 26 February 1921
- Summary
- His skill at portrait painting enabled Binem Grunstein to survive the Nazi concentration camps in World War II. After the war he immigrated to Australia, where he painted landscapes and other works for his own pleasure.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 8-Jan-13
- Age at death
- 92
Details
Latitude-34.9275 Longitude138.6 Start Date1921-01-01 End Date2013-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Adelaide, SA, Australia
- Biography
- Jeffrey Smart was born in Adelaide on July 26, 1921, as the only son of Francis Isaac Smart, a real estate agent and his second wife, Emmeline Mildred (nee Edson). His elder half-sister was from his father’s first marriage. He first travelled to Europe when he was a child of four, but after the Great Depression destroyed his father’s business, life became more confined. Nevertheless he was able to take Saturday drawing classes from the age of 12. His early interest was in architecture, but financial reality meant that he became a trainee teacher instead. He also attended classes at the South Australian School of Arts and Crafts.He was fortunate that the pioneer modernist, Dorrit Black had returned to Adelaide and it was she who first introduced him to the clean pure lines and cubic forms of modernism. He began teaching school in 1941,the same year he first exhibited with the Royal South Australian Society of Arts. He then approached a Melbourne commercial gallery, where he held his first solo exhibition. His clear-toned smooth painted geometric urban landscapes, where human figures sometimes appear as an intrusion, led him to be seen as an inoffensive modernist, an artist who could straddle both the Charm School and Surrealism.He first travelled to Europe as an adult in 1948. His experience of the great European collections, especially the work of Cezanne which he saw in Paris,and the work of the Quattrocento Italian artists helped mature his own vision. Smart returned to Adelaide in 1951 and after he was awarded the Commonwealth Jubilee Art Prize he moved to Sydney, where there were opportunities to exhibit his art.In Sydney he became the art critic of the Daily Telegraph, while continuing to support himself by working as a school teacher. Later he became the beloved Phidias, the art expert, at the ABC Radio children’s Argonauts program. Later he made the transition to television. As he became more successful as an artist Smart was able to leave school teaching and taught for a short time at East Sydney Technical College.In 1963 he was able to leave teaching and relocate to Italy where he was based for the rest of his life. Although he was surrounded by antiquity, the subjects he chose for his art tended to be those from modernity. He was entranced by the giant cubic shapes of industrial containers, empty streets, the absurd conjunction of old and new, of nature meeting geometry.Smart continued to exhibit in Australia for the rest of his life. He held exhibitions in public galleries as well as dealer galleries, and he was the subject of significant public praise. The Art Gallery of New South Wales held a retrospective exhibition of his paintings in 1999.As with many of his generation, Smart was hesitant at first to declare his sexuality, but later wrote a memoir, Not Quite Straight. His longest, and most loving relationship was with a fellow artist, Ermes de Zan who was with him from 1976 until he died.
Writers:
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2009
Last updated:
2013
- Born
- b. 26 July 1921
- Summary
- With a career lasting over sixty years the Adelaide born artist Jeffrey Smart was an expatriate realist painter best known for his depiction of isolated individuals in industrial landscapes.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 20-Jun-13
- Age at death
- 92
Details
Latitude55 Longitude24 Start Date1919-01-01 End Date2013-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Lithuania
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 27 January 1919
- Summary
- Zilinskas was an artist, designer, acrobat and trapeze performer who immigrated to Australia and worked in the Yuraygir National Park near Coffs Harbour NSW as a timber getter. While working there, he designed and built a timber, concrete and bottle sculpture in the forest ca.1960's that survives in 2019. He later joined the Ashton Circus where he continued designing and making circus equipment.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 26-Aug-13
- Age at death
- 94
Details
Latitude-30.748889 Longitude121.465833 Start Date1913-01-01 End Date2013-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Kalgoorlie, WA, Australia
- Biography
- Bessie Saunders was book in Kalgoorlie and educated at Miss Parnell’s Girls High School Claremont before attending Margaret Saunders’ Perth School of Art. She exhibited with the WA Society of Arts, winning prizes on at least two occasions. Later she became the Society’s secretary.In 1936 she married the painter Allon Cook and while she may have continued making commercial work, she appears to have ceased working as an artist after the birth of her son, the artist Phillip Cook.
Writers:
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2020
Last updated:
2020
- Born
- b. 1913
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2013
- Age at death
- 100
Details
Latitude42.989911 Longitude11.8687316 Start Date1972-01-01 End Date2012-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sarteano, Tuscany, Italy
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 11 November 1972
- Summary
- Cavaliere’s desire was to bring to light what she did not remember of her early years in Sarteano. Her art became a lifelong project transforming the packing, storing and transporting elements of her possessions into art.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 23-Jan-12
- Age at death
- 40
Details
Latitude-27.1170905 Longitude150.8946408 Start Date1956-01-01 End Date2012-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Darling Downs, Queensland, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. September 1956
- Summary
- Kieran was an active participant of the 1980s Qld ARI sector and in community based media including 4ZZZ public radio.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- c.2012
- Age at death
- 56
Details
Latitude-34.4278083 Longitude150.893054 Start Date1952-01-01 End Date2012-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Wollongong, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by adding to it.
Writers:
staffcontributor
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 1952
- Summary
- Michael Callaghan's political posters helped define urban dissent in the 1970s. Later he founded Redback Graphix and created the popular health poster figure 'Condoman'.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-12
- Age at death
- 60
Details
Latitude-42.880556 Longitude147.325 Start Date1950-01-01 End Date2012-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1950
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2012
- Age at death
- 62
Details
Latitude-25 Longitude133 Start Date1949-01-01 End Date2012-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1949
- Summary
- Coote is an interior designer and furniture maker active in the United Kingdom and Ireland. He studied at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, later working in Sydney for Decor, an interior design firm run by Tom Harding and David Lorimer. His firm, Coote & Co is now based in London.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-12
- Age at death
- 63
Details
Latitude-34.9275 Longitude138.6 Start Date1949-01-01 End Date2012-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Adelaide, SA, Australia
- Biography
- Trevor Nickolls was born in Adelaide, South Australia, in 1949. He first exhibited as a student and gained a Diploma of Fine Art from the South Australian School of Art in 1972. One of his teachers was the printmaker Franz Kempf. In 1978 he undertook a diploma in education which enabled him to work as a school art teacher. In 1979, when undertaking postgraduate studies at the Victorian College of the Arts he met the Papunya artist Dinny Nolan. He later described this as a turning point in his art, and in his life as Nolan mentored him in gaining an understanding of the directions his art could take.
The following year, after graduating with a postgraduate diploma of painting, he was appointed an education officer. This meant that he was able to travel through the Northern Territory, meeting artists and coming to see how modern the ancient techniques could appear to be. His own art changed to incorporate his new understanding of a changing tradition of Aboriginal art.In the 1980s he lived in both Sydney and Melbourne, and began to paint the awkward duality of the changing perception. It was the works of the 1980s, that showed the awkwardness and pain of Aboriginal people responding to a rapidly changing world and the growth of industrialisation, which finally brought him widespread critical acclaim. He coined the catch phrase, “Dreamtime to Machinetime” to sum up both the dilemma and the response. Dreamtime is the harmonious connection to nature and ancient traditions, while Machinetime is the trap of the modern confined life.
In 1990 Nickolls joined Rover Thomas to become the first Aboriginal artists to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale. His work was widely collected by many institutions including the National Gallery of Australia, Queensland Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of South Australia, the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, the National Gallery of Victoria and the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
He was well aware of the gifts that art could bring. His last gift was to establish the Trevor Nickolls Art Award for Aboriginal artists can undertake studies at art school.After his death, his friend the artist Vernon Ah Kee wrote: “For Blackfellas like me, the work of Trevor Nickolls, in the 1970s and ‘80s was a visual language that gave voice to the confusion and complexity around the identity politics of the times. As a visual artist, he gave voice to our frustration and anger at our powerlessness and our invisibility like no artist before had.”
On 17 November 2012 the Art Gallery of South Australia held a public commemoration of his life.
Writers:
Allas, Tess
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2011
Last updated:
2013
- Born
- b. 1949
- Summary
- South Australian Aboriginal painter who began working in the visual arts in the early 1970s. Along with Rover Thomas, Nickolls represented Australia in the 1990 Venice Biennale. Nickolls has work in many public collections including the Art Gallery of NSW, Art Gallery of SA and the National Gallery of Australia.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- Oct-12
- Age at death
- 63
Details
Latitude-19.8516101 Longitude133.2303375 Start Date1945-01-01 End Date2012-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- North East Arnhemland, NT, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1945
- Summary
- Using distinctive white and black crosses on a red ground, Yogngu artist Gulumbu Yunupingu (1945-2012) painted Garak, the starry universe, on barks and poles. She came to national prominance when she won the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Award (2004), and to international prominence with her scaled-up version of Garak for the Musee du quai Branly (2006).
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 9-Jun-12
- Age at death
- 67
Details
Latitude54.44588805 Longitude17.07368774 Start Date1942-01-01 End Date2012-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Stolp, Pomerania Poland, Stolp, Pomerania (Poland)
- Biography
- etcher, was appointed Founding Head of Printmaking at the Canberra School of Art, now part of The Australian National University in 1978. There is some speculation that he taught print making to Albert Namatjira Jnr while visiting Arnhem Land in 1976 and to Narratjin Maymuru and his sons when they were artists in residence at Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, in 1978. Appears to do colour etchings and engravings mostly.
This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1942
- Summary
- Jörg Schmeisser, etcher, is thought to have taught print making to Albert Namatjira Jnr while visiting Arnhem Land in 1976 and to Narratjin Maymuru and his sons when they were artists in residence at Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, in 1978.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- c.2012
- Age at death
- 70
Details
Latitude-38.2399682 Longitude142.9146792 Start Date1939-01-01 End Date2012-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Terang, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1939
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2012
- Age at death
- 73
Details
Latitude51.507222 Longitude-0.1275 Start Date1933-01-01 End Date2012-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- London, England, UK
- Biography
- cartoonist, scriptwriter and stand-up comic, was born in London on 5 November 1933. A stand-up comic for thirty years, he first came to Australia in 1964 to appear at Chequers nightclub then 'just stayed and stayed’. Since about 1988 he has been employed as a scriptwriter at Channel 9, so draws few cartoons. Previously, however, he had contributed cartoons to the Bulletin , Penthouse and various other magazines. His cartoon in the B/W Artists’ Club collection (ML PxD 586/ G-I) showing two boys saying '“My Dad’s a Cartoonist.”/ “Mine’s a miserable sod too” was reproduced in Inkspot 16 (Autumn 1991), 21 (ML Q741.5994/47) and in Kerr. As a freelance cartoonist NSW, his colour cartoon of a teacher and pupil was reproduced in Rainbow – “What do you know about Federation?”/ “They build nice houses?” – a rare unpredictable view of the topic.
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 5 November 1933
- Summary
- Contemporary London born, New South Wales based cartoonist, scriptwriter and stand-up comic.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 26-Jun-12
- Age at death
- 79
Details
Latitude52.52 Longitude13.405 Start Date1928-01-01 End Date2012-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Berlin, Germany
- Biography
- Mark Strizic (b.Marco Strizic 1928 Berlin 19.04.1928 – d. Wallan 08.12.2012) migrated to Australia from Croatia in 1950 and became a widely published architectural and industrial photographer, portraitist of significant Australians, and fine art photographer/painter known for his multimedia mural work. He, and other postwar immigrant photographers Wolfgang Sievers, Henry Talbot and Helmut Newton exerted significant influence on Australian photography, particularly in its transition to Modernism. He taught photography at tertiary level in Melbourne from 1978, and in 1984 he became a full time artist, photographer and designer. The winner of a number of photographic awards and grants, he exhibited his work widely from 1958 onwards. Strizic’s work is represented in the Australian National Gallery and several state galleries. He settled in Richmond, subsequently moving with his wife Sue to Surrey Hills, Melbourne, and finally to Wallan in country Victoria, living there until his death in 2012.
Strizic was born in 1928 in Berlin, where his father Zdenko Von Strizic (1902-1990) was studying and practising architecture (later becoming a Professor of Architecture). In 1934, in reaction to Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor, the family fled to Zagreb, Yugoslavia (now Croatia). There Strizic began to study physics and geology.
At the end of WW2 Strizic fled to Austria as a refugee following the liberation of Yugoslavia to escape the Communist regime. As there was a five-year waiting period to emigrate to the United States, he decided to go instead to Australia and departed Naples on the converted Australian Navy seaplane carrier Hellenic Prince, arriving in Melbourne in April 1950. There his good spoken English soon gained him a position as a clerk with the Victorian Railways Reclamation Department, and he resumed his studies in physics part-time at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. In 1952 he married Hungarian-born Sue. Strizic bought his first camera, a Dianette, and began to photograph his environment, developing a love of strong light which he found abundant under the clear skies of his adopted city. He enjoyed contre-jour (shooting into the sun) and low afternoon side-lighting effects for their high-contrast graphic silhouettes in black and white prints, and that became his signature style for his historically and culturally significant photographs of post-war Melbourne. His abandonment of physics in 1957 for a career in photography was encouraged by his father (who visited Melbourne in 1957 as guest professor at the School of Architecture Melbourne University) and through his friendship with David Saunders (who had stayed with Strizic’s parents in Yugoslavia in 1952.1 Saunders, a Senior Lecturer in Architecture at the University of Melbourne who was then acting Assistant Director at the National Gallery of Victoria, provided increasingly frequent photography commissions. In 1957 Saunders introduced him to Leonard French, an artist and the Gallery’s Exhibitions Officer, who asked him to document exhibitions, including the 1959 retrospective of cabinet maker Schulim Krimper’s furniture.
Postwar industrialisation in Australia then led to work for BHP and Humes Limited and McPhersons, photographing the plants, manufacturing, products and workers for annual reports and advertising, while the concurrent housing boom provided further opportunities. Again through Saunders, in 1958 Strizic met modernist Robin Boyd of architectural firm Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, who became a major client. Boyd controversially criticised Australian suburban culture in his book The Australian Ugliness of 19602, and likewise Strizic’s photography began to illustrate Australians’ disdain for their architectural heritage and their scant regard for the visual aesthetics of their urban environment amidst the destruction of magnificent Gold Rush era buildings and verandahs and their replacement by high-rise modernist office-blocks. His work was widely published in architectural books and journals but also illustrated social commentary during this period of a national identity crisis with frequent contributions of his photo-essays to Walkabout, Australia Today and other travel magazines. In 1960 Strizic joined David Saunders to produce Melbourne: A Portrait, stating 'Its central thought is that while men make cities, the cities also affect the men’.3
Having become the first photographer to exhibit at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1968, Strizic moved more emphatically into fine art, finding a market for large scale mural installations amongst corporate clients. He began combining, enlarging, cropping and transforming elements from his black and white negatives through montage, then colourising and posterising the monochrome images in the manner associated with Pop Art. Symbols of urban ugliness such as power poles and billboards were his subject matter and critical target in often apocalyptic imagery intended to provoke a social consciousness. Strizic was an early adopter of digital imaging for the construction of such works (he discussed these processes in an address to “Still Photography?”, International Symposium in Melbourne, 1994.
Strizic lectured in photography at a number of tertiary education institutions including Preston (Phillip) Institute of Technology (1975-1977); Melbourne College of Advanced Education (Lecturer in Charge of Photography 1977-1982) and the Victorian College of the Arts (part-time lecturer in Photography 1982-1984).
1. 'Professor’s wife from Yugoslavia’, The Age, May 15 1957
2. Boyd, Robin 1960, The Australian ugliness, F. W. Cheshire, Melbourne
3. joint statement by the authors of Strizic, Mark & Saunders, David 1960, Melbourne : a portrait, Georgian House, Melbourne p.1
Writers:
James McArdle
fishel
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2013
- Born
- b. 19 April 1928
- Summary
- Mark Strizic is one of the remarkable generation of photographers who migrated to Australia in the years after World War II.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 8-Dec-12
- Age at death
- 84
Details
Latitude-33.8936689 Longitude151.1656456 Start Date1928-01-01 End Date2012-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Stanmore, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1928
- Summary
- Bevan was a typographer who established a graphic arts business Dalley Typesetting P/L, later known as Paul Dalley Apex P/L. He introduced computerised transfer of images from film to lithographic plates for 4-colour printing and was involved in the abandonment of hot-type for computerised typesetting. His firm, then known as Adtype, was acquired by Harland and Hyde in 1993.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-12
- Age at death
- 84
Details
Latitude51.507222 Longitude-0.1275 Start Date1927-01-01 End Date2012-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Kensington, London, England, UK
- Biography
- Born and trained in London, the daughter of expatriate Australian artists, painter Evelyn Chapman and composer Sir George Thalben-Ball, Pamela Thalben-Ball worked as a landscape and portrait painter in Australia from the 1960s onwards, initially as a visitor but eventually based in the Sydney suburb of Avalon.
Writers:
Eric Riddler
Date written:
2022
Last updated:
2022
- Born
- b. 1927
- Summary
- London-born and trained daughter of expatriate Australians, worked as a landscape and portrait painter in late twentieth century Sydney.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2012
- Age at death
- 85
Details
Latitude-25 Longitude133 Start Date1927-01-01 End Date2012-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1927
- Summary
- Walford was an interior designer and a founder member of the Society of Interior Designers of Australia. His design practice (est.1957) specialised in a period-based style, often mixing European furniture and furnishings with Australian work. Design commissions included the first iteration of Elizabeth Bay House, Kirribilli House (Whitlam era), Pruniers restaurant and work for socially prominent families.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-12
- Age at death
- 85
Details
Latitude-27.467778 Longitude153.028056 Start Date1927-01-01 End Date2012-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Brisbane, Qld, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 27 July 1927
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 10-Feb-12
- Age at death
- 85
Details
Latitude52.561928 Longitude-1.464854 Start Date1926-01-01 End Date2012-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- England, UK
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1926
- Summary
- Davis was a puppet designer and maker with fashion design training from St Martins School of Art, London. She began work in puppets for the BBC. Touring Australia in 1956 with Peter Scriven's Marionette Theatre of Australia, she stayed on in Sydney. She later worked in puppetry in TV. Her most celebrated puppet was Amanda the Cat. She retired in 1991. Her puppets have been placed in Australian collections.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1-Jan-12
- Age at death
- 86
Details
Latitude48.2 Longitude16.366667 Start Date1926-01-01 End Date2012-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Vienna, Austria
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1926
- Summary
- Pollack began his career as a dress designer by working as a tailor with a shop in Elizabeth Bay Road, Kings Cross. He later began a fashion design business called "Shapely Creations". His designs were sold through David Jones Department Store, Sydney and other outlets
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-12
- Age at death
- 86
Details
Latitude-26 Longitude121 Start Date1926-01-01 End Date2012-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Western Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1926
- Summary
- Tasker was a sailor, ship-chandler, sailmaker and boat designer beginning in skiffs, later customising a 40 Square Metre class yacht sailing as "Siska" for ocean racing. In his later years, he created the Australian Sailing Museum, Mandurah, WA (2008-2012)
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-12
- Age at death
- 86
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1924-01-01 End Date2012-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1924
- Summary
- Harrison was an engineer with an active interest in design and competitive rowing. He formed a partnership with Ted Curtain to design and develop a rowing machine with ergometric features. He later became involved in boat design introducing hull improvements, improved winches for sailboats and other mechanical devices. He retired from teaching in the 1980s but continued his consultancies.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-12
- Age at death
- 88
Details
Latitude-27.467778 Longitude153.028056 Start Date1922-01-01 End Date2012-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Brisbane, Qld, Australia
- Biography
- painter and cartoonist, was born in Brisbane, Qld, on 9 December 1922; studied art Brisbane Technical College 1938. After five years in the army he worked as a cartoonist and artist while continuing his studies at ESTC (1948-51); then worked as painter in Brisbane apart from visits to England and Italy in 1957 and 1958. Won an Italian Government Scholarship to Italy, and in 1958 won the Women’s Weekly Portrait Prize. Won many prizes including Richards, Sulman and Melrose. Member CAS, Qld, and of Half Dozen Group of Artists, Brisbane, Qld.
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 9 December 1922
- Summary
- Brisbane based painter and cartoonist.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 18-Oct-12
- Age at death
- 90
Details
Latitude52.65233935 Longitude-2.64356407 Start Date1921-01-01 End Date2012-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Shropshire, England, UK
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1921
- Summary
- Dearnley was a small boat builder who was part of a team of five designers who created the Heron sailing dinghy. He was at one time the President of the National Heron Sailing Association. In addition to his design work, he was also a book editor and founder of the Ulysses Motorcycle Club.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-12
- Age at death
- 91
Details
Latitude52.561928 Longitude-1.464854 Start Date1921-01-01 End Date2012-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- England, UK
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 19 February 1921
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 27-Jun-12
- Age at death
- 91
Details
Latitude37.7790262 Longitude-122.419906 Start Date1921-01-01 End Date2012-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- San Francisco, CA, USA
- Biography
- painter and printmaker, was born in San Francisco (USA), a fifth-generation Australian who came to Sydney as a young child with her parents. She went to school at Ascham in Sydney and at Westonbirt, England. Her mother, Ailsa Lee Brown , was an artist, and Mitty also studied art: at East Sydney Technical College under Frank Medworth and William Dobell in 1944-46. While still a student, she took up residence at Merioola in Woollahra, a boarding house run by Chica Lowe who actively sought tenants with an interest in all fields of artistic expression. In 1944 Mitty Lee Brown was runner-up to Anne Wienholt , another Merioola resident, for the NSW Travelling Art Scholarship. In 1945 three pages of Present Day Art in Australia were devoted to her work; the paintings reproduced included a self-portrait, Sulky Girl .
Mitty Lee Brown left Australia with Wienholt in 1945, travelled extensively and did not return to Sydney until 1962, then but briefly. This inveterate traveller has lived in Paris and near Bordeaux in France, in Rome and, briefly, in Tokyo. She has built a house in Bali near Donald Friend’s longtime residence, lived on a houseboat in Kashmir, India, and renovated a house on the Greek Island of Cos. She has also undertaken two overland journeys from Europe to Australia via Turkey, Afghanistan and India. From 1980 until her death in June 2012, as Mrs Risi, she lived and worked near Trincomalee, Sri Lanka, but maintained regular visits to Australia.
Writers:
Simmons, Paul
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 1921
- Summary
- Lee Brown a painter and printmaker, doyenne of the Charm School. Born in San Francisco was runner up in NSW Travelling Art Scholarship, 1944. Left Australia in 1945 to travel extensively around the world. She spent her final years in Sri Lanka.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 3-Jun-12
- Age at death
- 91
Details
Latitude-33.87978 Longitude151.18541 Start Date1921-01-01 End Date2012-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Glebe, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
- Biography
- cartoonist and comic book artist, was born in Glebe, Sydney (acc. Shiell ed). He always wanted to draw cartoons and attended Saturday morning art lessons as a boy at Oswald Brock 's studio in Sydney’s Victoria Arcade. He left high school during the Depression and found work as a junior poster artist with Hackett Offset Printing, meanwhile studying commercial art at night at East Sydney Technical College. He stayed at Hackett’s for six months, then became a designer and illustrator for a furniture manufacturer, Corkhill & Lang (later Frazer’s Furniture). He moved to Grace Brothers as furniture artist and salesman, but this was short-lived; he spent 1941-45 in the AIF and RAAF.
After the war Wedd decided to complete his Commercial Art course under the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme. He created his first strip, Sword and Sabre , during the 1946 Christmas break. It was sold to Syd Nicholls’s publishing company and appeared as three monthly episodes in Middy Malone magazine. Wedd produced eight more strips for the magazine, all like Sword and Sabre about the French Foreign Legion. Nicholls, who was both nationalist and anti-war, encouraged him to try an Australian story, resulting in Captain Justice , the bushranger who righted wrongs, and a lifelong passion for Australian history. The strip first appeared in a Middy Malone book, was upgraded to a Fatty Finn comic, and when Nicholls was forced to abandon publishing after the 1950 Coal Strike, Wedd managed to get a contract with New Century Press for a series of 'Captain Justice’ books with the hero now from the American Wild West. 23 comic books were isssued in this series.
Meanwhile, Wedd produced one-off comic books, Kirk Raven and Tod Traill – the latter an American Western – for Elmsdale Publications. He created strips for Stamp News (on the history of the stamp) and for Dr T.S. Hepworth’s Australian Children’s Newspaper (which lasted for 16 years) and designed and illustrated all eight ABC Argonauts annuals. In 1954 he created The Scorpion for Elmsdale. It became a bestseller with sales of up to 100,000 per issue, he claimed, despite being banned in Queensland. Calvert Publishing decided to re-issue the Captain Justice books, but they had to be largely re-drawn to satisfy 1950s censorship rules and regulations, e.g. the hero’s face could not be entirely hidden, no flashes could issue from guns, no character could carry an offensive weapon in the hand, and no-one was allowed to be killed (the code did not apply to rival American strips, of course). He also wrote and illustrated eight books for Calvert about a war-time American, Kent Blake of the Secret Service .
Aching to do 'something really Australian’ (Wedd in Rae, 91), Wedd sold to the Women’s Mirror a serial strip called Children of Fortune set in the Macquarie period. Its success led to other commissions from the magazine, part of the Bulletin stable. At the same time he was producing a local version of Chuckler’s Weekly for Telegraph Newspapers. When local comics 'again took a nose dive’ in the early 1960s, Wedd found a new part-time career discussing his growing collection of Australiana and other historic topics as a TV guest on various Channel 9 programs. In 1965 he drew about 60 'Dollar Bill’ strips for the Decimal Currency Board. In 1966 he joined Artansa Park Studios and helped design a Lone Ranger animation feature for TV. This was followed by Rocket Robin Hood (also 1966). In 1968 he worked with Eric Porter Studios designing a TV series about his old Chuckler’s Weekly characters, leading to further work in the 1970s.
Wedd was in great demand for the Cook Bicentenary, creating historic strips, illustrations and cards for everything from TV series to Minties and washing powder in 1969-70 (Wedd in Rae, 92-93). He finally cracked the Sunday comics in 1974 when the Sunday Mirror accepted his Ned Kelly strip. It ran for 146 issues, until July 1977, and was published in Sydney, Brisbane and Perth. Bold Ben Hall followed. A longtime member and vice-president of the Australian Black and White Artists’ Club, Wedd lives at Williamstown, NSW (Lindesay 1994). He is married and has a family. In 1993 he was awarded an Order of Australia for his services as author, illustrator and historian. He won Stanley Awards in 1987 and 1989.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
stokel
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 5 January 1921
- Summary
- Wedd was a Sydney cartoonist, designer and comic book artist who worked on the nation's earliest animated film "Marco Polo vs the Red Dragon". He also executed covers for pulp fiction, drew trading cards and other emphemera. His obituary cites the establishment of his "Monarch Historical Museum", Dee Why (1960). Early in his career, he also designed selected items of furniture for Corkhill & Lang and Grace Bros., Sydney.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-12
- Age at death
- 91
Details
Latitude-39.9324904 Longitude175.0519306 Start Date1920-01-01 End Date2012-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Wanganui, New Zealand
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1920
- Summary
- Bethwaite was a aircraft pilot who initially designed gliders, then designed sailing dinghies such as the Northbridge Junior and later the 4.5 metre Northbridge Senior. After founding a company Starboard Products, later Bethwaite Design, he developed the Laser 2 (two crew Laser) and the Taser. Their final boat design developed by his son Julian was the 49er FX, a new Olympic sailing class.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-12
- Age at death
- 92
Details
Latitude-43.53 Longitude172.620278 Start Date1904-01-01 End Date2012-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Christchurch, New Zealand
- Biography
- painter, printmaker, cartoonist and art teacher, was born in Christchurch, New Zealand, on 13 November 1904, daughter of Arnold Wall (who wrote articles that were published in Lone Hand 1907-8) and E.K.M. Curnow. After initial art studies at Christchurch, Edith studied in Rome and London (Westminster Polytechnic). In 1933 she married Oscar A. Bayne, an architect; they had one daughter, Cosima. Wall came to Sydney in 1939 when her husband was appointed director of the Commonwealth Experimental Building Station; later the family lived in Balwyn, Melbourne.
Wall regularly exhibited watercolours and drawings with Sydney’s Society of Artists, the Victorian Artists’ Society (VAS), the Contemporary Art Society (Vic.) and elsewhere. Strawberry Ices (two very fat women in fox stoles), shown with the Society of Artists in 1943, was illustrated in their catalogue; Woman with Cinerarias (a nasty Sydney socialite) was included in 1945. Alan McCulloch praised her satiric drawings in 'Contemporary Art Displayed’, Herald (Melbourne) 11 May 1955, 21.
Between 1940 and 1950 Wall worked primarily as a cartoonist, producing trenchant, witty and occasionally bleak cartoons for the Ure Smith publications Australia National Journal and its companion annual Australia Weekend Book . The fifth (1946) volume of the latter published a portfolio of her cartoons, all signed with the gender-neutral signature 'Wall’. Many were acid comments on wartime society, women and businessmen, but it was her military cartoons in particular that encouraged the belief that 'Wall’ was a man. The joke frequently lay in the incongruity of soldiers and situation. Hence a tough digger deep in the New Guinea jungle in 1942 reads a romantic novel to two even beefier mates ('Now, we’d just got to the part where Gervaise, suspecting Lady Irma’s infidelity, slips from the conservatory’), or else four hideous Hun officers worry in January 1945, 'Mein vriends, if things go on like this ve vill all become pure ornaments’. The artist’s gender was revealed in Australia National Journal in June 1945 with the publication of a photograph of her by Olive Cotton .
Wall’s 12 joke cartoons in Australia Week-end Book 1 (1942) include the ludicrous “Playtogs?” and [2 effeminate male dancers] “Well, frankly, I think that bow on top makes your costume look slightly silly” . She was the most prolific cartoonist in the book. Vol.2 (1943) contained 15 cartoons by Wall, equal to (but reproduced larger than) those by “Wiz” .They include: “Doctor’s sorry he can’t come; he says would you mind if the local man had a look at you?” (i.e. witch doctor), “I’m tired of this war – aren’t you?” , “I love the [Sydney] harbour trip – must be my seafaring blood coming out” , and “Now, we’d just got to the part where Gervaise, suspecting Lady Irma’s infidelity, slips from the conservatory” . Vol.3 (1944) has 17 Wall examples, again the same number as “Wiz”. They include The Drawing Lesson , cheese /furniture polish cartoons and “George is with the Eighth Army…” Vol.4 (1945) had 10 cartoons (just less than Wiz). Vol.5 included a 'Portfolio of Wall’s Drawings’, pp.161-76 (Wiz got a portfolio too).
In 1956-70 Wall taught art, worked as an illustrator and publicist and designed an Australian exhibition display for Britain. She was a committee member of the NSW Contemporary Art Society in 1944-50 (and exhibited with it 11 times up to 1959: see Paula Furby, PhD pp.157-58) and of the Melbourne CAS in 1960-64. She held a solo exhibition in 1954 (see McCulloch, 'Satirical Intentions’, Herald 4 August 1954, 16), won the VAS drawing prize in 1956 and the Minnie Crouch prize at Bendigo Art Gallery in 1971 – the year she had a solo exhibition of her small-scale satirical works at Melbourne’s Leveson Street Gallery. Her last solo show, held at Melbourne in 1996, apparently consisted mainly of watercolour landscape paintings. She told JK in 1994 that she did few satiric works because people only bought landscapes.
Wall’s other interests were 'history, languages, cooking’, she wrote in 1982, adding:
I started drawing at the age of two, and so my ideals had to be invented later. I am a descriptive, not abstract, artist; I am continually hunting the adjustments between colour and space, shadow and substance, finite form and infinite ambience. Colour and line are the weapons I use to attack reality. My main object is to paint a picture that has not been seen before. This is difficult as it necessitates a many-fronted approach.
Wall also drew cartoons for Man .
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
1992
- Born
- b. 13 November 1904
- Summary
- Mid 20th century New Zealand-born, Sydney and Melbourne-based painter, printmaker, cartoonist and art teacher.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 21-Apr-12
- Age at death
- 108
Details
Latitude-37.560833 Longitude143.8475 Start Date1956-01-01 End Date2011-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Ballarat, VIC, Australia
- Biography
- This record is a stub. You can help out by adding more detail.
Writers:
staffcontributor
Date written:
Last updated:
- Born
- b. 1956
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 19-Jun-11
- Age at death
- 55
Details
Latitude52.0799838 Longitude4.3113461 Start Date1954-01-01 End Date2011-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- The Hague, Netherlands
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 18 August 1954
- Summary
- John Barbour was an Australian Experimental Art Foundation council member from 1996-98, its council chairman from 1997-98. He was a long-time lecturer at the South Australian School of Art. First exhibiting in the 1980s, John Barbour's contemporary art has since shown in Stockholm, London, Tokyo, Sao Paulo and Auckland. His work is represented in the Art Gallery of South Australia
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 17-Apr-11
- Age at death
- 57
Details
Latitude-42.880556 Longitude147.325 Start Date1946-01-01 End Date2011-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1946
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2011
- Age at death
- 65
Details
Latitude52.2434979 Longitude5.6343227 Start Date1934-01-01 End Date2011-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Holland, Netherlands
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1934
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2011
- Age at death
- 77
Details
Latitude-27.467778 Longitude153.028056 Start Date1933-01-01 End Date2011-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Brisbane
- Biography
- This record is a stub. You can help out by adding more detail.
Writers:
Date written:
Last updated:
- Born
- b. 1933
- Summary
- Humble began her training at the East Sydney Technical College under Phyllis Shillito and others. She initially studied industrial design but did not pursue it. She took a number of jobs, at one time working at the Martin Boyd Pottery. She completed her diploma in 1959. Her first solo show was held in 1972 and she later exhibited with the Eva Breuer Gallery, Sydney.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2011
- Age at death
- 78
Details
Latitude52 Longitude20 Start Date1930-01-01 End Date2011-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Poland
- Biography
- In 1950 Polish Holocaust survivor Sabina Wolanski, alongside husband Zdenek (Dennis), arrived in Sydney as an assisted immigrant. The couple had been living in Paris for two years, where Zdenek was a cutter in a shirt factory. Sabina recalls, “One day in Paris I saw a man promoting a tie on the street. I was intrigued and thought it was a clever idea for a business. I bought this strange looking product and packed it when we came to Australia. It was a clip-on tie, a real novelty, and we could see its potential. Zdenek refined and completely changed its structure and shape.” Using this experience, Zdenek gained employment working in a manufacturing company in York Street. The couple introduced the clip-on tie to David Jones and had great success under the Stardust name. It was in a shiny fabric dotted with tiny points that resembled stars. This tie was then patented and they became the Lido Tie Manufacturing Company. By 1956 the couple were travelling to Como, Italy, to buy and import custom-designed and hand-woven fabrics for their ties, bow ties and cravats.
Writers:
Jenni Hagedorn
Date written:
2013
Last updated:
2013
- Born
- b. 1930
- Summary
- Designer and Director of Lido Tie Manufacturing Company
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2011
- Age at death
- 81
Details
Latitude-23.2759057 Longitude129.3881877 Start Date1930-01-01 End Date2011-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Kintore, NT, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. c.1930
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2011
- Age at death
- 81
Details
Latitude-29.7379146 Longitude151.7356326 Start Date1928-01-01 End Date2011-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Glen Innes, Australia
- Biography
- Thomas Fletcher Gillies (1928-2011)
The interior decorator Thomas Gillies was a contemporary of such notable Sydney designers and decorators as Marion Hall Best, Deric Deane, Meryl du Boulay and Florence Broadhurst. While Tom (as he was more commonly known) valued privacy, he moved effortlessly amongst his clientele where he became known for his ability to mix and match old and new furnishings to provide ease as well as style. “I don’t like the impossible,” he said in a recorded 2010 interview, “where you don’t know where to sit down and be comfortable.”
Tom Gillies was born in Glen Innes, NSW. The district is known for livestock and his father, Bruce Gillies, was a successful stock and station agent and his mother Edna attended Teachers College. Mrs Gillies’s teacher training proved crucial to the family after Bruce Gillies’s death in 1941.
Gillies was educated in Glen Innes and had no early design training or exposure to the arts. In 1945, he was placed in a clerical position into the local Commonwealth Bank. Three years later, he asked for a transfer to a Sydney branch. He mentioned a Sydney placement, he said, because he had visited the city once with his father.
Soon restless with clerking, he took up an opportunity in the furnishings department of McDowell’s department store at King and George Streets. Shortly afterward, he met the interior decorator and architect Deric (Frederick) Deane who ran a well-known antique shop in Rowe Street and later, an interior decorating studio known as Deane and Hall in the Trust Building, King and Castlereagh Streets. Deric Deane and his partner Don Hall introduced him to the profession of interior decoration.
Deric Deane was Sydney’s pre-imminent interior decorator as well as a registered architect and Deane and Hall had an impressive clientele including such figures as Sir Alfred Davidson, the head of the Bank of NSW and Mr and Mrs Robert Brash, the chairman of the Sydney Stock Exchange. After a year with Deric Deane, Gillies decided that he needed to do a design course at the East Sydney Technical College but Deane and his associates tried to discourage it, telling him it was a waste of time. But he persisted and took courses with Phyllis Shillito, the noted colourist, who trained him in colour mixing. Her theories, he said, allowed him to mix any colour a client wanted, even matching colours that had been on the walls for thirty years.
In the 1950s, Deric Deane folded the practice in the city and Deane and Gillies established a new practice in Edgecliff advertised under the name “Thomas Gillies”. The practice was successful enough to earn attract Taubmans paints who featured Thomas Gillies interiors in a series of colour advertisements. Deane died in 1960 and Gillies then began to practice independently from a new Edgecliff shop, later moving to Bay Street, Double Bay and other locations in the eastern suburbs.
Many of Gillies’s early clients were well-known NSW families who continued to rely on Thomas Gillies through two generations. He maintained that he had done hundreds of country houses. While reluctant to identify clientele, he noted professional relationships with Lady Pagan [Sir Jock and Lady Marjorie Pagan], Dame Helen Blaxland, and provided designs for “The Lodge”, Canberra for Hon. Malcolm and Tammy Fraser. He developed an interior design scheme for Government House, Parramatta for the National Trust of Australia (NSW) and “Clydebank” in The Rocks for Caroline Simpson.
As an interior designer, Gillies was a soothing but shrewd practitioner. “If you’ve got ideas and you want your client to have them, quite often you’ve got to be very diplomatic how you present them,” he said in a recent interview. “If they want a black and white and yellow room, you might do a yellow room with black and white. But they think they’ve got a black and white and yellow room. It was a good way to put things together.” But at the same time, he respected the client’s taste. “You can’t just thrust your personality onto them; you’ve got to step back. Your client is the most important person.”
Unlike contemporary interior designers, Gillies did no drawings or colour boards at all. He simply took three metre samples of textiles to the client and a hatful of ideas and presented his thoughts about decor in their living room. He also resisted floor plans, insisting that furniture should always be moved about, considering that fixed schemes for rooms were anathema, arguing that rooms should change for the seasons.
Gillies continued to practice in Sydney with an interlude in Burley Heads, Queensland in the 1970s when he explored flower painting with exhibitions at the Macquarie Galleries in Canberra, Victor Mace, Brisbane and the Painters Gallery, Burton Street. Then after five years in the tropics, he returned to interior decoration to re-launch his career in Double Bay.
He considered his interior decoration for the 19th century Government House in Darwin to be one of his most exciting commissions. The house’s gabled rooms open onto the cane furniture of a screened verandah that circles the white-painted building. “I gave them simple things,” he said. “So I thought, it’s the tropics, so I gave them big simple sofas covered in printed linens, simple striped curtains and nice clear colours.”
In his later years, he kept up with his friends and acquaintances, worked with the late Caroline Simpson, one of his oldest and closest friends, on her house and museum, “Clydebank” in The Rocks, Sydney and auctioned his collection in 2008 through Sotheby’s as “The connoisseur’s spring collection: including the private collection of Colin Lennox and Tom Gillies, John Stephens and the late John Klinger.” He maintained his creativity by executing tapestry work to his own designs. His career is now commemorated with the annual Thomas Gillies Scholarship for Interior Design and Decoration students at Design Centre, Enmore sponsored by Radford Furnishings.
Michael Bogle with Annalisa Capurro who interviewed Thomas Gillies in December 2010. Thanks also to interior decorator Malcolm Forbes for valuable information regarding the career of Deric Deane.
[Prepared as an obituary, published in the Sydney Morning Herald, 13 March 2012]
Writers:
Michael Bogle
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 1 January 1928
- Summary
- Gillies was an interior designer/decorator who apprenticed with the architect and interior designer Frederick Deane's practice in Sydney known as Deane and Hall (Don). In the 1950s, Gillies and Deane combined their practice in Edgecliff, a Sydney suburb as "Thomas Gillies". Gillies continued the practice under his name as various locations. In the 1970s, he moved to Burleigh Heads, Qld, then back to Sydney.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-11
- Age at death
- 83
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1926-01-01 End Date2011-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1926
- Summary
- Sahm was a production potter working with Terra Ceramics, Sydney and Gutenhalde Ceramics, Stuttgart, Germany. He established a pottery in Mosman in 1958 and taught at the National Art School. He continued working in ceramics and teaching until his retirement in 1984.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1-Jan-11
- Age at death
- 85
Details
Latitude-42.880556 Longitude147.325 Start Date1926-01-01 End Date2011-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1926
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 30-Jan-11
- Age at death
- 85
Details
Latitude51.6889387 Longitude5.303116 Start Date1925-01-01 End Date2011-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- s'Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 11 December 1925
- Summary
- Havekes appears to be a self-taught artist. He was active in ceramics, painting, sculpture, sculpture and tapestry. He later studied ceramics at East Sydney Technical College and worked with architects such as Peddle, Thorp and Walker and Kahn, Finch on major projects. Furniture by Havekes is also known. See Andrew Shapiro SH209 20/21C Art and Design 29 March 2022.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 27-Oct-11
- Age at death
- 86
Details
Latitude-37.8902423 Longitude145.067469 Start Date1924-01-01 End Date2011-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Murrumbeena, VIC, Australia
- Biography
- David Boyd is a figurative painter, ceramic sculptor and potter. David Boyd’s art stems from a long family tradition of artistic talent.
He was the fourth child of the potters Merric and Doris Boyd, and with his talented siblings – Arthur, Guy, Lucy and Mary – he spent his childhood at the family farm, Open Country in Murrumbeena, Victoria. Strong beliefs in religion and ethics shaped the Boyd family, and as with his brothers David refused to fight in World War II. He even underwent hunger strikes in order to avoid bearing arms.
After the War, David and his brother Guy moved to Sydney where they established Martin Boyd Pottery, producing high quality ceramics. In 1949 he married Hermia Lloyd Jones, a sculpture student at East Sydney Technical College. Their partnership in art and life was to last until her death in 2000. They could not however make a profit from their join pottery ventures until they moved to London in 1951. The media called them 'a golden couple’, and they attracted significant financial success, but in 1954 they returned to Australia, this time to Melbourne. Here the quality of their work combined with news of their London success, led to a significant local reputation, which was reflected in the sale of their combined work.
David Boyd began his career as a painter in 1957 with a series of symbolic paintings on Australian explorers. He became one of the seven members of Bernard Smith’s Antipodean group of figurative artists, joining his elder borther Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan, John Brack, Robert Dickerson, John Perceval and Clifton Pugh. His Truganini series was exhibited in Melbourne in 1959 but then the family departed once more for London.
David Boyd painted several major series of works, including his powerful Trial series, Tasmanian Aborigines, Wanderer and Exiles series. Picturing innocence and evil, destruction and creation, his works convey mythical and universal themes. Having won significant international recognition, David Boyd was invited by the Commonwealth Institute of Art, London, to hold a retrospective of paintings at their Art Gallery in 1969.
In 1971, after many years of British success, the Boyd family returned to Australia, settling this time in a large house in Silver Street, St Peters in inner Sydney. Noisy aeroplanes, represented by cockatoos, became the subject of some of his later paintings. He stopped painting in 2005, after breaking a hip, but continued to make etchings in collaboration with James Whitington. In 2009 he moved to Braidwood, where he was cared for by his daughter Lucinda.
David Boyd is represented in the Australian National Gallery, Canberra; all State and many regional galleries; the Mertz collection, USA; the Power Collection, Sydney; and many major international galleries and private collections in Australia and overseas.
He died on Thursday 10th November 2011 at Sydney, surrounded by three generations of his family, after a short illness. He was eighty-seven years old.
Writers:
Eva Breuer Art Dealer
Joanna Mendelssohn
zauthor
Date written:
2011
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 23 August 1924
- Summary
- Brother of Guy, Lucy and Arthur Boyd, David Boyd found acclaim as a potter in the 1950s and ’60s. He began his career as a painter in 1957 with a series of symbolic paintings on Australian explorers. David Boyd died on 10th November 2011 at Sydney, NSW.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 10-Nov-11
- Age at death
- 87
Details
Latitude-28.79363905 Longitude153.2670868 Start Date1923-01-01 End Date2011-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Lismore, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- painter, was born on 22 June 1923 in Lismore, NSW, eldest of the three children of Joseph Olley and Grace, née Temperley. Shortly after her birth the family moved to Tully in Queensland, then to Murwillumbah (NSW) before finally settling in Brisbane. Margaret was educated at Somerville House. She was taught art by Caroline Barker , an enthusiastic teacher quick to recognise ability.
She spent a year at Brisbane Central Technical College, then studied at East Sydney Tech. under Dorothy Thornhill , Jean Bellette , Lyndon Dadswell , Douglas Dundas , Herbert Badham and Frank Medworth , graduating in 1945 with first-class honours. In 1943 she painted sets for John Kay of the Mercury Theatre Group; in 1947 she designed and executed the sets for Sam Hughes’s production of J.E. Flecker’s Hassan ; in 1948 she worked with Sidney Nolan on Hughes’s production of Cocteau’s Orphée and Shakespeare’s Pericles . She began showing her paintings in group exhibitions in 1944 – at the Royal Queensland Art Society Exhibition in Brisbane and the Under Thirties Group in Sydney. By 1945 she was exhibiting with the Contemporary Art Society in Sydney. In 1948 she held her first solo exhibitions at the Macquarie Galleries, Sydney and the Morton Galleries, Brisbane, where she again exhibited in 1950. In 1947 she won the Mosman Art Prize with New England Landscape , one of many landscapes she executed at this time. She and Donald Friend were among the first of many artists to paint in the Hill End area, near Bathurst.
In 1949 Olley and Mitty Lee Brown travelled to London. Olley settled in Paris and attended classes at La Grande Chaumiére. She became interested in the work of artists such as Matisse and Bonnard, seen in commercial galleries. On weekends she and fellow Australians David Strachan and Moya Dyring made painting expeditions, which she continued after moving to a farmhouse at Cassis, near Marseilles. Her many drawings and watercolours of Paris and French coastal villages have a quick vitality and show an increased awareness of light.
Having learnt the technique from Sir Francis Rose (a fellow excursionist), her first overseas exhibition – in 1952 at the Galerie Paul Morihien, Palais Royal – was of monotypes. It was favourably reviewed in three Paris journals, all of which commented on her sense of poetry. Olley sent out bundles of drawings to Australia for exhibition at the Marodian Gallery, Brisbane, and the Macquarie Galleries. In 1952, with Strachan, she joined David Rose in Lisbon and helped him with a commission for wallpaper designs. Then she worked in London with Jocelyn Rickards and Loudon Sainthill on designs for Michael Benthall’s proposed film, The Tempest .
In 1953 Olley returned to Brisbane. Robert Haines, Director of the Queensland Art Gallery, commissioned her to paint a mural of the Place de la Concorde for the opening of the important 'French Art Today’ exhibition at the gallery. It was followed by mural commissions for the Grosvenor and Lennon’s Hotels in Brisbane and, in 1955, for the Leagues Club, Phillip Street, Sydney.
In 1954 Olley and Friend travelled to Magnetic Island, prior to visiting Papua New Guinea. Work from these trips was shown in a solo exhibition at Macquarie Galleries in 1955. They revealed an increased interest in colour and, as Lloyd Rees was to comment, showed a Bonnard-like approach to tropical landscape. The still-lifes heralded her future direction as a still-life painter.
A warm personality, Margaret Olley’s capacity for friendship and her individual style of dress has endeared her to many artists. She has been a popular subject for portraits: by Margaret Cilento , Russell Drysdale and Donald Friend, as well as the renowned 1949 Archibald prize-winning portrait by William Dobell . All state and most regional galleries in Australia hold examples of her work.
Writers:
France, Christine
Michael Bogle
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2014
- Born
- b. 22 June 1923
- Summary
- After her first Australian solo painting exhibitions, Olley worked and exhibited in France in the 1950s. An endearing personality, Olley had many travelling and working friendships with other Australian artists. Olley died at her home in Paddington, Sydney, on 26th July 2011.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 26-Jul-11
- Age at death
- 88
Details
Latitude-33.928992 Longitude18.417396 Start Date1922-01-01 End Date2011-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Cape Town, South Africa
- Biography
- Joy de Gruchy made a major contribution in the field of interior design, and the promotion of good design, art and craft – as an interior designer, business and gallery owner, and arts bureaucrat. Craftsman’s Market, Joy’s shop, became an iconic Brisbane business important to Brisbane’s cultural development as it grew from country town to cosmopolitan city. Joy believed strongly that modern interiors benefited from the interest and warmth that came from the injection of art works and craft.Born in Cape Town, South Africa in 1922, Joy studied economics and fine arts for her Bachelor of Arts at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. She married architect, Graham de Gruchy. While working as an economist, Joy collaborated with Graham on domestic interiors for his clients. They were madly keen on the design ideas for furniture and interiors coming out of Europe, Scandinavia and the U.S. in the 1950s, heralding a new era of modern design. In 1960, with 3 young children, Joy and Graham moved to London. While there, they saw a slide show about Brisbane at Queensland House. They decided to emigrate, settling in Brisbane in 1962.Joy conceived the idea of a craft and design ‘studio’. She came across a ramshackle building at 57 Jephson Street, Toowong thinking this would ‘do’ until she found longer-term premises. Craftsman’s Market opened on 11 February 1963. Joy remained in business at this same location for the next 25 years.For two decades from the mid-1960s, Craftman’s Market and Joy’s interiors attracted interest from the interiors media, being regularly featured in magazines like Australian Home Journal, Belle, Home Beautiful, and Vogue Australia, Living and Interiors.Joy loved colour. Along with a few other Australian interior designers like Marion Hall Best in Sydney and Merlin Cunliffe in Melbourne, Joy was delighted by the bold colour and simplicity of Marimekko fabrics. Craftsman’s Market beat other states by a week when the 1966 Marimekko clothing range went on sale with a preview party on 10 August 1966. Vogue Australia captured this fashion event. Joy was rarely seen out of a Marimekko outfit for the next 30 years.Craftsman’s Market sold imported furniture from Scandinavia and local suppliers included Michael Hirst Furniture (Melbourne) and Saga Furniture (Sydney). Giftware included: Scandinavian glassware (Iittala, Kosta Boda, Holmegaard, Orrefors), ceramics (Arabia, Liekke, Hackman), kitchenware (Stelton, WMF, Spring), fabrics and textiles (Marimekko, Metsovaara, Tidstrand), jewellery (Hans Hansen) and clothing (Marimekko, Vuokko). Craft exhibitions included potters Carl McConnell and Hatton and Lucy Beck.Joy was actively involved with the community of architects, artists and designers. Her passion for interior design and her interest in the study of interior design led to accepting invitations to speak about interiors to the Queensland Chapter of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects and to the public. In 1969, Joy and Graham de Gruchy co-sponsored the Darnell-de Gruchy Art Prize with the University of Queensland (and contributed funding until 1977). This was a significant contribution to stimulate modern art.In 1971, Joy was invited to become the first Queensland member of the Society of Interior Designers of Australia (now DIA), remaining an active member for 22 years. In 1976, Belle magazine published a special national feature celebrating SIDA’s 25 years of design. Joy was one of the 39 featured Australian designers. In early 1973, Joy was appointed by the Whitlam Government as a member of the inaugural Crafts Board of the Australian Council for the Arts (later called the Australia Council). This was a stimulating time for the arts and Joy was delighted to contribute. Joy travelled often to Europe for ideas and product lines. Favourite stops were Conran’s Habitat, Milan and Copenhagen furniture fairs and the Danish Design Centre. The 70s was a world in which fibreglass and sophisticated furniture manufacturing techniques were leaping ahead. Joy imported Cado, Westofa, B&B Italia, Fritz Hansen, Artemide, Cassina. She secured top quality curtaining and upholstery fabrics from Sweden and Denmark. She imported Lyktan lighting and stocked the Louis Poulsen range. She imported stylish office equipment such as Danese and Styro. Joy’s business acquired the property adjacent to Craftsman’s Market in 1973. Joy added large showrooms connected by a walkway. The business now had 500 sq metres of display space for showing furniture and interiors, and as gallery space.By the mid-80s import rights changed to large Australian distributors like Artes. Joy continued to retail through them. She supplemented her business with local suppliers like Roy Catt furniture and retailing innovative Verisol window treatments.The De Gruchy Gallery in the 1970s and 80s showcased the work of many artists and craftsmen, including: batiks by Edit Richards, Peg Mecham pots, Aase Pryor jewellery and pots, Peter Collingwood and Tadek Beutlich (UK), Pru Medlin weavings, Milton Moon pottery, Sam Herman glass, the weaving art of Hawaii, Liz Nettleton weavings, Jack Laird ceramics and pots, watercolours by celebrated NZ artist Jane Evans, Pietro Agnoletto’s Art of the Sepik River, and Croneen oriental rugs. Belle magazine’s June 1980 issue featured a story on ‘top’ galleries in Australia, with the De Gruchy Gallery profiled.After 25 years in business, Joy closed the business in April 1988.Over the years, Joy completed many projects including homes for clients, particularly those designed by architects, many offices and small businesses such as professional consulting rooms, a few restaurants including the Nautilus Restaurant in Port Douglas, and the Castaways resort on the Sunshine Coast.Her friends (and clients) included some wonderful Queenslanders including: Karl and Gertrude Langer; Brian and Marjorie Johnstone; Pam and Patrick Wilson; John and Sue Railton; Graham and Margaret McNamara; Bob and Pfeff Colin; Nancy and Peter Underhill; Zelman and Anna Cowen; Betty and Roy Churcher; Syd and Maureen Schubert; Quentin and Michael Bryce; Joan Whalley; Denis and Elysia Croneen, and many more whose names are less well known.Joy left a lasting legacy among a generation of Brisbane homeowners, architects and business people who benefited from having access to a shop and showroom like Craftsman’s Market and the De Gruchy Gallery.
Writers:
rayned
Date written:
2021
Last updated:
2021
- Born
- b. 1922
- Summary
- De Gruchy established a design studio "Craftsman's Market", Toowong, QLD in 1962 offering design goods such as Marimekko & Danish-inspired furniture. Her husband, Graham de Gruchy also designed furniture for the shop. In the 1970s, she began supplying interior design services, later serving on the Crafts Board of the Australia Council. She and her husband established the Darnell-de Gruchy Art Prize, University of Queensland.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2011
- Age at death
- 89
Details
Latitude54.09809555 Longitude-3.257316751 Start Date1921-01-01 End Date2011-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Walney, Cumbria, England
- Biography
- Joy Warren, ceramicist and art historian, was born at Walney, Cumbria, England in 1921. Warren attended the Julian Ashton Art School, Sydney, the National Art School (NAS), Sydney, and the Camberwell School of Art, London, in 1949. After a study tour of Europe in 1951 she attended the Camberwell School of Art from 1952 to 1955 and then NAS in 1963. She completed a Bachelor of Arts with Honours at the University of Sydney in 1980 and attained a PHD at the University of Wollongong in 1994. Between 1982 and 1985 Warren toured the USA, Europe, China and Singapore. After working as an advertising executive from 1947 to 1959 in London and Sydney, she was a founding member of Ceramic Study Group in 1963 and the Craft Association of NSW (later called the Crafts Council of Australia) from 1964 to 1969. She was the founder, editor and producer of the 'Craft Australia’ journal from 1969 to 1975. Warren lectured in Art History and Theory at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, from 1979 to 1993 and at the Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, from 1980 to 1985.
Warren created poetic thrown ceramic vessels. The simplicity of the handmade shape, the tactility of the glaze and the understated tones were signatures of her work. Warren’s husband, the well-known artist Guy Warren, often painted on her ceramics, his figures in the landscape complementing the gentle character of the ceramics.
Warren was the recipient of an Australia Council Grant in 1942 and a Crafts Board Grant in 1979. She participated in two Paris residencies in 1994 and 2004. Warren has had numerous solo shows nationally and has been included in an exhibition with the Craft Council of New South Wales and an 'Australian Ceramics’ touring exhibition. Her work is represented in many major public collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, and numerous private collections.
Writers:
downes
Date written:
Last updated:
- Born
- b. 1921
- Summary
- Ceramicist who founded the 'Craft Australia' journal in 1969, and was its editor and producer until 1975.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2011
- Age at death
- 90
Details
Latitude-29.7379146 Longitude151.7356326 Start Date1921-01-01 End Date2011-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Glen Innes, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Colin Madigan (1921–2011) was born in Glenn Innes, NSW and studied at the Sydney Technical High school, 1938-39, then at the Sydney Technical College from 1940, graduating with a Diploma of Architecture in 1950. He served in the Navy from 1941-46. From 1948 to 1950, he worked with Jack Torzillo in the office of Ashton Tyler and Edwards, then worked with his architect father, FJ Madigan, at Inverell from 1950-1954. On return to Sydney in 1954, he joined the Edwards Madigan Torzillo practice with Maurice Edwards and Jack Torzillo. In 1966, they were joined by another partner, David Briggs and the practice became known as Edward Madigan Torzillo and Briggs until 1977, when the word ‘International’ was added. A Canberra office was opened in 1973. then completed the High Court in 1981, the National Gallery of Australia in 1982 and and several further civic projects during the 1980s. The practice won the NSW RAIA’s Sulman Medal in 1967 and 1971; the Blacket Award in 1968 and Canberra Medallions in 1982 and 1984. Madigan himself won the RAIA Gold Medal in 1981 and became an Officer in the Order of Australia in 1984. He left Edwards Madigan Torzillo and Briggs in 1990. After a merger, it is now known as HBO + EMTB.Sources—Taylor, Jennifer. 1990. Australian Architecture Since 1960. Canberra: Royal Australian Institute of Architects.—Emmanuel, Muriel. 1980 and later editions. Contemporary Architects. London: Macmillan.
Writers:
Davina Jackson
Date written:
2015
Last updated:
2015
- Born
- b. 22 July 1921
- Summary
- Colin Madigan was a nationally notable Sydney architect from the mid 1950s until his retirement in 1990. He is best known as the design architect for two national monuments on Lake Burley Griffin, Canberra: the High Court of Australia (1981) and the National Gallery of Australia (1982). He was a principal of Edwards Madigan Torzillo and Briggs.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 17-Sep-11
- Age at death
- 90
Details
Latitude-31.7656468 Longitude150.8388618 Start Date1917-01-01 End Date2011-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Murrurundi, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1917
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2011
- Age at death
- 94
Details
Latitude-33.9542619 Longitude151.1403655 Start Date1915-01-01 End Date2011-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Rockdale, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Ceramicist, was born Joyce Halpin on 14th October 1915. Her mother, Lavinia Figtree, was an amateur landscape artist who had painted several townscapes of Wollongong. On her marriage to Claude Gittoes, they bought a house in Villiers St Rockdale, near to her parents’ home. In the late 1950s she began to take ceramics classes Kogarah Technical College where she was taught by Molly Douglas and Mrs Anderson. Her early work is best described as being in the Japanese tradition as encouraged by post World War II British taste. Gittoes began to exhibit her ceramics with artist groups in the St George region and then to enter art prizes. In 1962 she was awarded the grand prize at the Royal Easter Show. In 1965 the family moved to a house with a larger studio at Bardwell Park. She exhibited at Barry Stern Galleries as well as mixed exhibitions. Her art changed direction from about 1970 after her son, George Gittoes, became involved in Martin Sharp’s Yellow House collective. She befriended Jo Sharp, Martin’s mother, and was encouraged to make ceramic objects based on Magritte for some of the installations. The most significant of these were the objects made for Peter Kingston’s Stone Room which was a part of the Spring 1971 exhibition. It may well be that the technical challenges posed by this work encouraged her own art to move away from bowls, plates and vases towards creating objects. Another source of encouragement was the direction taken by her daughter, Pamela Griffith, whose etchings and paintings were beginning to include detailed studies of Australian flora and fauna. The mature work of Joyce Gittoes is best described as small ceramic sculptures of Australian native life decorated with dazzling glazes. Her favourite subjects were owls, and these are greatly prized by collectors. Her most significant piece of public work is the ceramic mural installation at the Berrima Correctional Centre in the Northern Territory.
Writers:
Mendelssohn, Joanna
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2023
- Born
- b. 14 October 1915
- Summary
- The mature work of Joyce Gittoes is best described as small ceramic sculptures of Australian native life. Her favourite subjects were owls, and these are greatly prized by collectors. Her most significant piece of public work is the ceramic mural installation at the Berrima Correctional Centre in the Northern Territory.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 6-Dec-11
- Age at death
- 96
Details
Latitude51 Longitude9 Start Date1911-01-01 End Date2011-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Germany
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1911
- Summary
- Herbst was a designer for Prestige (Fabrics) Limited, an illustrator and later principal lecturer at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in industrial design, graphics. In the 1950s, Herbst made three films on design: `Portraits in Fabric', (1950); `Language of Design', (1950); `Fabrics in Motion', (1951). In 1967, the course also included Wilby Rackham as lecturer and three tutors. Herbst retired in 1975.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-11
- Age at death
- 100
Details
Latitude-32.916667 Longitude151.75 Start Date1963-01-01 End Date2010-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Newcastle, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1963
- Summary
- Shaw Hendry moved to Adelaide in 1990 and was a long-serving Technical Officer at the University of South Australia. Folling a 1990 residency at the Frans Masereel Centre in Kasterlee, Belgium, Hendry received several South Australian artist grants to develop various art projects. His work is represented in numerous public collections around the country, including the Art Gallery of South Australia.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 23-Apr-10
- Age at death
- 47
Details
Latitude-32.0117265 Longitude117.4483428 Start Date1957-01-01 End Date2010-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Quairading, WA, Australia
- Biography
- Meeykba Shane Pickett (b.1957) spent much of his youth at Quairading, a wheatbelt town in Western Australia. From a family of Nyoongar artists he describes his work as the beneficiary of the legacy from both his father’s Jdewat traditions and his mother’s Balladong ancestry. He graduated from the Claremont Art School in 1983, though he had begun exhibiting in 1976 when only nineteen. His national recognition came early with his selection for the finals of NATSIAA in 1984 and in 1986 receiving the award for Best Painting in a European Medium.
Pickett has exhibited in every Australian state and territory throughout his career. His work has been recognised in numerous art awards and exhibitions. He won the inaugural 2007 'Drawing Together Art Award’, has been chosen as a finalist in the 'Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award’ numerous times, including winning the People’s Choice award in 2009. He was selected by Brenda L. Croft for the 'National Indigenous Art Triennial ’07: Culture Warriors’ at the National Gallery of Australia (touring nationally and shown in Washington D.C. in 2009).
In 2003 Pickett’s works featured in the first comprehensive survey to trace the rich multiplicity of Nyoongar visual culture, 'South West Central: Indigenous Art from South Western Australia 1833-2002’, also curated by Brenda L. Croft. In 2008 he was a finalist in the 'Western Australian Indigenous Art Awards’ at the Art Gallery of Western Australia and the recipient of the People’s Choice award. In 2009 he was again selected to participate in the 'Western Australian Indigenous Art Awards’, the only artist selected to participate in both exhibitions.
Pickett began his career with high-keyed colour depictions of Nyoongar stories of Country in a figurative style. In the early 2000s he abandoned figuration in favour of gestural abstraction, while still remaining focused on land and a responsibility to teach successive generations the necessity of knowing and caring for Country. In later work he charts the seasons, light and the lay of the Nyoongar landscape and the weather patterns and stories. He produces highly personal, ethereal landscapes that reveal an intimate relationship to and understanding of land, law and Country. Through his work he emphasizes the need for knowledge of weather patterns and shares his respect for the six Nyoongar seasons. His works often tell a previously untold or concealed history of Nyoongar lands, underscoring the deep connections, pride and confidence that come from identity, family and knowledge.
Inhabiting the spiritual space between what is concealed and revealed, his paintings explore the Nyoongar season cycle and in so doing create complex visual analogues for the persistence and renaissance of Nyoongar cultural awareness throughout the south-west. As he has said, his works “bring a respect and awareness of Aboriginal culture imbued with the spirituality present in Nyoongar values.” (artist’s statement, Mossenson Gallery). Pickett describes his art as simultaneously portraying an inner peace and the harshness of an everyday Indigenous journey through a modern world. McLean (in Croft 2007, p150) acknowledges Pickett’s painting as a legacy of the “vibrant postcolonial Nyoongar school of landscape art” initiated in Western Australia in the 1950s and now known as the Carrolup tradition.
Pickett’s stature in the community was recognised in 2006 when the united Nyoongar elders selected him to contribute to the monumental group painting Ngallak Kaart Boadja for the Perth International Arts Festival 2007. His work is held in the collections of the Art Gallery of Western Australia, the National Gallery of Australia, and the National Gallery of Victoria.
Writers:
Gary Dufour
Date written:
2008
Last updated:
2009
- Born
- b. 1957
- Summary
- Nyoongar artist Meeykba Shane Picket (b.1957) has exhibited in every Australian state and territory. He won the inaugural 2007 'Drawing Together Art Award', has been chosen as a finalist in the 'Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award' numerous times, including winning the People's Choice award in 2009. He was selected by Brenda L. Croft for the 'National Indigenous Art Triennial '07: Culture Warriors' at the National Gallery of Australia.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 15-Jan-10
- Age at death
- 53
Details
Latitude-22.2527454 Longitude131.7978253 Start Date1955-01-01 End Date2010-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Yuendumu, Northern Territory, Australia
- Biography
- Born in Yuendumu in the 1950s, Bertha Nakamarra Dickson later lived in the Hidden Valley town camp of Alice Springs. When she was living at Yuendumu, her aunt, Ruby Napurrurla, taught her painting. Bertha’s country was situated near Mission Creek and she painted Warna (Snake) and Yawakyi (Bloodberry) Dreamings, which belong to the Jupurrurla/Napurrurla and Jakamarra/Nakamarra skin groups. Together with her husband, Andrew Japaljarri Spencer , Bertha worked for HALT (Healthy Aboriginal Lifestyle Team) in 1989/90. HALT’s aims were to educate Aboriginal people about the dangers of alcohol and drug abuse, diseases related to unhealthy nutrition, lack of hygiene etc. During that time, they produced a series of paintings in the traditional Western Desert style but dealing with these contemporary issues. Bertha had close connections with the Warlpiri communities of Yuendumu, Lajamanu and Willowra. She started with the IAD Literacy Course in 1992, and sold her paintings through the Jukurrpa artists’ co-operative. Monica Nakamarra Doolan was her sister.
Bertha Nakamarra Dickson passed away in Alice Springs on 31st May 2010.
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2010
- Born
- b. c.1955
- Summary
- A Warlpiri artist and a former member of HALT (Healthy Aboriginal Lifestyle Team), Dickson's work has explored contemporary social and health issues. She was a member of the Jukurrpa group in Alice Spring (NT).
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 31-May-10
- Age at death
- 55
Details
Latitude55.861111 Longitude-4.25 Start Date1932-01-01 End Date2010-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Glasgow, Scotland
- Biography
- When Alex Leckie was admitted to as a sculpture student at the Glasgow School of Art, it was on the basis of his talent, rather than any formal academic qualifications.
In 1955, rather than face British National Service, he emigrated to Australia, settling in Adelaide. He initially found work throwing terra cotta pots for Bennetts’Magill Pottery. When he inquired about furthering his studies at the South Australian School of Art, he discovered he was the most qualified potter in the state. He was subsequently employed to teach both sculpture and ceramics. In 1962 he was arrested for swimming naked in the River Torrens and dismissed from his teaching post. However by this time he had his own well established pottery and was President of the Contemporary Art Society of South Australia. 1964, he was one of three Australian ceramicists chosen to represent this country in the International Ceramics Exhibition in Tokyo.However the prudish culture of Adelaide at the time was perhaps a factor in his return to Scotland in 1966. He spent some time in the London Central School, but in 1968 he was appointed Head of Ceramics at the Glasgow School of Art, a position he held for the next twenty years.
He did return to Australia in 1978, 1979 & 1982 as Artist in Residence at Melbourne State College, but for the rest of his life was based in Glasgow. An obituary described him as ‘… wee bull who caused havoc in many a china shop …’
Writers:
7write6
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2021
Last updated:
2022
- Born
- b. 2 June 1932
- Summary
- Alexander Leckie, an adventurous Scot with a modernist sensibility, was one of the generation of studio potters responsible for establishing Australia's post war culture of hand thrown pots.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 7-Feb-10
- Age at death
- 78
Details
Latitude55 Longitude24 Start Date1923-01-01 End Date2010-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Lithuania
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1923
- Summary
- Following her arrival in Australia from Lithuania in 1951, Ieva Pocius was the first student to major in Sculpture at the South Australian School of Art. She went on to lecture part-time at the school for over a decade, whilst at the same time exhibited in Australia and overseas including the USA and Canada. Her life-size statue of Catherine Helen Spence in Light Square, Adelaide, remains one of her most significant works.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2010
- Age at death
- 87
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1922-01-01 End Date2010-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, VIC, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 14 January 1922
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 21-Mar-10
- Age at death
- 88
Details
Latitude47 Longitude20 Start Date1917-01-01 End Date2010-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Hungary
- Biography
- Hungarian sculptor George Barsony was studying at the Munich Academy of Arts in July 1944 when the school was destroyed by air bombing. He was a refugee in Munich until 1949 when he arrived in Sydney in September as an assisted migrant and was naturalised in 1955.
He first worked as required as a carpenter in Sydney.In 1951 he married British immigrant Jean Harbutt Bird who worked for a Sydney pottery. Barsony was devout and had had had some success in Hungary and Munich as a sculptor of religious works. The Munich commissions were lsot during the War.A 2.2 metre bronze statue of St Francis of Assisi reputedly still survives in 32 Ferencesek street Pecs. George Barsony was highly skilled in design and mould casting. He was used to making maquettes for sculptures and had skills in kiln making and firing.
George and Jean Barsony established their own pottery Barsony Ceramics in 1955 at their home in Bankstown and in 1956 built a workshop at 24 Guernsey street Guilford, New South Wales, which operated until the 1970s. In the post war years artistic immigrants were encouraged to open small craft businesses. Studio pottery became a successful livelihood catering to a rising market for home decor.
An early products by Barsony Ceramics were small scale decor items such as ashtrays. For the 1956 Olympics market Barsony made a series of Australian Aboriginal heads as wall plaques. Black painted figure based lamps soon became a major product line. The Barsony range included wall plaques,candlesticks,figurines,lamp bases, book ends, vases, bowls and ashtrays. Most well known are the extensive variations of graceful 'black lady’ lamps. The figures were skimpily but discretely dressed negro, Hawaiian and other exotic ethnic belles as well as ballerinas, flamenco dancers, modern bathing beauties and even tennis players. Many figures were painted usually with added motifs and colours, and bright with red lips. Many had pearl drop brass earrings. Jean Barsony was responsible for much of the painting although other works also sprayed and painted the products.A distinctive feature of Barsony lamps were the plastic ribbon lampshades in multi colour stripes and occasional patterns. These were made from cutting up rolled up shower curtains into strips.
Barsony Ceramics were prolific in the 1960s a huge range of products and motifs in the black figurines and other finishes including lustre, white, brown and even gold finish.George also made plaster plaques for various advertisements by firms such as Tintara Wines, Casben shorts Stamina Quality Clothes. These were also marketed by Mrs Mary Hodern’s company Plasto.
Stores such as David Jones were regular customers. Barsony lamps were sent all over Australia, to New Zealand and to places in the Pacific such as Vanuatu – where the lamps were being supplied to people without electricity.Barsony Ceramics did not have a retail outlet for their own. A wholesaler, David Lyn paid for job lots which were then stored on site till the wholesaler called for their delivery.
The diversity of the Barsony range can be seen online with a number of sites devoted to providing details of the complex numbering by which to determine an original. The 1970s saw protection of the local pottery industry undermined by tariff removals which allowed Japan mass produced ceramics to come on to the market. The 1970s also saw a move away from the rather happy hedonism and vivacity of the Barsony style. The kiln and ceramics business closed in 1970 although lampshade making by George and Jean and later son Roger, continued to 2005. Some of George’s master moulds were sold to Austral pottery in Castle Hill others were smashed.
George Barsony did one known sculpture commission for a mosaic for St Margaret Mary’s (Catholic church) Marylands road in 1967.
Barsony ceramics have an established and robust collectors market but the work of the studio is unrepresented in any fine art or applied art museums. No scholarly study, formal exhibition or recognition has celebrated this unique and highly skilled Australian ceramic art studio.
Writers:
newtog
Date written:
2021
Last updated:
2022
- Born
- b. 15 November 1917
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 7-Oct-10
- Age at death
- 93
Details
Latitude-33.481536 Longitude150.1564887 Start Date1916-01-01 End Date2010-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Lithgow, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Tom Bass AM, DVisArts, public sculptor and teacher, was born in Lithgow, NSW, in 1916. His parents both grew up in rural NSW, his father the son of a baker, and his mother a descendant of early Australian gentry. At the time of Tom’s birth, his father, also a baker by trade, was contributing to the war effort working in an arms factory in Lithgow. In 1919, at age three, Tom moved with his family to the outskirts of Griffith, where his father worked as a baker for the construction workers of the post-war irrigation scheme. From 1920-26 the family relocated several times, moving between work in Erskineville and the rural towns of Parkes and Gundagai, before eventually settling in the working class Sydney suburb of Marrickville in 1927. During the depression, in 1931 Bass left school to work; he was fifteen years old. Jobs were scarce, however, forcing him to travel the countryside, often on foot, seeking employment. At twenty-two he returned to Sydney, having decided to pursue his desire to study art. He posed as a life model at several art institutions, eventually commencing his art studies at Dattilo Rubbo’s atelier. From 1937-40 Bass learnt drawing skills and basic art principles under Dattilo Rubbo’s guidance, and in 1937 met his first wife, fellow student, Lenore Rays. In 1940, a year after World War II commenced, he was conscripted and sent to duties in Bathurst, then Sydney. Bass and Lenore Rays married during the war and moved to Minto, where they continued to live until 1975. Following his discharge from National Service, Bass attended The National Art School in Sydney under the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme from 1946-48. During this time he was taught by the Head of the Sculpture School, Lyndon Dadswell. In his final year of art school, he received his first commission from a family of Queensland graziers, seeking a sculptural piece for their country property in Sutton Forest, NSW. After much deliberation over a theme of relevance to the lives of the rural family, Bass created a sandstone fireplace depicting a drover on his horse, titled Jack Earth. After graduating, Bass worked as an assistant to his previous teacher, Dadswell, from 1949-50, whilst trying to explore and define what type of sculptor he wished to be. Creating sculpture for exhibition in galleries was not his ambition; instead his interest lay in the function of sculpture in society, and how it could be used to represent people and communities (Bass & Harris 1996). It was during this time that Bass developed his philosophy of working with totemic forms and emblems to create works of significance to the people that they serve. To Bass, the totem was defined as 'an object that is so imbued with the meanings and the values of the people for whom it is made, that they can stand around it (the object) and connect with those things without a word being uttered…that to me is a totem, and that is the thing that has really inspired my work’ (Bass 2006). In 1951 Bass became a member of the newly founded Sculptors’ Society, and during the early 1950s he received media exposure through the Society’s growing public profile (Carson 2006). Bass’s work was featured in many group exhibitions with The Sculptors Society, including its first outdoor exhibition in the Botanic Gardens in 1951. Bass remained a member of The Sculptors Society until 1964, occupying the executive positions of president, treasurer and secretary during this period. From the early 1950s, Bass’ commitment to representing communities saw him become a sculptor of public art, with commissions from schools, universities, religious institutions, and government and corporate organisations. During a time when public monuments were being replaced by public art, Bass became a highly sought after sculptor of commissioned works. Significant public commissions, including The Student (1953) for the University of Sydney, The Falconer (1953-55) for the University of NSW, and The Trial of Socrates (1954-56) and The Idea of a University (1954-59) – both for the University of Melbourne – are evidence of the support for Bass by the tertiary sector. In 1953, Bass was chosen to represent Australia at the prestigious 'Unknown Political Prisoner International Sculpture Competition’ at the Tate Gallery in London, which led to further professional acknowledgement (Carson 2006). Corporate commissions Research and Herald Sculpture (1956-59) followed, along with religious works External Crucifix, Reredos Crucifix and St Paul the Sailmaker (1955-56) for St Augustine’s Church, Yass. During the 1960s, Bass produced numerous prominent and highly publicised civic works. The P&O Wall Fountain (1962-63) was controversially featured on the cover of Oz Magazine, the Lintel Sculpture (1967-68) formed the entrance to the National Library of Australia, and Ethos (1959-61) became Canberra’s first piece of public art work (Cloughley 2006), representing the spirit of the community of the national capital. Unlike many artists of the time, Bass chose to work independently of the commercial gallery realm, personally managing his own commissions and projects. As a public sculptor in a period of cultural and societal change in Australia, Bass was a key advocate for the inclusion of sculpture in public spaces. Significant religious commissions were developed during the period, including Our Lady Archetype of the Church (1959-62) for Saint Mary’s Cathedral in Hobart, and the Crucifix (1965-66) for the Chapel at the Royal Military College, Duntroon. Additionally, Bass’s work became internationally recognised through Sculptured Emblem (1968-1969) on the Australian Chancery Building in Washington DC, USA. It was in the 1960s that Bass undertook two study trips abroad, the first to Europe, in 1962, and to the USA in 1969, coinciding with the Washington DC commission. On this latter trip he met Australian expatriate sculptor, Clement Meadmore, and was inspired by the work of David Smith. According to Hoekstra, his “experiences in America helped him to see that he needed to explore his inner world… in sculpture… in the relationships with those near to him and with himself”(pers. comm.). In the 1970s Bass changed direction as an artist, choosing to focus on personal sculptures, and engaging in a new teaching vocation. His two major commissions of this period include Entrance Sculpture (1971) for the University of Technology, Sydney, and The Genii (1973) for the Queen Victoria Gardens in Melbourne, Victoria. After a short stint of teaching life study at the National Art School in 1973, Bass spent six months renovating a studio on Broadway, which then opened as the Tom Bass Sculpture School in 1974. The independent art school was designed to encourage a new generation of Australian sculptors, and promote sculpture in the community. In 1980 Bass held his first solo exhibition at the David Jones Art Gallery, resulting in mixed reviews. Whilst teaching at the Tom Bass Sculpture Studio School, he completed several commissions including The Arts and the Sciences (1984) for the Great Hall at the University of Sydney, and Christopher Robin (1989) for the Prince of Wales Children’s Hospital. Bass and Lenore had separated in 1975 (and divorced in 1981), and in the early 1980s, Bass met and married his second wife, Margo Hoekstra. During the 1990s Bass continued his leadership and teaching roles at the Tom Bass Sculpture Studio School, whilst participating in group exhibitions such as 'Sculpture by the Sea’ (1999) in Bondi. In 1998, after much resistance, the Tom Bass Sculpture Studio School was forced to relocate, moving to a new site in Erskineville. In 2003, Tom Bass handed the school over to a management committee, as it became an incorporated, not-for-profit association. As a public artist, the development of Bass’s career has been well documented by the media. Beginning with articles portraying Bass as an ex-serviceman turned artist in the early 1940s, the literature following his career is extensive. He has received both criticism and praise from the media, yet his choice to work outside the gallery realm saw him receive little attention from the arts community (Bass 2006). Since the 1950s, radio interviews, documentaries and television features have provided the public with first hand glimpses into Bass’s life and career. He has been featured in books such as The Development of Australian Sculpture: 1788-1975 (Sturgeon 1978), Australian Sculptors (Scarlett 1980) and The New McCulloch’s Encyclopaedia of Australian Art (McCulloch 2006). In 1996 he co-authored his biography titled Tom Bass-Totem Maker, and in 2006 a book accompanying his retrospective exhibition was released. In recognition of his services to sculpture, Bass was made a member of the Order of Australia in 1989. This lead to a resurgence of media interest and public recognition of his contribution to Australian sculpture. Following a career that had spanned sixty years, and to mark his ninetieth birthday, in 2006 the 'Tom Bass Retrospective’ was held at the Sydney Opera House. In 2009 Bass was awarded the degree of Doctor of Visual Arts (honoris causa) by the University of Sydney, in recognition of his excellence as a sculptor and teacher. Thomas Dwyer Bass died on 26 February 2010 and is buried at Macquarie Park Cemetery at North Ryde.
Writers:
De Lorenzo, Catherine
Note: Long, Sarah
Note:
Date written:
2009
Last updated:
2011
Status:
peer-reviewed
- Born
- b. 6 June 1916
- Summary
- Bass was an Australian public sculptor and teacher with a career spanning over 60 years. Born in 1916, Bass studied drawing at Dattilo Rubbo's atelier from 1937-40, and sculpture at the National Art School from 1946-48. His community-focused work is featured in many prominent Australian public spaces and institutions, including schools, universities and churches, as well as government and corporate sites. In 1974, Bass established the Tom Bass Sculpture Studio School, where he taught until his death. He died in February 2010.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 26-Feb-10
- Age at death
- 94
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1912-01-01 End Date2010-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, VIC, Australia
- Biography
- Pioneering studio potter, printmaker and teacher, was born in Melbourne. Her mother left the family when she was a small child, and after conflict with her new stepmother, Clytie went to live with her aunt, Christian Waller and her husband Napier Waller, both artists who encouraged and nurtured her career. Christian Waller in particular introduced her to theosophy and to classical mythology, all of which were to be major influences on her work. Christian Waller, who was interested in astrology and the occult, persuaded her to change her name to “Klytie”. Her first art lessons were in modelling with the sculptor Ola Cohn in 1931. The following year she enrolled in studied painting and drawing classes at the National Gallery School under W.B. McInnes and Charles Wheeler. She soon transferred to the Melbourne Technical College where she studied figure drawing and applied design as well as modelling and sculpture. In 1932 she completed a series of plaster masks for the Wallers’ home at Ivanhoe, Victoria, and printed her only linocut Limpang Tung . Published (as Klytie Sclater) in Manuscripts no.3 (November 1932), p.12, it shows Waller’s influence. She made fired pottery from about 1936. Her first solo exhibition, when she showed pottery, was held at the Kominsky Gallery, Melbourne, in 1941 and showed the dominant influence of Christian Waller’s Art Deco sensibility.
In 1937 she married fellow studio potter William Pate. After her marriage she began to teach pottery at Melbourne Technical College where she remained until 1945, resigning to become a full-time professional potter. Two years later, the National Gallery of Victoria made its first purchase of studio pottery – a ginger jar by Pate and a piece by Alan Lowe. Her work was exhibited at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1983 and at Sydney’s Macquarie Galleries in 1989 and 1990. She continued to live and work in Melbourne until her career was ended by frail old age.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2013
- Born
- b. 20 October 1912
- Summary
- A potter and printmaker who was encouraged by her aunt, Christian Waller and uncle, Napier Waller, to pursue a career in art. In 1947, Pate, together with Alan Lowe, became the first ceramicists to have their studio pottery purchased by the National Gallery of Victoria. Her distinctive style led her to become one of Australia's most significant studio potters.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 10-Jun-10
- Age at death
- 98
Details
Latitude-32.916667 Longitude151.75 Start Date1971-01-01 End Date2009-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Newcastle, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Les Saxby is a Wonnarua (Hunter Valley, New South Wales) painter, dancer and didgeridoo player who paints the Dreamings of his people. He was born in Newcastle, New South Wales, in 1971 to Norma Walsh and Gordon Saxby. He began painting in the early 1990s and was included in the 1998 exhibition “ Djalarinji: Something that belongs to us” at Manly Regional Museum and Art Gallery. In 1992 he formed the dance troupe Yidaki Didg & Dance .
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Writers:
Allas, Tess
Date written:
2008
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 2 July 1971
- Summary
- Les Saxby is a Wonnarua (Hunter Valley, NSW) painter, dancer and didgeridoo player who paints the Dreamings of his people. He is the founder of Yidaki Didg & Dance.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 8-Feb-09
- Age at death
- 38
Details
Latitude-33.2981001 Longitude146.3734587 Start Date1965-01-01 End Date2009-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Lake Cargelligo, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Joanne Dunn (painting as Joanne Reid) is a Wiradjuri woman, born in 1965 at Lake Cargelligo in New South Wales, Australia. In 1980 Dunn moved to Orange, New South Wales. Dunn is a self-taught artist, and during her career developed her own style, often combining Aboriginal and European art forms and also experimenting with abstract pieces. Dunn started “Jemalong Art” (jemalong meaning platypus) in June 2000, prior to which she painted for eight years with various Aboriginal organizations.Dunn has held a number of exhibitions both in Australia and the United States of America (in Nashville, Tennessee). She developed her talents into a commercial enterprise with the assistance of the Parkes Forbes Business Enterprise Centre, a not-for-profit business advisory service.In 2001, Dunn presented the first of a number of major exhibitions of her work in Sydney at the Country Embassy, hosted by Peter Croft, Chief Executive Officer of Parkes Forbes Business Enterprise Centre and the Department of State and Regional Development.The exhibition was opened by The Minister for Small Business, the Hon. Sandra Nori MP, as part of the launch of the Indigenous Small Business Advisory Service and featured 42 artworks by Dunn. In praise of the art, the Minister said: 'The exhibition highlights the talent and drive that Dunn has to translate her creative pursuits into a successful business and a source of financial independence’.Another major exhibition at the State Parliament House in Sydney was opened by the then Premier of New South Wales, Mr. Bob Carr, and hosted by Peter Croft, Chief Executive Officer of Parkes Forbes Business Enterprise Centre. The exhibition consisted of 30 artworks by Dunn and was on display for twelve months.Dunn’s depiction of Australian flora and fauna and her unique use of traditional Aboriginal methods also created interest in Nashville, Tennessee, when her works were exhibited at the Centennial Park Arts & Crafts Centre as part of the Australian Festival in 2003. Dunn will be making her first visit to Nashville in September 2006 where she will be exhibiting her works as part of the Australian Festival.Her works have also become sought after for official and private collections. One of Dunn’s major works was purchased to hang in the Orange Court House. Other works have been purchased by the Legislative Assembly of New South Wales, State and Federal Parliamentarians.Several of her works were purchased by a Sydney based firm for T-shirt and wall hanging designs and manufacture.Dunn’s works extend from fine art to community projects. She designed the new welcoming signs located on the outskirts of Orange at each point of entry to the city. Dunn developed a totemic design in 2003 by adapting it to a land drawing, which will be the basis for construction of a giant platypus to be built in Orange at the Gosling Creek Reserve. The overall theme for the site is “drawn from the land” which indicates that inspiration, ideas and materials are drawn from the site and pays tribute to Indigenous and non-Indigenous occupants of the area. The platypus design is the first component of the project which will become a land or earth art measuring 70 metres in length. The image will be visible from several sections of the park and from the air, connecting the entry signs from the outskirts to the city centre. Although the project has been developed is yet to be constructed whilst awaiting funding advice from Orange City Council. Another of Dunn’s achievements includes use of her art works by the New South Wales Department of Education and Training to illustrate promotional materials for the Elsa Dixon Aboriginal Employment Program. Similarly, her work was selected to adorn materials for the Indigenous Self Employment Program. These arrangements were negotiated by the BEC. Dunn teaches Aboriginal Art and Cultural Practices through the New South Wales Technical and Further Education system.More recently Dunn was invited to participate in the “Water Works” showing held at the Orange Art Gallery in November 2005. The story behind Dunn’s painting is:“Waterworks is a thematic depiction of the history of the Orange waterways as seen through the eyes of a Wiradjuri woman. Its themes include the local river systems, ranging from Mount Canobolas to the Lachlan and including local fauna and flora”. Dunn was also invited to exhibit at the Careflight Exhibition, held in Orange, in December 2005. Her latest project is a reconciliation project at Bowen Public School in Orange, New South Wales, which embraces the coming together of all children, with a particular emphasis on troubled youth.Peter Andren, Independent Federal Member of Parliament (1996-2007) for Calare, is a great supporter of Dunn and has said in the context of Dunn’s Nashville exhibition, “This will be a great opportunity both for Dunn and to raise an awareness and appreciation of Aboriginal art in America. Aboriginal art covers a wide spectrum from Central Australia and Arnhem Land and urban Australia, from ancient to so-called traditional and modern. Dunn’s unique style has received wide acclaim, particularly her interpretation of nature and reconciliation themes”.
Writers:
Allas, TessCroft, Peter
Date written:
2007
Last updated:
2009
- Born
- b. 19 February 1965
- Summary
- Joanne Dunn (painting as Joanne Reid) is Wiradjuri woman based in Orange, NSW. She is a self-taught artist who has exhibited locally and internationally.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 17-May-09
- Age at death
- 44
Details
Latitude51.9464129 Longitude-0.2791646 Start Date1941-01-01 End Date2009-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Hitchin, Hertfordshire, England
- Biography
- NICK Waterlow was one of the great enablers of Australian art. He was best known to the public as the inspirational director of three biennales of Sydney, but his generosity of spirit made him the mentor to generations of students both in his teaching and as director of the Ivan Dougherty Gallery at the College of Fine Arts at the University of NSW. He continued to watch over the careers of students and junior colleagues for many years after graduation.Nicholas Anthony Ronald Waterlow was born 30 August 1941 Hitchin, in Hertfordshire, the son of Anthony Edgar Russell Waterlow and Barbara Davy. His father spent the war years as a lieutenant in the Kings Royal Rifle Corps, and died young. His grandfather, Sir Edgar Lutwyche Waterlow was a Baronet. As a young man Nick was less interested in privilege than cricket. He played for Harrow and on more than one occasion said the proudest moment in his life was when he played at the M.C.C.. After leaving school Waterlow first studied French history at the University of Grenoble, before travelling to Florence where he studied Renaissance art at the British Institute. His first job was as a gallery assistant at the Alfred Brod Gallery in London, which specialised in Dutch and Flemish 17th-century art, but his interest was always the contemporary. By 1964 he was writing for the Arts Review in London, which led to opportunities to write criticism for Nation, The Sun, and The Bulletin when he made his first visit to Australia in 1965 to marry Rosemary (Romy) O’Brien who was then a school teacher. They returned to London in 1966, when he was appointed prints curator at Editions Alecto publishing house, and the next year he became director of the Bear Lane Gallery, Oxford, a position he held until 1972. From 1973 to 1977 he worked as senior recreation officer for the Milton Keynes Development Corporation, where he was given ample opportunity to develop his diplomatic skills as this new city endevoured to develop a cultural program.Waterlow’s English experience stood him in good stead when the family returned to Australia in 1977. After a stint as a lecturer at the Alexander Mackie CAE (now College of Fine Arts) and some writing for Art and Australia and Nation Review, Waterlow was appointed director of the 1979 Biennale of Sydney.The theme was “European Dialogue”. It became clear from the start that this director believed in dialogue. Local artists wanted greater participation, women wanted a more equitable representation, and many artists still had their eyes firmly focused on the US as the major centre of culture. Nick discussed, negotiated and compromised, and the final exhibition was the stronger for it. His reputation as an honest broker led to his appointment as director of the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council in 1983. His ability to create an inclusive vision meant that he directed the 1986 and 1988 event and chaired the international selection panel for the 2000 Biennale of Sydney.The 1988 biennial, From the Southern Cross: A View of World Art c1940-1988, was one of the defining exhibitions for Australian visual culture. It connected Australian artists to European and American counterparts in a grand, complex narrative of art. At the heart of the exhibition stood The Aboriginal Memorial: 200 grave posts from Ramingining in the Northern Territory; one for every year of European settlement. Waterlow had been approached by Djon Mundine, then Ramingining art adviser, about the possibility of developing a project to mourn Aboriginal loss. Speaking after Waterlow’s death Mundine said, ‘he understood it right away’ and linked his idea of the graveposts to the crosses on the burial fields of World War I. The memorial was bought by the National Gallery of Australia and is now on permanent view.Mundine, then curator of Aboriginal art at the Campbelltown Regional Arts Centre, said: ‘He always gave you time, and gave you an ear. He wanted to know things. There’s a humility in that. He wasn’t afraid of ideas and wasn’t afraid of sticking his neck out.’In 1989, Waterlow was appointed senior lecturer in gallery management at the City Art Institute, now the College of Fine Arts, UNSW. In 1990 he engineered an upgrade so the qualification became the Master of Art Administration, one of the leading degrees of its kind. The next year he became director of COFA’s Ivan Dougherty Gallery, a position he held until his untimely death.It was through these positions that he made what is perhaps his most important contribution to Australian cultural life.Generations of curators, gallery directors, and artists were nurtured by his generous and inclusive approach to the making of exhibitions of art. Indigenous artist and curator Brenda L. Croft, who ensured that Waterlow was an honoured guest when she was awarded an honorary doctorate of letters at the University of Sydney, said: ‘I truly would not have had the career I’ve had without his encouragement and support.’ He was especially keen to encourage the work of indigenous artists. The gallery is a small space, yet the exhibitions he created (and enabled others to create) made it burst with life.From the time he was appointed to COFA Waterlow urged the university to expand resources for exhibiting art. He was instrumental in the plans for the development of the ramshackle COFA buildings, which now include a 1000sq m exhibition space. Funding was confirmed in the 2009 federal budget and the faculty was preparing for construction at the time of his death. Waterlow saw the building as one of the high points of his career and was planning a great opening to include the work of the NSW comedians known as the Ladies of the Bigotbri Concerned Women’s Association. One of the ‘concerned women’, Aboriginal performer Tess Allas, said: ‘I was excited about working with him. He gave me confidence to go ahead with a large exhibition proposal and put our plans into action.’His wife, Romy, with whom he had two sons and a daughter, died in 1998 after a long fight with cancer.Nick Waterlow was killed by his son Antony Waterlow who was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. After his death, his partner, the artist and poet Juliet Darling, worked with his friend Father Steve Sinn S.J. to create the memorial film A Curator’s Last Will and Testament.Because Nick Waterlow was one of the most loved figures in the arts community and because of the shock of his death, St Mary’s Cathedral was filled beyond capacity for his funeral. Afterwards students from the College of Fine Arts strewed jacaranda flowers on the pathway between the Cathedral and the Art Gallery of New South Wales which overflowed with those wishing to honour their friend, mentor, teacher and colleague.
Writers:
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 30 August 1941
- Summary
- Nick Waterlow was the inspirational director for a number of Biennales of Sydney, commencing in 1979. He later became the Director of the Ivan Dougherty Gallery at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 9-Nov-09
- Age at death
- 68
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1940-01-01 End Date2009-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Brian Dunlop was born in Sydney, the son of British parents who had emigrated because of the Great Depression. He later described his father as “a bit of a Calvinist”. On leaving school after the Intermediate Certificate in 1954 he was awarded a scholarship to the state-funded National Art School in Darlinghurst, which meant that his parents encouraged his studies as a way of escaping his working class origins.
He instinctively used the human scale as a way of defining space and proportion, which meant that he readily absorbed the Charm School style promoted by the school’s teachers. Dunlop’s fine drawing style and carefully modulated tonality won him considerable attention in the earlier part of his career. In 1958, the year he completed art school, he was awarded the Le Gay Brereton Prize for drawing, and in 1962 had his first work (a drawing) purchased by the Art Gallery of New South Wales.The same year he travelled to Europe, where he spent most of his time in Italy but also travelled to Greece, Majorca, North Africa and London. He returned to Australia convinced that the humanist values of the Renaissance artists were the right ones to guide his future career. For some years Dunlop was able to supplement his income as an artist with teaching part-time at the National Art School. When that was downgraded to a technical college in the 1970s, he taught at Alexander Mackie College of Advanced Education. Formal teaching ended in 1980 when he became artist in residence at the University of Melbourne. The following year he was awarded the Sulman Prize for his painting of the interior of the Old Physics Building.Dunlop divided his time between Sydney and Ebenezer in NSW and Panton Hill and Port Fairy in Victoria. His careful compositions, where people are defined by their context made him especially popular as a portrait painter. He was not especially enamoured of portrait commissions, preferring to concentrate on landscapes, still lives and architectural interiors, and was known to dismiss portraits as “hack work”.
For some commissions however, he travelled. In 1984 he travelled to London, to paint the official Victorian Sesquicentenary portrait of queen Elizabeth. The Queen wears in a bright yellow dress, sitting in front of a white panelled door, balanced by and intricate golden patterned wallpaper. It is clear that he sees her body as an element in an overall composition, and it is no surprise to discover that while she only had brief sittings for the portrait, he spent a great deal of time painting the wallpaper. Despite, or perhaps because of this, Dunlop’s royal portrait is an especially satisfying work.In his later years Brian Dunlop was one of a small group of artists fostered by Eva Breuer, and exhibited regularly with her until his death.
Writers:
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2007
Last updated:
2015
- Born
- b. 14 October 1940
- Summary
- Brian Dunlop's understated paintings and drawings were influenced by Renaissance art, as well as the Charm School artists who were his teachers in Sydney. His best known work is a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 9-Dec-09
- Age at death
- 69
Details
Latitude53.2190652 Longitude6.5680077 Start Date1928-01-01 End Date2009-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Groningen, Netherlands
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1928
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2009
- Age at death
- 81
Details
Latitude52.561928 Longitude-1.464854 Start Date1928-01-01 End Date2009-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- England, UK
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1928
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2009
- Age at death
- 81
Details
Latitude-32.820927 Longitude117.6528542 Start Date1927-01-01 End Date2009-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Wickepin, WA, Australia
- Biography
- Painter, teacher, curator who was born in Wickepin, Western Auatralia where he grew up on the family farm. He studied at Claremont Teachers College and Perth Technical College 1949-50. He also took a Bachelor of Arts at University of Western Australia awarded in 1953. He taught at Nedlands primary school and then Perth Boys from 1949-54. He exhibited a watercolour, Winter Study, with the Perth Society of Artists in 1952. He married and had two children, but his wife Mary Elizabeth died in 1955, and having been left an annuity by an uncle he travelled overseas in 1955-6 and undertook study at Kent College, Canterbury. 1957 saw him teaching at Princess May and Perth Modern School and then he studied at East Sydney Technical School under Godfrey Miller, John Passmore and Ralph Balson, graduating with a Diploma in Fine Art in 1959. In 1960-1965 he taught in high schools and joined the Art Advisory Service of the Education Department. He won the Rupert Boan Landscape Prize in 1961. He taught drawing and painting at Perth Technical College 1966-7 and Western Australian Institute of Technology (now Curtin University) 1968-9. He spent 1970 being a fulltime painter preparing for a solo exhibition held at the Old Fire Station Gallery in Leederville. A charismatic man with a quirky sense of humour, he was generous with his students. Weekend painting and drawing excursions were held at his North Beach house in the 1960s. In the 1970s he lived in Central Australia and New Guinea. On his return he worked as an education officer at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in the 1980s. A consummate draughtsman his elegant drawings are now highly valued. He won the Sir Charles Gairdiner Hospital Prize in 1999. He continued having highly acclaimed solo exhibitions until 2008.
Writers:
Dr Dorothy Erickson
Date written:
2010
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1927
- Summary
- Russell studied at East Sydney Technical School under Godfrey Miller, John Passmore and Ralph Balson. He won the Rupert Boan Landscape Prize in 1961 and the Sir Charles Gairdiner Hospital Prize in 1999.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2009
- Age at death
- 82
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1926-01-01 End Date2009-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 27 December 1926
- Summary
- Trained in engineering, Davis studied sculpture in London. Davis was an innovator in model-making for architects, landscape planners, designers and engineers. He later studied design at East Sydney Technical College and taught industrial design at Randwick Technical College. He had solo sculpture exhibitions from 1982 and taught sculpture at Seaforth TAFE.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- c.1 January 2009
- Age at death
- 83
Details
Latitude-31.9559 Longitude115.8606 Start Date1919-01-01 End Date2009-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Perth, WA, Australia
- Biography
- Amy Lakides was a china painter, painter on silk and interior designer. She was born in Perth in 1919 and educated at Perth Girls School and Perth Technical College. Her first lessons in porcelain painting were under Flora Landells whom she admired. Later in life she studied at Sun Yee Art School in Singapore and with painters David Gregson and Owen Garde in Perth and Karafalakie in Greece. She has said of her training: “During my early years of study, I was taught many rules to go by, but now I combine both western and eastern concepts of composition until the effect pleased me. I use painting in and wiping out as a combined method as this helps the naturalistic result that I want.” Lakides taught china painting to Jean Agnew and others, advising her students to “[k]now your subject and practice drawing constantly. See the mechanical shape of the flowers, look for the directions of the petals, this is not difficult but necessary to develop observation. The ability to excel in art lies mostly in this area: perseverance and love of nature are essential ingredients.” She introduced other china painters to her 'wipe-out’ technique, which she taught on television in Western Australia and at seminars, workshops and lectures in England, New Zealand, Venezuela, Singapore, Canada and the United States. Amy was the Founding President of the Western Australian Guild of China Painters in 1965. She moved to Atlanta in America in 1970 where she carried on working, in addition to publishing books and articles. Her son remained in Australia and thus she continued to visit the country frequently. Lakides died in 2009.
Writers:
Dr Dorothy Erickson
Date written:
2010
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1919
- Summary
- Well known and influential china painter, painter on silk and interior designer. Her first lessons in porcelain painting were under Flora Landells.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2009
- Age at death
- 90
Details
Latitude40 Longitude-100 Start Date1918-01-01 End Date2009-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- United States of America
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1918
- Summary
- Culbert studied at the Free School of Mechanical Trades, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, designed and manufactured cases for radios in St Peters, a Sydney manufacturing suburb, later manufacturing cabinets for Admiral TV, then manufacturing chests for commercial sale.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-09
- Age at death
- 91
Details
Latitude-38.50717805 Longitude145.1888103 Start Date1917-01-01 End Date2009-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Phillip Island, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1917
- Summary
- Furey was a Society of Designers for Industry foundation member, an International Design Institute of Australia Vice President, a Society of Industrial Designers President amongst other honours. As a designer, he was consultant designer A.G. Healing and worked for Australian Container Industry as Product Design head, as an independent consultant after 1964, he produced designs for Sebels, AWA and other firms.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-09
- Age at death
- 92
Details
Latitude-37.560833 Longitude143.8475 Start Date1912-01-01 End Date2009-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Ballarat, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- illustrator and painter, joined the Artists’ branch of the Communist Party of Australia at Melbourne in 1937, aged 24. It included cartoonists, commercial artists, painters, lithographers, and a model (who later convened the Models’ Union) into whose loft they eventually crowded for meetings. Healy produced banners and signs. In 1941 she married Charlie Walters and moved to Sydney. Their son Max was born in Sydney in June 1942. By 1949 the marriage was 'long over’ and Evelyn later married Bill Armstrong (died 1976), then Kevin (?) Healy. She illustrated Helen Palmer’s Beneath the Southern Cross , published in 1954 for the Eureka Stockade centenary.
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1912
- Summary
- Mid 20th century Melbourne and Sydney political illustrator and painter. Healy illustrated Helen Palmer's Beneath the Southern Cross, published in 1954 for the Eureka Stockade centenary.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2009
- Age at death
- 97
Details
Latitude-30.774675 Longitude121.4883268 Start Date1908-01-01 End Date2009-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Boulder, WA, Australia
- Biography
- Wildflower painter, botanical illustrator, author, naturalist, teacher and farmer’s wife, Dr Rica Erickson was born in Boulder, WA, in 1908. She was the daughter of Christopher and Phoebe Louisa Topping Sandilands n_e Cooke. Her maternal grandmother was the redoubtable Nurse Cooke well known in Boulder in the early years of the nineteenth century. Rica won a scholarship to the Eastern Goldfields High School and lived with her grandmother whilst her parents went farming at Kendenup. After monitoring and teacher training she was sent to various one-teacher schools in the South West. Here she commenced painting. She was introduced to Emily Pelloe’s books on Western Australian wildflowers and given an excellent box of Windsor & Newton watercolours, and had private lessons with Brenda Holland in Albany on watercolour techniques. In 1936 Rica married farmer Sydney Uden Erickson of Bolgart and was compulsorily retired by the Education Department. Four children in four years as well as home schooling for some years meant little time for painting until 1950 when all the children were at school and later boarding school. After exhibiting her paintings at the Wild Life Show in 1946 she was persuaded by Dr Dominic Serventy to write a book to go with them. This began a career in botanical research followed by historical research and then editing. She and her husband travelled round Australia and overseas. In 1964 they retired from the farm to give Rica more access to research facilities. The children were: Dr Dorothy Erickson, artist-jeweller and writer, John, a farmer and vigneron, Bethel, an award-winning photographer, and Robin, a nurse who nursed the Duchess of Windsor. Rica was the author or editor of some twenty books and collaborated on a number of others. Her Western Australian Biographical Index and Dictionary of Western Australians project was the first project of its kind in the world. In 1980 she was Citizen of the Year for the Arts in Western Australia and awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters by the University of Western Australia for services in the fields of botany, history and literature. In 1987 she was awarded the Order of Australia (Gen Division) for service to the arts particularly as an author and illustrator. Other awards include Honorary Life Membership of Western Australian Naturalists Club, 1966, Fellow of the Royal Western Australian Historical Society, 1975, Honorary Life Member of the Fellowship of Australian Writers (Western Australian Branch) 1982 and Fellow of the Western Australian Genealogical Society, 1987. In 1991 she had her first solo exhibition. In 1996 the first Western Australian Nature Reserve named after a living person was named in her honour. In 1999 Rica was honoured with the plaque for the year 1980 in the paving stones in St Georges Terrace. In 1999 she was also honoured as an older woman of science in Canberra. In 2006 Rica was listed as one of the 100 most influential people in Western Australian history. In 2007 she won the State Heritage Award for an individual. In 2009 she was one of fifty famous goldfields people profiled in an exhibition in the Museum of the Goldfields, Kalgoorlie.
Writers:
Dr Dorothy Erickson
Date written:
2010
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1908
- Summary
- Wildflower painter, botanical illustrator, author, naturalist and teacher whose many honours included the Order of Australia (Gen Div.) for service to the arts and an Honorary Doctorate of Letters by the University of Western Australia for services in fields of botany, history and literature.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2009
- Age at death
- 101
Details
Latitude-32.4925 Longitude137.765833 Start Date1971-01-01 End Date2008-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Port Augusta, SA, Australia
- Biography
- Bernadette Lennon-Lawrie was born in Port Augusta, South Australia, in May 1971. She was of the Mirning (mother’s side) and Antikirinjara (father’s side) people of South Australia. Lennon-Lawrie painted in synthetic polymer on canvas and board and in her artist statement for the Ceduna Aboriginal Arts and Cultural Centre she said the she loved painting, “especially dot paintings”.
It was through the Ceduna Centre that she was able to participate in Adelaide Festival Centre’s 'Our Mob’ exhibitions in 2006, 2007 and 2008. She also exhibited in a group show in 2007 at the Red Poles Gallery in McLaren Vale and was a finalist in the 2008 Port Lincoln Art Prize. She won first prize in the West Art Exhibition at the Ceduna Oysterfest with her painting Jidarah (the great whale).Her painting Whirly wind, Dust storm was acquired by the South Australian Museum.
Her grandmother Jessie Lennon was a published author with the book titled I’m the one that know this country. Her son, Beaver Lennon, was selected as a finalist in the 2008 Xstrata Art Awards at the Queensland Art Gallery.
Both her mother, Verna Lawrie, and her son, Beaver, work from Ceduna Aboriginal Arts and Cultural Centre. Bernadette Lennon-Lawrie passed away in 2008.
Writers:
Allas, Tess
Date written:
2009
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 10 May 1971
- Summary
- Dot painter who worked out of the Ceduna Aboriginal Art and Cultural Centre. In collection of South Australia Museum.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2008
- Age at death
- 37
Details
Latitude40.712778 Longitude-74.006111 Start Date1940-01-01 End Date2008-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- New York, USA
- Biography
- ON HIS first overseas posting, to Milan as a young art director, Ron Kambourian was blown away by the elegantly dressed local men who every morning sipped coffee and grappa in the cafes as Ferraris zoomed by. Kambourian not only joined this scene but sketched it, for he was one of an unusual breed – an art director who could draw.
He also loved things that flew, predominantly those machines that flew in the two world wars, and in particular Spitfires. He also loved fast cars. He loved the way they were engineered and the way they handled but, above all, he loved the way they were designed.
He leaves behind beautiful watercolours of planes, boats, cars, people, landscapes, layouts, ads, caricatures and cartoons. He also had a deft hand for oils, gouache, pencil, pastels, crayons and charcoal. In fact, if it could be used to create an image, he would use it. In later life he discovered and loved a new tool – the computer.
Ronald Haig Kambourian was born in 1940 in New York to Armenian parents Haig and Lucy Kambourian. He went to Forest Hills High and was in the same year as Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, but was happy to leave the music to them. He insisted only that the design of the year book was his. This creative talent offered him an early entry into university but in his first week he had a knife pulled on him and retreated to what he believed to be the sanctuary of the creative world – advertising.
He spent almost 50 years in the business and won more awards than most people have wall space to hang. This was best demonstrated at DDB Needham when a new business pitch found the then managing director David Fernley in a twitch about showing off the agency as the most creative in Sydney.
Kambourian’s idea of being helpful was to come in at the weekend before the pitch and hang his awards. These included gold Clios (for creative advertising), gold Art Directors Club, gold International Print, FACTS (Federation of Australian Commercial Television Stations) and AWARD (Australian Writers and Art Directors Association) awards. They sat frame-to-frame, like wallpaper, from the ceiling to the floor, covering the main walls and even the hallway leading to his office. DDB Needham won the pitch.
Kambourian’s advertising career began in 1960 as an art director with Ogilvy Benson Mather, New York. By 1968 he was group creative director of Pritchard Wood & Partners, Wasey Quandrant, London and by 1971 creative director of Smit’s-Bates BV Holland.
n 1974 he married Karin Manders, a stewardess with KLM, the first of his family to marry outside the Armenian community. In 1975 they emigrated to Australia.
By 1976 he was the creative director of Monahan, Dayman, Adams, Sydney and by the end of the 1980s had worked for international agencies such as Clemenger BBDO and DDB Needham. By 1990 there was nowhere else to conquer and so he began his own visual communications consultancy – Wildblueyonder – that he continued until his death.
He was a master of type who would test unsuspecting copywriters by creating a layout with type that was truly gruesome and if the copywriter picked it up, a “just testing” email would follow with an attachment containing a brilliant piece of advertising work.
For 11 years he taught graphic design and advertising, first at Manly-Warringah College, then Sydney Graphics College and finally for eight years at the Billy Blue School of Graphic Design as senior advertising lecturer. His patience and perseverance always brought out the best in his students.
For 15 years Kambourian was also a scout leader and trainer, and served as the international liaison for the 16th World Scout Jamboree, held in Australia in 1988.
Kambourian was a fellow of the Australian Institute of Advertising, a member of the Art Directors Club, New York, the American Institute of Graphic Arts, the Society of Typographic Arts, the Art Directors Club Nederland and a foundation member and co-chairman of judges of the inaugural AWARD show.
(Bio and Obituary by De Brierley Newton http://www.smh.com.au/news/obituaries/a-master-of-beautiful-design/2008/06/02/1212258735330.html)
Writers:
Michael Bogle
Joanna Kambourian
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 8 September 1940
- Summary
- Kambourian was creative director at a number of prominant advertising agencies including Monahan Dayman and Adams, Sydney. He later founded a visual communications consultancy, Wildblueyonder. He was active as an illustrator, artist, typographer. He taught at Manly Warringah College, Sydney Graphics College and the Billy Blue School, North Sydney.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 22-May-08
- Age at death
- 68
Details
Latitude-27.02804795 Longitude116.3029629 Start Date1940-01-01 End Date2008-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Murchison, WA, Australia
- Biography
- Joan Martin, born c. 1940s, was a Yamatji artist from the Murchison region in the Western Australian wheatbelt. As a child Martin was given the name Kulyarrdoo, and as an artist later in life she went by the name of Yarrna. Martin, who spent much of her adult life in Perth, created the painting upon which the design for the mosaic for the floor of the main building at the Centre for Aboriginal Studies at the Curtin University of Technology in Perth was based. The Centre for Aboriginal Studies website states that “the painting depicts the coming together in celebration of different Aboriginal tribal groups from many parts of the country” (Accessed 21 May 2009). Martin also created paintings and painted ceramics based on Yamatji ancestral stories, examples of which are in the collection of the Curtin University of Technology Art Collection. In 1994 her work was shown in a solo exhibition, 'Yarrna: paintings 1982-1994’, at the Erica Underwood Gallery at the Curtin University of Technology.
Martin passed away in 2008.
This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Fisher, Laura
Date written:
2009
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1940
- Summary
- Yamatji artist who created the design for the mosaic on the floor of the main building at the Centre for Aboriginal Studies at the Curtin University of Technology in Perth.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2008
- Age at death
- 68
Details
Latitude-34.9275 Longitude138.6 Start Date1937-01-01 End Date2008-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Adelaide, SA, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 15 July 1937
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 25-Oct-08
- Age at death
- 71
Details
Latitude-40.37342 Longitude148.02703 Start Date1937-01-01 End Date2008-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Cape Barren Island, Tas., Australia
- Biography
- Muriel Maynard, Trawlwoolway shell-necklace maker and weaver, was born on Cape Barren Island in 1937. Maynard’s mother died when she was very young, and the auntie who fostered her as a child was a shell necklace maker. Maynard used to collect shells on the beach with her aunt and other family members, and watch her string them together at night by the light of a kerosene lamp. She would come to carry on the necklace making tradition alongside her basket-weaving practice.
Maynard’s experimental approach to these crafts was reflected in her taste for stitching small, decorative posies of shells to the exterior fibre of some baskets. In 2004 Maynard participated in the Purrelayde Project along with fellow Tasmanian shell-necklace makers Dulcie Greeno and Corrie Fullard . The project was designed to facilitate passing on the techniques and traditions associated with the craft from this older generation of shellworkers to family members and peers.
Maynard participated in a number of exhibitions, including Tactility at the National Gallery of Australia in 2003 and Woven Forms, which began its national tour at Sydney’s Object Gallery in 2005. Her necklaces and baskets are represented in numerous state museum and gallery collections. In 2000 Maynard and fellow Tasmanian Aboriginal artists Vicki West and Lola Greeno were commissioned by Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife to produce an installation for the Lake St Clair Visitor’s Centre.The three women collaborated to produce a woven sculpture that acknowledges the nine Aboriginal nations of Tasmania, and celebrates the continuity of Aboriginal people’s presence in Tasmania.
Muriel Maynard passed away in November 2008.
Writers:
Fisher, Laura
staffcontributor
Date written:
2008
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1937
- Summary
- Trawlwoolway artist born on Cape Barren Island who takes an experimental approach to the Aboriginal traditions of basket weaving and shell necklace making.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 9-Nov-08
- Age at death
- 71
Details
Latitude-37.755963 Longitude144.9161779 Start Date1923-01-01 End Date2008-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Essendon, Melbourne, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- cartoonist, was born and bred in Melbourne. After completing secondary school, he began studying architecture at RMIT, but joined up in 1940. He spent the last years of WWII in New Guinea as an infantryman and made his first artistic income painting Japanese flags (in partnership with an American-born Japanese interpreter), which sold for up to $40 each as 'authentic’ souvenirs to American G.I.s. Weg drew the rising son and his partner did the wording. He also drew cartoons for his mates, some of which were published. Not to be confused with 'WOG’, acknowledged as Sapper Green W.O. ( William Oliver Green ) /HQRAE/9 Aust. 28/9/44 on back of original cartoon at Mitchell Library PX*DY66/78.
Green returned to Melbourne in 1946 and started a rehab. art course at the National Gallery of Victoria: “I wasn’t a great success there”, he told Pat Hinton, editor of the Herald (in preface to Weg’s World ): “Bill (later Sir William) Dargie advised me to go away and learn to draw. I’m still learning.” He began submitting cartoons to the Melbourne Herald and was hired as a replacement cartoonist when Sammy [S.G.] Wells went on holidays. In 1947 he joined the Herald as an illustrator, becoming a full-time 'Topical News Cartoonist’ and/or 'Australia’s first pocket cartoonist’ two years later. He remained in the job for 40 years then turned to free-lancing.
'Weg’ was an outstanding joke deviser (acc. Blaikie, 109), e.g. anti-modern art joke showing prize-winning 'Hunk of Junk’ at Sculptors Society Exhibition 1969: “I got it like that from the quarry” (ill. Lindesay 1979, 311). Also original 1960s cartoon at Mitchell Library [ML] PXD 764. He drew lots of cartoons for Man (December 1936-May 1974), e.g. “All right, stop crying and tell mother just where you buried the portable radio” n.d. (ill. Lindesay, Way We Were , 143); girl in bed on phone surrounded by wild oats: “Said he’d reap them later!” April 1946, 45.
His caricature of Henry Bolte was published in Nation Review in the early 1970s (Walsh 1993, 38). He apparently had cartoons in the Sydney Morning Herald in the 1980s, e.g. Election Melbourne 1 December 1984 (included by Christine Dixon, not ill?), and in the New York Times . Three original cartoons done for the Bulletin dated 25 June and 2 July 1985 – including cartoons about the ABC – are at ML PXD 739, and the SLV has at least 15 Melbourne Herald originals (under 'WEG’), e.g. CARNA CATS CARNA ROOS CARNA PIGS 1980s (re VFL). Several Weg anthologies have been published.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1 November 1923
- Summary
- Prolific and popular mid 20th century Melbourne newspaper cartoonist. Green made his first artistic income painting Japanese flags while stationed in New Guinea during WW2. On returning to Melbourne he worked as a cartoonist contributing works to the Melbourne Herald, Man, the Bulletin and the New York Times.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 29-Dec-08
- Age at death
- 85
Details
Latitude-33.718959 Longitude117.4092845 Start Date1922-01-01 End Date2008-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Carrolup, WA, Australia
- Biography
- Marjorie Hansen, Noongar artist, was born in 1922 at Carrolup, near Katanning in southern Western Australia. Her mother was an Native American, and her father was a Noongar man. At the age of fifteen she married Felix Hansen, who was then seventeen. Felix was a post cutter who was employed to work on the fence lines of different farming properties in the southwestern region, and Marjorie and their children would move with him and camp on the properties for the duration of his work. Marjorie made her first paintings on paperbark in the 1960s, while she was living on Wagin reserve. She also created paperbark paintings while living in Allawah Grove in South Guildford. Later, when she returning to Marribank (which was on the site of the former Carrolup Native Settlement) with her family, she created paintings and ceramics as part of the Marribank Artists Cooperative that operated alongside the Marribank Family Centre in the 1980s. In later years she moved to the Perth suburb of Koongamia. She continued to paint, selling her work through a gallery shop on St Georges Terrace. She would often sign her paintings with her Noongar name – chitty chitty (or willy wagtail).
A watercolour work created by Hansen in 1967 is in the collection of the Berndt Museum of Anthropology, and was included in the 'Koorah Coolingah (Children Long Ago)’ exhibition that took place at the Katanning Arts Centre, Katanning, and the Western Australian Museum in Perth during the 2006 Perth International Arts Festival. Hansen’s son Philip Hansen is also an artist, and his mother’s art practice has been a source of inspiration for him.
Hansen passed away in November 2008. She was living in Collie, where she was close to her many children and grandchildren.
Writers:
Fisher, Laura
Date written:
2009
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1922
- Summary
- Noongar artist who grew up on the Carrolup Native Settlement. Hansen is represented in the collection of the Berndt Museum of Anthropology.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- Nov-08
- Age at death
- 86
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1920-01-01 End Date2008-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- painter and press artist, born in Melbourne, was a 'pioneer member of the new art classes’ at Caulfield Technical School. William Dargie was one of his lecturers. After serving in New Guinea during WWII, Bell remained studying native artefacts. Then he returned to Sydney and attended classes at SORA, a period he describes as full of 'rich, exciting ideas’. He returned to Melbourne and spent nearly 25 years as a press artist with the Herald and Weekly Times , retiring in the mid-1970s. Since then has had a number of exhibitions of his paintings and drawings. His charcoal illustrations on rag paper of 'Alice in Wonderland’ were included in the Carroll Foundation exhibition of 1990. In 1990 he was working on the theme of Eureka, 'Australia’s most celebrated rebellion against colonial rule’.
This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 11 January 1920
- Summary
- Late 20th century Melbourne painter and press artist. Bell served in New Guinea during World War 2 and after his service remained to study native artefacts. He eventually returned to Australia and began what would become a nearly 25 year career working on Melbourne's Herald and Weekly Times.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 15-Jul-08
- Age at death
- 88
Details
Latitude42.3315509 Longitude-83.0466403 Start Date1919-01-01 End Date2008-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Detroit, Michigan, USA
- Biography
- The silhouette artist S. John Ross was born and raised in Detroit, USA. He was about 11 years old when he first saw a silhouette artist working at the Michigan State Fair and was captivated by the skill of the cutter. After leaving school Ross worked and trained with the silhouette artist Budd-Jack for three years, working the fairs of the northern states of the USA. He later worked in Hollywood. Some of his early celebrity 'cuts’ included Stan Laurel, Al Jolson, Spencer Tracey and Mickey Rooney. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour he was drafted into the US Army. Corporal Ross arrived in Australia in 1942 and was later transferred to the Philippines. During the war years he was involved in protecting General Douglas MacArthur and celebrity entertainers such as Bob Hope. Ross made images of both these men and garnered notice in the wartime press for his skill with his trademark surgical scissors.
After the war, Staff Sergeant John Ross left the army and returned to Australia where he married a local woman. Since then Ross has toured the agricultural shows and fairs of Australia and has been a regular at the Sydney Easter Show since 1948. His long time connection with the Sydney show saw him awarded the title 'show legend’ for 2007. A man of great humour, Ross was heard to say that he would “rather be a living legend than a dead one.” He has also been a regular at the Royal Queensland Show (the Ekka), the Royal Adelaide Show and at Sydney’s Luna Park and Centrepoint Tower. Ross has created tens of thousands of portraits during his 60 year long career and Vivian Leigh, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Nicole Kidman, Sir Robert Menzies and Queen Elizabeth II are among his famous sitters.
Writers:
Clifford-Smith, Silas
Date written:
2008
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 24 April 1919
- Summary
- With a career lasting sixty years, US born S. John Ross was one of the last silhouette artists working in Australia.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 24-Aug-08
- Age at death
- 89
Details
Latitude-27.6395345 Longitude152.4132894 Start Date1919-01-01 End Date2008-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Laidley, Qld, Australia
- Biography
- Painter, was born at Laidley, Queensland. During the 1930s she studied art with Vera Cottew at the Brisbane Girls Grammar and at the Central Technical College. During WWII she served for four years with the Air Force and when demobilised in 1946 was appointed an assistant teacher of art at the Tech. While teaching there she was awarded the Queensland Wattle League Scholarship. In 1948-49 she studied under William Dargie at the National Gallery School Melbourne under the terms of the Rehabilitation Training Scheme. In Melbourne she submitted a group of works to the Half Dozen Group of Artists’ Travelling Scholarship and received the 1949 award, allowing her an additional year’s study in Melbourne. Her major work that year, The market queue, Victoria Markets 1950, however, did not win the School’s Travelling Scholarship, but she was awarded the Hugh Ramsay Portrait Prize and also the Sara Levi Prize for the most outstanding student (for a portrait of fellow student Val Myers). Having saved for years, she was able to finance her own European study in 1951-52, where she visited galleries and studied at La Grande Chaumière, Paris. After returning to Brisbane she taught art at Moreton Bay College, Somerville House (Joan Kerr was a student in c.1955-56 ) and Ipswich Girls Grammar and, from 1955, at the Central Technical College. She became at full time teacher at the last from 1966 until retiring in 1984. In 2000 she was the subject of a focus exhibition by Glenn Cooke at QAG to mark International Women’s Day and her 80th year and in 2001 a larger more comprehensive retrospective was mounted at the Gold Coast City Art Gallery.
Betty Quelhurst died on 13 August 2008 and was cremated at Mt Thompson Crematorium, Brisbane on 19 August 2008.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1919
- Summary
- Betty Quelhurst was a painter. She served in the Air Force for four years during World War Two. Having saved for years she was able to study at La Grande Chaumière in Paris in 1951 and 1952. She spent the rest of her life studying, painting and teaching.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 13-Aug-08
- Age at death
- 89
Details
Latitude55 Longitude-3 Start Date1915-01-01 End Date2008-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- United Kingdom
- Biography
- “Mr. Harry Sebel, FAIM. Sebel Limired,96 Canterbury Rd., Bankstown, NSW.Founded the Sebel Company in Australia in1951 and, as Managing Director, initiatedthe Sebel Design Award in 1967. Has beeninterested in Product Design and developmentsince the immediate postwar years inEngland. Has many patents and inventions to his credit. Fellow of the Australianlnstitute of Management. Sometime ChairmanChairman of the Toy Manufacturers’ Associationof N.S.W., and the Direct Mail Commiilee ofthe Australian Association of NationalAdvenisers, and a past Councillor of theN.S.W. Guild of Furniture Manufacturers.As a “hobby”, is also Managing Director ofThe Town House in Sydney, and has beenresponsible for the development of severallarge building projects including The Penthousesin Darling Point.” [Biographical summary from Anon. Design Australia 5/1969, p.56.]
Writers:
Michael Bogle
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2016
- Born
- b. 1 January 1915
- Summary
- Sebel was a furniture & toy designer/manufacturer. He worked with his father in metalwork in UK, then establishing a furniture manufacturing works in Sydney. Specialising in injection moulded plastics, later diversifying into property (Sebel Town House hotel). Notable works include chairs such as the "Slim and Comfy" , the Nest-a-Bye stackable, the steel "Stak-a-Bye" and the "Integra" (designed by Charles Furey).
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-08
- Age at death
- 93
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1915-01-01 End Date2008-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
ecwubben
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 23 February 1915
- Summary
- Born in Melbourne in 1915, Grahame King was an artist-printmaker who significantly contributed to the field of printmaking in Australia. He taught lithography to generations of students at RMIT and in 1965, he along with Udo Sellbach and Dr Ursula Hoff established the Print Council of Australia, of which he became the Honourary Secretary and President.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 11-Oct-08
- Age at death
- 93
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1907-01-01 End Date2008-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- potter, craftworker, broadcaster and bark artist, was born in Melbourne, daughter of Arthur Barker and Eliza, née Stribley, and younger sister of the influential Brisbane artist and teacher, Caroline Barker . She moved with her family to Brisbane in 1920, where she was educated at Somerville House; Nina Stoddart was her art teacher. In 1925 she enrolled as a full-time student at the Brisbane Central Technical College, taking pottery classes with L.J. Harvey and painting with Martyn Roberts. She exhibited pottery with the Queensland Royal National Agricultural and Industrial Association (1927-33), the Arts and Crafts Society of Queensland (1930-31) and the Royal Queensland Art Society (1929-32). She was awarded first prize for original design at the 1931 Royal National Exhibition for her hand-built earthenware bowl with carved modelled and glazed decoration using local clays. One of her vases (1931) is in the collection of the Queensland Art Gallery.
Harvey encouraged Barker to take up sculpture and allowed her to work after hours at the Central Technical College (in 1934 William Moore called her a promising sculptor); but the necessary advanced study in Sydney was precluded by the state of her health (she suffered from asthma). Agnes began to work from home, making hand-painted brooches. Sales were so good that in 1931 she visited England on the proceeds.
On her return she established her own studio, called Novelart, in the Heindorff Building, Queen Street. As well as acquiring a small printing press and guillotine to produce the illustrative work she marketed in Sydney and Melbourne, she had a small electric kiln for ceramics; but the former proved so demanding that she gave up pottery in 1934.
Barker exhibited annually with the Arts and Crafts Society of Queensland until 1941. In 1937 she introduced enamelled pewter work to Brisbane and cork work in 1940-41. In the late 1940s she opened a craft shop, Bronte, in her sister’s painting studio in George Street. In 1953 she married Harold Richardson and shortly afterwards gave up the craft sho
In 1959 Agnes Barker was approached by Channel 7 to demonstrate crafts that could be made in the home. The following year she made over 50 television appearances; in 1960 she also appeared on Channel 9 in Sydney. She later concentrated on bark painting and oriental brush painting, exhibiting examples of both with the Royal Queensland Art Society.
Barker died in Mount Olivet Hospital, Brisbane, on 25 April 2008. A service was held at Mount Gravatt Crematorium on 30 April 2008.
Writers:
Cooke, Glenn R.
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1907
- Summary
- A talented artist in multiple media, Agnes Barker went on to become well-known as a television personality who demonstrated craftmaking techniques and activities in the home.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 25-Apr-08
- Age at death
- 101
Details
Latitude-32.05423 Longitude115.74763 Start Date1905-01-01 End Date2008-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Fremantle, WA, Australia
- Biography
- Painter Betsey Currie was born in Fremantle, WA, one of four children of the family who owned the Oasis Tearooms there. The jewellery maker and silversmith Herbert Kitchener Currie (also known as Kitch Currie) was her brother. Her maternal great-grandfather was a sculptor in Melbourne. She studied art at Perth Technical College under J. W. R. Linton and A. B. Webb. Linton opened a new purpose-built studio and gallery in Murray Street West where he and his elder son Jamie established a business as 'Art Metal Workers, Designers, Dealers in works of Art, etc’. This included a display area and a studio room for drawing, painting, sculpting or exhibiting. Currie and Jamie Linton worked there helping at the Linton School of Art from 1922-1925. Students came for life classes one or two nights a week. Currie shared a studio in 1929 with Ivor Hunt but this became impossible after the family lost their fortune in the Depression. J. W. R. Linton was retired early by the Education Department at the end of 1931 because of the 'financial emergency’ of the Depression. In 1932, when Jamie opened The Linton Institute of Art on the corner of King and Hay Streets, Perth, he was joined by his father and Currie. The Institute housed the studios and an art school. Currie acted as the Lintons’ assistant and general factotum, organizing the classes and teaching students. Kitch Curry helped with the metalwork. Extra 'life’ classes at night were carefully scrutinised by the police to ensure that all attendees were bona fide and that the nude did not move. The institute quickly became a meeting place for students, artists, family and friends. It also served as an exhibition venue with an alcove at the top of the stairs set up with a permanent display managed by Currie. The Linton Institute of Art lasted until about 1935. When J. W. R. Linton’s wife Lottie moved interstate in 1938, Currie and Linton went to live in Parkerville. She changed her name to Linton by deed poll in 1942. She and her sister Nell ran Currie’s Gift Shop in the Wheatsheaf centre, corner of St George’s Terrac eand Kings Street in Perth in the 1940s and 1950s to sell the work of Kitch Currie and the Lintons. Linton died in 1947 and in 1957 Betsey moved with Kitch to Greenmount. She taught art at Fremantle Prison through the Perth Technical College extension service from 1955 and retired in 1965. She and her sister travelled with Kitch to Europe and Morocco. In 1999, in her nineties, she enjoyed a resurgence of her art with almost sell-out exhibitions of pictures selected from her old folios. RED SECTIONS
Writers:
Dr Dorothy Erickson
Date written:
2010
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1905
- Summary
- Painter and teacher who had a long association with J. W. R. Linton and worked at the Linton Institute of Art. She changed her name to Linton by deed poll in 1942.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2008
- Age at death
- 103
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1965-01-01 End Date2007-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Adam Cullen, painter and Archibald Prize winner, was born in Sydney in 1963. He studied Fine Arts and Professional Art Studies at the City Art Institute in Paddington, initially graduating in 1987. Later he returned as a research student when the former CAE joined the He University of New South Wales, graduating with a Master of Fine Arts in 1999. Despite his apparent conventional academic trajectory, Cullen was initially best known for his confrontational stunts and punkish ploys. In one performance he walked around for a week with a severed pig’s head chained to his ankle, during which time he was banned from public transport. His friend and fellow student, Andrew Frost, saw this as an indication of his long term obsession with decay and death.Cullen’s most challenging performance piece was held at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 2005. Home Economics consisted of Cullen and fellow artist Cash Brown, standing at a table with various domestic appliances and easily purchased ingredients. Then as Cullen read from sources found on the internet, Brown drew accompanying diagrams to show how weapons of mass destruction could be made by all.His joy in challenging authority can be seen in his later collaboration with Mark 'Chopper’ Read on a children’s book entitled Hooky the Cripple . Cullen’s work approached difficult social issues with a light touch. Crime, masculinity and cowboy culture, were all exposed through a lens of humour. Formally, his paintings united high and low culture through the combination of bold, gestural brushstrokes and appropriated imagery. Cullen was the recipient of a number of distinguished prizes most famously the Archibald Prize in 2000 for his portrait of the actor David Wenham. Ice was also a regular finalist in the Archibald, the Sulman and the Blake Prize. In 2002 Cullen represented Australia at the 25th Bienal de Sao Paulo.For many years he suffered from ill health, which was exacerbated by a life style characterised by drugs and heavy drinking. At the time of his death he was a diabetic, and had his pancreas removed and was heavily medicated, not for pleasure but for survival. Andrew Frost wrote 'Adam has left us his legacy: the good, the bad and the ugly, the funny, the insightful and glacial glistening of truth, the dancing black line, the splat of curdled enamel on the infinity of a single colour acrylic. It wasn’t conceptual he always said, it was optical. Just look and you will see.’
Writers:
Chalk Horse Gallery
Joanna Mendelssohn
duckydo37
Date written:
2010
Last updated:
2018
- Born
- b. 9 October 1965
- Summary
- Adam Cullen delighted in confronting both his fellow artists and the establishment with his works that explored crime, masculinity and cowboy culture through a lens of bleak humour.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 28-Jul-07
- Age at death
- 42
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1949-01-01 End Date2007-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Richard Martin Wood was born in Sydney on 15 November 1949 the eldest of the two sons born to Ronald Wood and Irene May née Martin. He was educated at the Sydney Grammar School but left school in 1965 to work in his family’s book and stationery business in Pyrmont. He quit working there in 1969 to travel around Australia with a group of friends. Their car broke down in Mackay and, after repairing the car and completing the trip they returned to Sydney. However, the prospect of living at Mackay appealed to Wood and he settled there in 1972. His involvement with pottery began when he enrolled in hobby classes at the Mackay Education Centre in 1973 while he worked as a crane-driver at the Mackay Sugar Co-operative Association’s Racecourse Mill. He was awarded a master craftsman/trainee grant from the Crafts Board of the Australia Council in 1978 and worked with the Eungella potters, Arthur and Carol Rosser in 1979-80. After completing his traineeship he received a workshop development grant from the Crafts Board and set up his pottery at Black’s Beach Pottery in 1981 and devoted the remainder of his career to the vocation of a potter. He relocated to Ocean Avenue, Slade Point and set up EarthSea Pottery in 1991 and from 1995 worked with his wife, Leonie Snedden. In 1993 he was awarded a Graduate Diploma in Visual Arts from Monash University, Gippsland Campus and in 2001 he completed a Certificate in Science from the James Cook University, Townsville.
His early work demonstrates the interest in salt-glaze firing that followed his training with the Rossers and, subsequently shows in the decorated surfaces of works such as Regions Torridae 1991 (QAG Collection). His work evolved over years and was inspired by bushwalking, windsurfing and scuba-diving and also incorporated the forms of seed pods, bark patterns and island profiles. Wood’s later work exploits glazing techniques from ancient China.
From 1982 he held a number of solo exhibitions including several at the Queensland Potters Association/Fusions Gallery in 1985, 1987 and 1993 (as well a group exhibitions for salt-glazed work). He also shared an exhibition with Leonie at Gallery 10, Townsville in 1996. Wood also exhibited at the Plumridge Gallery, Brisbane in 1986 and 1987. His work has been included in several significant group exhibitions such as 'The Queensland Gift 1988’ (Queensland Potters Association) and 'Decorated clay’ (QAG) 1991 and throughout his career he conducted numerous workshops and received a number of awards for his stonewares throughout North Queensland. His death on 21 June 2007 was caused by melanoma.
Writers:
Cooke, Glenn R.
Date written:
2008
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 15 November 1949
- Summary
- Rick Wood was an accomplished potter who was based in regional Queensland and who included a range of traditional glazing techniques and contemporary decorative motifs in his work.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 21-Jun-07
- Age at death
- 58
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1948-01-01 End Date2007-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- cartoonist, was born in Sydney on 15 November 1948. He attended Our Lady of the Sacred Heart College, Bowral (1958-60), Chevalier College Bowral (1961-62), Christian Brothers, Rose Bay (1962-63), the Independent School of Dramatic Art, North Sydney (1968-71), a National Institute of Dramatic Art Playwright Forum in 1973 and a Royal Academy of Dramatic Art Professional Workshop at London in 1979. Cartooning, which he started doing in the Traralgon Journal in 1967, paralleled his acting career. In London he contributed to Punch and worked on the Australian Express for which he created the weekly comic strip Frogin (1980-82).
Returning to Sydney in 1983, Kemsley took over drawing the daily comic strip Ginger Meggs (in the Sydney Morning Herald to mid 2005, Daily Telegraph [Sydney] since then), a weekly (coloured) strip in the Sun-Herald that was syndicated to the US (et al.?). Some Days You’re A Legend.Some Days You Ain’t (Allen & Kemsley Publishing: Mosman NSW, 1995) was Kemsley’s fourth collection of Ginger Meggs comics strips, the first being published in November 1983. It was also the 39th volume in the Ginger Meggs series, which dates back to Jim Bancks 's first anthology of 1924 (three years after he created Ginger and the gang in the Sydney Sun ).
Kemsley was president of the Black and White Artists’ Club in 1988-90 and was elected a life member in 1991. Married to Helen Lorraine Perry with two sons, he lived in the Southern Highlands of NSW until his death in December 2007.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 15 November 1948
- Summary
- Contemporary Sydney/Southern Highlands cartoonist and actor. Was responsible for the "Ginger Meggs" strip for over 20 years, working right up until his death in December 2007. From 1988-1990 he was president of the Black and White Artists Club.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 3-Dec-07
- Age at death
- 59
Details
Latitude-36.3131874 Longitude145.0480905 Start Date1937-01-01 End Date2007-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Kyabram, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1937
- Summary
- Painter, teacher and pioneer of the Melbourne leather scene
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2007
- Age at death
- 70
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1937-01-01 End Date2007-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- John Stringer’s creative intelligence was the guiding spirit behind The Field of 1968. In the 1970s and 80s he created innovative exhibitions in New York, before moving to Perth where his creative intelligence was responsible for the new directions of the Kerry Stokes collection.
John Norris Stringer was born in Melbourne on 2 October 1937, the son of Walter Stringer, a banker, and his wife Eva. His father was an an enthusiastic photographer and his interest in the arts was encouraged. After leaving school he first enrolled in Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne, and later completed a Diploma in Art at RMIT. His passion for art led to his first appointment in 1957 as Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings at the National Gallery of Victoria, under the formidable Dr Ursula Hoff. Although he enjoyed drilling down into the possible layers of meaning in individual works of art, Stringer’s talent was always towards display, and in time a staff restructure saw him appointed Exhibitions Officer.In 1968 he collaborated with Brian Finemore to curate The Field, the innovative exhibition of contemporary Australian art that opened the new National Gallery of Victoria building in St Kilda Road. The year before MoMA had brought the travelling exhibition Two Decades of American Painting to Australia. Waldo Rasmussen, MoMA’s International program director had been so impressed by the young Stringer that he arranged for him to go to New York as assistant program director.Here he arranged for exhibitions to travel to Europe, Latin America and Australasia. In 1975, Stringer oversaw MoMA’s blockbuster _Modern Masters: Manet to Matisse _ when it travelled to Sydney and Melbourne.In 1976 he returned to Australia to head the Australian Art Exhibitions Corporation, which brought a blockbuster exhibition of Chinese art, and his own initiative– El Dorado: Colombian Gold. This was less financially successful than China, although the cognoscenti enjoyed the pun of the exhibition’s title and the beauty of the finely crafted gold sculptures. Stringer returned to New York in 1978 as an independent curator. His marriage to June Webb was over, but he remained close to his children – his daughter Chloe and the twins Phoebe and Simon. He curated Latin American exhibitions for a gallery in Brooklyn,often working closely with his lover, the Columbian art critic Eduardo Serrano. He also showed Melbourne minimalist Robert Hunter and Sydney funk jeweller Peter Tully. For almost a decade he also ran visual arts at David Rockefeller’s project of Centre for Inter-American Relations. In 1988, when Betty Churcher offered him the position of curator at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth, he was concerned both about how to keep close to his children, but also Serrano. Daniel Thomas later wrote that 'the long-distance relationship inevitably ran its course.’ In 1992 Betty Churcher moved to the National Gallery of Australia, and his curatorial role became more bound by administrative duties, which took Stringer away from art. He was saved when Kerry Stokes asked him if he would like to be curator of his personal collection. This new position gave him unprecedented freedon to promote West Australian art in both an international and national context.As well as great European and American work, Stringer was responsible for many innovative Australian and new Zealand works entering the Stokes collection. These included Howard Taylor, Juan Davila’s Stupid as a Painter John Brack,Michael Parekowhai, and Stuart Elliott.His last exhibition, Cross Currents, curated for Stokes and Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, was still on view when he died.Daniel Thomas, in his obituary of Stringer wrote that as he approached his 70th birthday Stringer was 'whippet-thin and fit, cool and wonderfully considerate, and engaged with the wonders of the natural world as well as new international art’. His daughter Chloe was to be married, and when he failed to turn up for wedding photographs, his former wife went to look for him and found him dead from a sudden heart attack, dressed for the occasion in Versace.
Writers:
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2011
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 2 October 1937
- Summary
- John Stringer was the innovative exhibition officer at the National Gallery of Victoria who was the guiding spirit behind The Field of 1968. Later he created innovative exhibitions for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, before moving to Perth where his creative intelligence was responsible for the new directions of the Kerry Stokes collection.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 14-Nov-07
- Age at death
- 70
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1928-01-01 End Date2007-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Victor Dove was born in Sydney on 17th September 1928. He lived in Carrs Park and was educated at Hurstville High School in East Sydney. At an early age Victor’s love for art had become obvious and his father, the late Sidney Dove, had a special table with an easel built for him. After leaving high school, Victor enrolled at East Sydney Technical College where he studied commercial art, figure drawing, painting and composition, progressing into a career as a commercial artist.
Early in his career Victor established a position in Pakistan and stayed there for three years working for a Karachi advertising agency, traveling extensively and sketching many points of interest during his stay.
After moving back to Australia he worked as a press artist for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Daily Telegraph , establishing himself as a commercial artist and, to some degree, a travel writer & photographer.
He had a love of travel and undertook extensive visits throughout South East Asia during his holidays, studying the culture and people of various countries and publishing a number of articles for Arts of Asia , Kaleidoscope and various other related magazines during his somewhat limited spare time; this eventually overtook his passion for painting and became his first love.
Victor’s photography and research into South East Asian cultures often led to a presentation slide show to related migrant culture groups in Australia including the Indonesian Society and the Korean Society.
While spending time in Fiji during the late 60s, he gathered a portfolio of information and sketches which were published in 1970 in his book Fiji Sketchbook (Rigby Press).
In his spare time, and later after he retired, Victor visited the south coast of New South Wales with his brother Frederick and family, sketching and painting various points of interest, particularly of the Kiama and Jamberoo areas, while there. Victor’s works also include a number of paintings and drawings from around Cronulla and Doll’s Point in Sydney.
Throughout his life, Victor worked in various media including painting, black & white line and wash drawing (he was a member of the Australian Black & White Artists’ Club) and photography.
Victor Dove died on 26 June 2007.
Writers:
Dove, Charles
Date written:
1970
Last updated:
2008
- Born
- b. 17 September 1928
- Summary
- A Sydney-born artist and travel writer whose paintings include many scenes of South East Asia.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 26-Sep-07
- Age at death
- 79
Details
Latitude-37.1417687 Longitude142.520244 Start Date1928-01-01 End Date2007-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Halls Gap, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 8 November 1928
- Summary
- Fashion designer and couturier based in Melbourne and Darlington Point, New South Wales. Life partner and collaborator of Ross Weymouth.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- Feb-07
- Age at death
- 79
Details
Latitude51 Longitude9 Start Date1926-01-01 End Date2007-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Germany
- Biography
- Mr. Gerd Block.Studied architecture in Berlin andKarlsruhe. Winner of Gold Medal for bestFinal Year thesis at Karlsruhe. Migrated toAustralia, 1951 . ln private practice, with hiswife, since 1956. Post graduate degreeMelbourne University, I965. Senior Lecturerand Year Master at School of Architectureand Building, University of Melbourne,since 1964. Published works on NetworkAnalysis and Architectural Education.[Anon. Design Australia, 5/1969, p.56.]
Writers:
Michael Bogle
Date written:
2016
Last updated:
2016
- Born
- b. 1 January 1926
- Summary
- Renate and Gerd Block worked in partnership as architects. In 1958, they were exhibiting furniture and lighting in "Architecture and Arts". They were the architects for the first Canberra mosque, 1960. They were among the first interior architects to design and install the "office landscape" / Bürolandschaft in Australia. Their first commission to use this approach was the Nunawading Municipal Offices in Victoria ca.1969.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-07
- Age at death
- 81
Details
Latitude-32.5664044 Longitude151.1733972 Start Date1922-01-01 End Date2007-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Singleton, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1922
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2007
- Age at death
- 85
Details
Latitude-36.3300305 Longitude146.2283047 Start Date1922-01-01 End Date2007-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Wangandary, Vic, Australia
- Biography
- Lorna Merle Chick was born 18 August 1922 in Wangandary, a small farming community in north-eastern Victoria lying between the Warby Ranges and the rural city of Wangaratta, a few kilometres to the east. Chick grew up on the family farm, often riding her horse through the Warby Ranges, a 400m high granitic outlier of the Great Dividing Range rich in bird and plant life (Fawcett 1986). The Warby Ranges entered the public imagination when the Kelly Gang passed through them soon after the infamous Stringy Bark Creek police murders in 1878. Chick knew gang member Steve Hart’s brother Dick as a child, as her grandmother’s property adjoined the Hart’s property (Ford 1986). The subject matter of most of Chick’s work was inspired and informed by local bushranger legend and the small agricultural landholdings containing orchards, crops and stock around Wangaratta, which is situated on a river plain surrounded by the peaks of the Great Dividing Range and the Warby Ranges.
Chick’s painting career began by chance around 1960 after she attended Dookie Agricultural College to pursue subjects for farmer’s wives such as book keeping and jam making. This endeavour was the result of her having to assume more responsibility for the everyday running of the farm, following her husband Bert’s serious and incapacitating tractor accident (Unknown 1986). The college also offered an art appreciation course, which, after she attended, led her sons Marcus and Louis to express an interest in taking up art. The only place locally that ran an art class was Wangaratta Technical School. Chick later recounted that as she sat in the car while her children were being taught, the art teacher, Jock Thomlinson, came up to her and told her to come inside and see what she could do, an idea she hadn’t considered (Adams 1978). Thomlinson did little more than show Chick how to mix and apply paint to canvas, later writing of her unique perception and intuitive understanding of her compositions that were underpinned by a strong determination and interest in technique (Thomlinson 1985).
While early in her painting career Chick painted the occasional seascape including Lakes Entrance (1964), the majority of her oeuvre depicted the agricultural lands of North-East Victoria in which she lived all her life. Often noted for their panoramic, aerial views, Chick’s landscape paintings revelled in the native wildflowers and birdlife of the surrounding hills and mountains, epitomised by Where Eagles Nest (1969), in the Wangaratta Art Gallery collection and Power’s Lookout (1975), a painting whose title is in keeping with her interest in local bushranger lore (Banfield 1979, Karovich 1985). Chick also delighted in the minutiae of floral displays such as Wildflowers of the Warby Ranges (1969) and Roses (1977). Water divining, an activity she learnt while accompanying her husband, led to her travelling around the district, suggesting landscapes to paint (Kaptein 2004). Chick was also taken to composing piano music to accompany many of her paintings (Adams 1978).
During the 1960s and 1970s painting was secondary to farm and family life as Chick raised her sons and managed their 40ha property. As a consequence, painting was only done at night after her daily chores were completed (Hart 2004). In the 1980s, when her sons had grown up and her father, whom she had also cared for, had died, she was able to devote more of her time to painting. She was assisted in this by several Visual Arts Board grants in the early 1980s. She would retire to her small galvanised shed near her farmhouse that she used for an art studio at 8:30 in the morning and finish at 5:30pm (Unknown 1986). Despite this work ethic, Chick’s output was slow. On average it would take three months to complete a work and her largest painting, Power’s Lookout, at over 3m in width, took up to eighteen months to complete. This work was acquired by the National Gallery of Australia in 1976 (Unknown July 1976, Unknown 1986). She would also rework the same painting over many years (Unknown 1986). By the mid 1980s Chick estimated that she had completed around forty paintings, while near the end of her life two decades later, she had completed about one hundred (Ford 1986, Author Pers. comm. 2006)
Throughout her career Chick was wary and suspicious of the motives of those involved in the art world (Fawcett 1986). She once claimed that an art dealer stole a painting and that she received phone calls from people demanding that she supply them with work otherwise they would duplicate her style and put her out of business (Unknown 1986). She shunned what she called the art worlds “cocktail party trappings”. Curators also incurred her wrath. She described one as a careerist who did not ask her permission to display works in an upcoming exhibition (Author Pers. comm. 2006). However, she formed a friendship with then Ballarat Art Gallery director Jim Mollison in the late 1960s which ultimately led to the acquisition of several of her paintings for the national collection soon after he become director of the new National Gallery in Canberra in October 1971 (Unknown March 1972, Unknown July 1976, Unknown December 1976). Visitors to her farmhouse were often greeted with refreshments and invariably invited to lunch (Fawcett 1986).
Besides Mollison’s interest in Chick, her paintings were eagerly sought by collectors. Despite favouring traditional style paintings, the Benalla based business man Laurie Ledger commissioned Chick to paint his family property. This resulted in the work Woolleen from a Helicopter (1975), one of five of her paintings he donated to the Benalla Art Gallery (Unknown December 1976). The aptly named Dr W.H. Orchard was a private collector of naive art in the 1960s and 1970s that actively sought her works and lent them to early, significant group exhibitions of Australian naive art; 'The Innocent Eye’ (Benalla Art Gallery 1975-76) and 'Wonderland- Some Naifs’ (Albury Regional Art Centre and touring 1983-4). With the purchase of four works for Canberra’s new Parliament House from her Glenrowan and Kelly Legend Country series in 1986, Chick’s paintings began to attract greater attention. Due mainly to her small output, her paintings rarely come up for auction (McPhee 2005).
Lorna Chick passed away in April 2007 and was buried in Wangaratta. Her biggest regret appears to have been that she did not begin painting sooner in life (Ford 1986). Wangaratta Art Gallery organised a retrospective of her work as part of their 25th Anniversary celebrations in 2012-13.
Writers:
bullj
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 18 August 1922
- Summary
- Artist known for her paintings of the agricultural lands of North East Victoria, some of which are grand in scale and scope. Her work is in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 22-Apr-07
- Age at death
- 85
Details
Latitude-33.8342887 Longitude151.2182049 Start Date1919-01-01 End Date2007-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Neutral Bay, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- At times it seemed Bill Spencer led a double life. For many years he was a fixture at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, where he gave advice to visitors and colleagues alike. But not on art, as the hierarchical gallery structure did not encourage attendants to pass opinions on matters aesthetic. But once the uniform was discarded he reverted to being an artist painting sensitive Post Impressionist inspired landscapes of mainly New South Wales’ subjects, and portraits often of family and friends. Art governed Bill’s life. His father was a builder, designing as well as building houses on the lower north shore, near their Neutral Bay home. When Bill left school at 15 he enrolled in classes at the Julian Ashton school where he was taught by John Passmore, Eric Wilson, Jean Appleton and Henry Gibbons who praised his draughtsmanship. A solo exhibition at the Grosvenor gallery in 1939 was a great success. But as with most young men of his generation he was soon caught up by World War II, where he served in Army Intelligence. After the War his health was not good and this may have influenced his decision to choose the one job where he could work surrounded by art, as an attendant at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. With his thirst for knowledge of all manner of things and his natural organisational skills it was not surprising that he became the union representative of the general staff for the gallery. He settled at Miranda with his wife Cainetta Caines and here they raised their four children. Bill continued to paint on his days off. He was a regular exhibitor at local art exhibitions in NSW and his paintings of regional landscapes can be found in public collections throughout New South Wales. He held solo exhibitions at Dominion Galleries in 1965, Holdsworth Galleries in 1970, 1975 and 1979. His watercolour, Landscape at Richmond NSW, was purchased by the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1971. In 1976 the AGNSW conservator, Bill Boustead, alerted the Gallery to the health hazards of the asbestos which had been sprayed onto the ceiling of the new gallery building. The matter was brought to the attention of the Public Works Department, but nothing was done. By 1978 the staff showed the administration evidence that the asbestos was flaking from the gallery ceiling throughout the building. A subsequent Health Commission report indicated that although there were areas where the sprayed ceiling was falling away and fibres going into the atmosphere, it was regarded as “being without health risk”. Bill did not accept this report and took his concerns to the Public Service Association. The PSA made representations on behalf of the gallery attendants to the Public Service Board. The Board refused to consider the removal of the asbestos, but agreed to replace the ceilings “as a long term projected. as funds become available”. Bill’s actions in convincing his colleagues of the danger of the asbestos led to the attendants threatening immediate work bans. Aleks Danko and Joan Grounds, artists who were preparing for the Biennale of Sydney picketed the gallery in sympathy, and threatened to withdraw their work. On 20 April 1979 the Premier, Neville Wran, agreed to the immediate removal of the ceiling. According to the gallery’s official communication “the decision did not arise from concern of any immediate health risk”. The name, “Asbestos Bill”, stayed.After Bill and Cainetta’s children went their ways, their father had more time for art. In 1998 his portrait of Cainetta, entered in the Moran Prize was praised by the critic Robert Rooney for the way it reconciled “abstraction and figuration”. He taught at both Gymea Technical College and the Royal Art Society. He was an inspirational teacher, loved for his warmth, knowledge and passion. Bill’s last years were cruel. Parkinson’s Disease immobilised him. Dementia destroyed much of his mind, except that when he looked at art he returned in part, to being the man he once was, and he continued to draw. The night before he died he was watching the Antiques Roadshow on television and saw a painting of cows in a field. “That looks like a Constable”, he said. It was not quite right, but the painting was indeed painted by one of Constable’s followers.
Writers:
Mendelssohn, Joanna
Note:
Date written:
2007
Last updated:
2011
Status:
peer-reviewed
- Born
- b. 6 August 1919
- Summary
- In one life Bill Spencer was the Art Gallery of New South Wales attendant who led the fight against asbestos in the gallery building in the late 1970s, but as W.J. Spencer he was a graduate of the Julian Ashton school who for many years exhibited work in regional art exhibitions throughout New South Wales.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 8-Nov-07
- Age at death
- 88
Details
Latitude52.0799838 Longitude4.3113461 Start Date1917-01-01 End Date2007-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- The Hague, The Netherlands
- Biography
- Maryke Degeus was born at The Hague, The Netherlands in 1917. She had an unhappy childhood, but later trained as a school teacher. She became an important member of the circle around Jon Molvig and was largely self taught (although she may have studied briefly at the Akademie voor Beeldende Kunsten, The Hague). During the years of World War II she was involved with the Dutch resistance movement, and also served in Indonesia. In 1949 she came to live in Brisbane where she taught at the Stuartholme Convent and a few years later built a cottage on Acacia Street, Surfers Paradise. There she taught children’s art and produced many watercolour studies of children. At the suggestion of the art dealer, John Cooper, she studied with Jon Molvig at St Mary’s Studio, Kangaroo Point, Brisbane from 1957. She became friendly with Ian Fairweather and produced several portraits of him. The following year she travelled with Molvig to Melbourne and through Central Australia. Degeus was notable for her vigorous technique especially with the palette knife. In 1960 she was reported as making her living from art as she was able to turn her hand to any necessity. At her suggestion Jon Molvig and Charles Blackman set up a teaching studio at Broadbeach for about a year. She taught as well as designed costumes for the production of Hotel Paradiso by the Gold Coast Little Theatre 1961.
During her marriage to an oil company executive, whom she met while travelling in Holland in 1966, she lived in Borneo and Sarawak but after they separated, Degeus returned to live in Surfers Paradise. She was one of the first Australian artists to be influenced by the experience of Indonesia – in 1972 she exhibited works with tribal subjects at the Reid Gallery. Subsequently, adapting once more to necessity, she transferred her major art interest to ceramics in which the influence of Indonesia dominated. As central Surfers Paradise was being developed extensively she sold her studio and moved to a new house/studio at Nerang where her ceramics and a ceramic mural were an important feature of its decoration. During the 1970s she also conducted pottery classes for children.
Degeus exhibited paintings extensively from 1958 in group exhibitions including : H.C. Richards Memorial Prize 1958-64; Redcliffe Art Contest 1959-72; Queensland Artists of Fame and Promise 1959; Centenary Art Competition 1959; Queensland Centenary Eisteddfod Art Competition 1959 (for which she was awarded the prize for 'Bag sewer’); Contemporary Art Society of Australia (Queensland Branch) 1962-64; Royal National Association 1963-65; L.J. Harvey Memorial Prize for Drawing 1963; Half Dozen Group of Artists 1964 and the Gold Coast City Art Prize 1968-71.
Maria Wilhelmina Degeus, as she was also known, died on 12 February 2007.
Research Curator, Queensland Heritage, Queensland Art Gallery
Writers:
Cooke, Glenn R.
Date written:
2008
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1917
- Summary
- Maryke Degeus was one of the many European migrants whose entry into Australia after World War Two transformed our culture. She was associated with Jon Molvig and innovative art practice in Brisbane in the 1950s and 1960s. Her intimate connections with Bali informed her art and experimentations with pottery in subsequent decades.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 12-Feb-07
- Age at death
- 90
Details
Latitude53.4075 Longitude-2.991944 Start Date1915-01-01 End Date2007-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Liverpool, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Ivan Englund (1915-2007) was born in Liverpool, NSW. He completed a Diploma of Painting and Drawing at East Sydney Technical College (ESTC) in 1951, then taught art and ceramics in institutions in Victoria, Canberra and Wollongong, where he took up a post at the Technical College in 1954. He was one of the original four members of the Potters’ Society of New South Wales (later the Potters’ Society of Australia) when it was formed in 1956. He conducted extensive research into glazes and published two books and many articles on this work. In 1962, he was awarded an ESTC Fellowship for his development of igneous rock glazes. In 1971, he was appointed Senior Head Teacher of Art at ESTC, and from 1972 to 1977, he conducted the Ivan Englund Pottery School at the Rocks, before moving to Walcha, NSW, and then to Bawley Point, NSW, to work as a full-time potter. For his work on middle-fire glazes he received a Doctorate from Wollongong University in 1995. He has entries in the 1974-1996 potters’ directories. His mark is an incised or impressed 'IE’ in various forms.
Writers:
staffcontributor
Judith Pearce
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2013
- Born
- b. 4 November 1915
- Summary
- Ivan Englund was one of the founders of the Potters' Society of New South Wales in 1956. He taught at the Wollongong and East Sydney technical colleges before setting up his own pottery school at the Rocks in 1972. He conducted extensive research into glazes and published two books and many articles on this work.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- Oct-07
- Age at death
- 92
Details
Latitude52.52 Longitude13.405 Start Date1913-01-01 End Date2007-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Berlin, Germany
- Biography
- Wolfgang Sievers was one of the finest architectural and industrial photographers working in Australia in the second half of the twentieth century. For an extended biography click on the peer reviewed biography tab below.
Writers:
staffcontributor
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 18 September 1913
- Summary
- German-born Australian photographer whose subject matter consisted primarily of Australian architecture and heavy industry. Sievers arrived in Australia in 1938 and died in Victoria in 2007.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 7-Aug-07
- Age at death
- 94
Details
Latitude-33.8858088 Longitude151.1024805 Start Date1912-01-01 End Date2007-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Burwood, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Dorothy Ellen Lindsay nee Simpson was born in 1912 in the Sydney suburb of Burwood. In 1936 she married Norman Andrews Lindsay. He had been born in Wauchope, near Port Macquarie in New South Wales, on 20 May 1904, son of Norman J. and Mary Lindsay; and died on 10 May 1982, aged 78, at Thurloo Downs via Bourke. (There does not appear to be any relationship to Norman Alfred Williams Lindsay).
The couple had two sons. During World War II (1939-1945), Dorothy Lindsay worked for the Red Cross, while her husband served in the Australian Army, rising to the rank of Captain. By 1968 they were living in Turner Avenue, Haberfield, New South Wales. In 1979 the Lindsays moved to Wauchope { war-hope }. Lindsay died on 1 May 2007, aged 94, in Port Macquarie Base Hospital.
Lindsay studied art at the Australian School of Sketching, Sydney, from 1927, and in the 1970s attended a course at the Royal Art Society, Sydney. In 1968 she joined the Drummoyne Municipal Art Society and the Ryde Art Society. In 1976 she founded the Ashfield Municipal Art Society. This society was quite active at first, with open competitions exhibited in Ashfield Town Hall, but existed for only a few years. She is known to have exhibited with at least the Drummoyne Municipal Art Society (now the Drummoyne Art Society Inc) and Ashfield Art Society. The only works known to the biographer are minor landscape works in oils dating from the late 1970s. She is represented in South Africa, Australia, Papua-New Guinea, England, France, Holland, Canada, and Japan (Dorothy Lindsay, pers. comm. 2002). Her signature was 'Dorothy Lindsay’ scratched into the paint.
Writers:
Rost, Fred
Date written:
2011
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1912
- Summary
- Dorothy Ellen Lindsay (née Simpson), JP, BEM. Community worker and artist (painting and drawing). Founder of the Ashfield Art Society.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1-May-07
- Age at death
- 95
Details
Latitude-29.43679805 Longitude151.1770693 Start Date1959-01-01 End Date2006-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Inverell, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 22 February 1959
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 11-Jul-06
- Age at death
- 47
Details
Latitude-26 Longitude121 Start Date1951-01-01 End Date2006-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Western Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1951
- Summary
- Wright was a West Australian furniture designer and maker who worked as a Denmark WA farmer and photographer before returning to study at the West Australian Institute of Technology in 1982. While working in interior design, jewellery and 3-dimensional work, his work is primarily in wood and his production furniture was sold through ANIBOU, Sydney and other outlets.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-06
- Age at death
- 55
Details
Latitude-23.447 Longitude131.882 Start Date1950-01-01 End Date2006-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Haasts Bluff, NT, Australia
- Biography
- Born in the late 1940s at Haasts Bluff, where Cameron’s family settled after walking in from Pintupi country hundreds of kilometres west. The area around the Lizard Dreaming mountain which lies alongside Kintore was Cameron’s father’s country. He started painting for Papunya Tula Artists at Kintore in about 1987 under the instruction of Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri and Benny Tjapaltjarri , but later became more involved with community affairs. Stories depicted in Cameron’s paintings related to the Tingari cycle and included a Bandicoot Dreaming story around Desert Bore and a Wallaby and Budgerigar Dreaming site north-west of Nyirrpi.
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Note: primary biographer
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1950
- Summary
- Cameron painted at Kintore for about a decade from 1987 under the instruction of Mick Namarari Tjapaltjarri and Benny Tjapaltjarri. He later dedicated himself to working for the Kintore Clinic.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2006
- Age at death
- 56
Details
Latitude-37.8611788 Longitude144.8898569 Start Date1938-01-01 End Date2006-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Williamstown, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- Jon Plapp was born in the western bayside suburb of Williamstown, Victoria, in 1938; received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Melbourne in 1959; and in 1966 moved to St Louis, Missouri, USA, where he completed a doctorate in psychology at the Washington University in 1967. There, Plapp took advantage of the Washington University’s fine art department to take some instruction in painting and life drawing. This was the extent of his formal art training .
In 1968 Jon Plapp relocated to Toronto, Canada, where he entered the social scene surrounding the David Mirvish gallery and met colour-field and geometric abstractionists such as Jules Olisky, Frank Stella, Larry Poons, and Canadian abstractionist Jack Bush. Their work profoundly influenced Plapp, both for its aesthetic qualities, and for its balance and serenity, that resonated with his own temperament and philosophical outlook. He was drawn to try this style of painting as it seemed an art he could make, might love, and possibly would excel in. In a spirit of admiration and emulation, he became a committed artist. By 1976 he was sufficiently confident in his work to invest in a studio space, to be shared with like-minded artists David Bolduc and Paul Slogett.
For Plapp, being an artist was not just about painting, it was a way of life. Throwing himself into the art world, he engaged in its activities, enjoyed its attitudes, and made friends with other artists and art world personalities. Richard McMillan, his life partner, whom he met in the late 1960s in Toronto, was both a sculptor and an academic. The couple were to be familiar faces in the Canadian and Australian art scenes, frequenting exhibition openings and other arts events.
In 1977 the two artists moved back to Australia where they settled in the Sydney suburb of Surry Hills. Here Plapp continued to explore colour-field painting. His works from this period are characterised by subtle variations in colour aided by a play of texture, with impasto used to build swollen ridges of acrylic paint. In 1979 he had his first solo exhibition at Watters Gallery, which continued to represent him in Sydney. In Melbourne, since the 1990s he was represented by the Charles Nodrum Gallery; in Toronto he was represented by the Klonaridis Gallery; and in New York by the Rosenberg Gallery. Between 1979 and 2005 Plapp showed regularly in Sydney, Melbourne, Tasmania, Brisbane and Toronto. A thoughtful survey of his work, Elusive Meanings, was held at the Tasmanian Devonport Gallery and Arts Centre in 1995. The curator, Fiona Christie, had first met Plapp in 1990 on one of Plapp’s regular visits to the northwest coast of Tasmania, where his family had settled in the 1850s. The survey focused on Plapp’s geometric abstractionist works from a critical ten-year period between 1984 and 1994.
Plapp started to explore geometric abstraction in the 1980s, creating from it works whose ambiguous mixture of freedom and discipline represented his response to life. In the burgeoning age of the computer, Plapp’s art was systematic without being mechanical or straightforward. His methodology embraced the geometry of the hand-worker as opposed to that of the scientist. He would tear his canvases into the desired length and use the loosened strands to plot right-angular arrangements of threads across the surface, securing them with tacks. When his hands started to shake — a symptom of the Parkinson’s disease from which he suffered for many years — Plapp took a leaf from Pollock’s book and laid his canvases on the ground, steadying his arm by leaning on the floor. He worked in series, diligently experimenting with each variation of a theme until he had exhausted its creative possibilities. The works produced at the end of his career, when the shaking was at its most extreme, ambitiously involved complex and fine lineal systems. The monochromic lines, some dead-straight, some with a slight waver, express Plapp’s human persistence and strict dedication to his art.
If recognition for Plapp’s art was quiet, he achieved a solid position in the estimation of critics, curators, dealers and collectors. In 2000 he and Richard McMillan were granted a residency at the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ studio at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. His work is held by public, corporate and private collections in Australia and North America, including the National Gallery of Australia, MOCA, the collection of Ann Lewis, the University of Toronto, the University of Sydney, New England Regional Art Museum, the AMP collection, and Artbank.
As well as being notably dedicated to his art, Plapp was equally committed to his work as a psychologist in the Rivendell Child and Adolescent Unit at Concord Hospital. Terence Maloon, in the essay for the catalogue of a posthumous survey of Plapp’s work at Watters Gallery in 2009, noted that Plapp’s art expressed many of the intuitive responses of the psychologist: an alertness to tone, energy of expression, alternations of emphasis, meaningful silences — and the implications behind them — are the key to the paintings as to the psychologist’s work of diagnosis. More practically, Plapp’s career in psychology gave him the freedom to hold onto his ideal of art for art’s sake with no fiscal requirements riding on his art practice.
In the December of 2006, after failing to answer phone calls from his friends and his dealer, Jon Plapp was found dead in the apartment he had shared with Richard McMillan. McMillan, Plapp’s primary carer as his battle with Parkinson’s wore on, had died suddenly of a brain tumor five months before, in June 2006. Mourning, and battling his own fast-declining health, Plapp continued to work until the end, producing a new series of works on paper, which Watters Gallery exhibited in 2007, the year following the artist’s death.
Writers:
HMBG
Date written:
2016
Last updated:
2016
- Born
- b. 1938
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 26-Nov-06
- Age at death
- 68
Details
Latitude53.35 Longitude-6.260278 Start Date1936-01-01 End Date2006-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Dublin, Ireland
- Biography
- This is a stub. Please help the DAAO by adding information.
Writers:
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 1936
- Summary
- Painter, post-object artist, always encouraging new ideas, Noel Sheridan had a major impact on art and ideas in Adelaide and Perth as well as his native Dublin.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 12-Jul-06
- Age at death
- 70
Details
Latitude65.0377727 Longitude-92.5540791 Start Date1935-01-01 End Date2006-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- NT
- Biography
- Paddy Fordham Wainburranga (corn circa 1935) was a senior artist (painter, sculptor, printmaker and dancer) and a storyteller of Aboriginal culture and history, including historical events associated with European occupation.
This entry is a stub. A full bio is coming.
Writers:
Stephen K Brown
Date written:
2009
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1935
- Summary
- Paddy Fordham Wainburranga (corn circa 1935) was a senior artist (painter, sculptor, printmaker and dancer) and a storyteller of Aboriginal culture and history, including historical events associated with European occupation.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jun-06
- Age at death
- 71
Details
Latitude-19.8516101 Longitude133.2303375 Start Date1930-01-01 End Date2006-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Lupul, Frederick Range, NT, Australia
- Biography
- This record is a stub. You can help out by adding more detail.
Writers:
staffcontributor
Date written:
2011
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1930
- Summary
- Pintupi/Ngaatjatjara artist who began painting in 1993 and was awarded the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award in 1999.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2006
- Age at death
- 76
Details
Latitude50.938361 Longitude6.959974 Start Date1927-01-01 End Date2006-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Cologne, Germany
- Biography
- printmaker, was born in Cologne, Germany. Studied Kölner Werkschulen, Cologne, 1947-1953, where he organised a print workshop, Kölner Presse. Came to Australia in 1955 and held a joint exhibition of prints with Karen Schepers. Lecturer in printmaking South Australian School of Art 1960-1963; Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Melbourne, Vic.1965-1971; Canberra School of Art {1980s-1993?}. Founding member of the Print Council of Australia, along with Graham King, in 1966. Goya-influenced prints of 1966 include 'The Target is Man’ (illustrated in Bernard Smith, 'The Sellbach Etchings’, Overland 34, May 1966, 24-28). He had hard edge works in 'The Field’, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Vic. 1968. Foundation member of the Australia Council’s Visual Arts and Crafts Board in 1973 and of the Tasmanian Arts Advisory Board. Head of the School of Art at Tasmania College of Advanced Education, Hobart 1971-1977 [McCulloch says 1972 78], then went to Brisbane [Canberra from 1978 to present acc. McCulloch]; returned to Hobart 1993.
IMAGE: Nightwatch series 1993 (extended from a commission by the Queensland Law Society) consists of 30 b/w aquatints in a very European style; subjects range from enigmatic mockery to severe indictment of the human species. Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, Tas.(#5663.1) has 1990 artist’s proof of men running round a rock with a figure, probably female, playing a pipe on the top; also (#5663.2) 1990 artist’s proof of men looking at a woman chopped into pieces, clearly two of a series.
This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1927
- Summary
- Udo Sellbach was a printmaker and a founding member of the Print Council of Australia and the Tasmanian Arts Advisory Board.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 26-Sep-06
- Age at death
- 79
Details
Latitude-33.8996968 Longitude151.170986 Start Date1926-01-01 End Date2006-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Enmore, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- In his own words………
Notes for a Previous Exhibition – Geoffrey writes a short biography:
“I started painting when I was very young, about 7, encouraged by my parents who must have been driven mad by my endless bits of paper.
Later at school I was helped by a teacher, Edward Monkton who was an excellent watercolourist and exhibited in Sydney. He guided me in my selection of colours and their mixing and his influence is probably seen in my work. Through him I met John D Moore, a leading Sydney artist at that time and he also gave me help.
For a few years after school I painted small landscapes and watercolour sketches of birds.
In 1950 I took up my own property on the Mann River and so painting was neglected. We eventually moved to Queensland and while recovering from an illness I met Alex Rotteveel, the art teacher at Maryborough Girls High, and under his guidance started painting and drawing again. He introduced me to oil painting.
After moving back to the Clarence Valley in 1970 I joined the Lower Clarence Art Group and painted regularly. However this took second place to a small prawn trawler I was building and launched in 1975. This I worked mainly at sea for 10 years when we moved to Tullymorgan and I retired to concentrate on painting.
I went back to watercolour my first love. I also resumed my interest in birds and in 1987 after several months training under the guidance of David Geering, Greg Clancy and Bill Lane I got my ‘A Class’ bander’s licence. This enables me to see at first hand, detail of the birds I catch. I usually do a quick sketch of particular birds with notes on colour etc. These I use for my paintings as I find photographs usually disappointing.
Some of the paintings exhibited are by-products of a weeks bird banding at Mootwingee National Park where I took time of to do some sketches. “Blue Bonnets” is a result of this trip. All the other birds are species found locally. I tend to work watercolours dry, with exceptions, mainly to the honour of a lot of tutors. I tend to think that the little spots of paper that get missed add a sparkle to the painting. Sometimes I might have three lots of colour and three brushes which I use together. I am not worried about floating one wash on top of another and I might do up to seven or eight……….”.(End of page – pages missing)
Writers:
Katwood
Date written:
Last updated:
- Born
- b. 9 November 1926
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 15-Jun-06
- Age at death
- 80
Details
Latitude-18.6476374 Longitude146.1603448 Start Date1925-01-01 End Date2006-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Ingham, Qld., Australia
- Biography
- This record is a stub. You can help out by adding more detail.
Writers:
staffcontributor
Date written:
2011
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1925
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2006
- Age at death
- 81
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1925-01-01 End Date2006-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- cartoonist, oil painter and illustrator, was born in Melbourne, Vic, and grew up in the suburb of Sandringham. He studied art at the National Gallery School. In 1948 he went to Perth to play in the WA tennis championships and was offered a job on the Daily News . He remained in Perth for 20 years as cartoonist on the Daily News and the Western Mail e.g. 'Rigby and School Help’/’“State aid’s not enough – we’ll need the Army and Air Force too!”’, Daily News 1966 (ill. Coleman & Tanner, 86) and 6 examples in Walsh 1966. He won the Walkely Cartoon Award a record five times (1960, 1961, 1963, 1966, 1969) – the 1969 one, published in the Daily News , being on Brisbane’s censorship of Beardsley’s Lysistrata drawings (straight copy, ill. Rigby, 69). He was Highly Commended in 1968, runner-up to fellow WA cartoonist Cedric Baxter .
In 1969, when his cartoons were being run in News Ltd newspapers across Australia, Rigby left for London, aiming to do cartoons for the Sun and News of the World (owned by Murdoch) for six months. He stayed five years. With England as his base, he travelled and worked in China, the USA, USSR (Russia), Europe and Vietnam. He also sent work back to Australia, e.g. 'Sharks’, Daily Telegraph 10 December 1975 (included in Christine Dixon’s exhibition). In 1977 he returned to Perth, but moved to New York later that year in order to work on the New York Post . He stayed for 12 years after again intending a six-month stint. When he retired, intending to return to Australia, the New York Daily News made him an offer he couldn’t refuse and he remained in New York. For a while, Paul and his son Bay Rigby, a cartoonist on the New York Post , worked for rival newspapers.
Rigby cartoons from the Sydney Daily Mirror are illustrated King 172, 178, 186. He was extremely influential on Australian cartooning. Someone (Petty?) noted that everybody wanted to draw like Rigby in the 1970s. Cartoonists who acknowledge his influence included Bill Mitchell of the Australian and Sean Leahy (also from WA). His practice of drawing his Perth Daily News cartoons on a duo-tone shade board (which he appears to have got from Giles) was widely emulated: by Benier (who drew for the rival Sydney afternoon paper, the Sun , and took over on the Mirror in the early 1970s after Rigby returned to London: Foyle, 94), by Warren Brown (who in turn replaced Benier on the Mirror ) and by Geoff Hook (“Jeff”), Rod Waller , Dean Alston , Alan Langoulant , Zanetti , Vince O’Farrell ( Illawarra Mercury ), Moir , Mitchell and Pryor .
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1925
- Summary
- Prolific Australian newspaper cartoonist, based in New York during the 1960s and 1970s.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 15-Nov-06
- Age at death
- 81
Details
Latitude-19.8516101 Longitude133.2303375 Start Date1924-01-01 End Date2006-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Yummurpa country,Tanami Desert, NT, Yummurpa country (Tanami Desert), NT, Australia
- Biography
- Lorna Fencer Napurrula was born around 1924 at Yartulu Yartulu, and is custodian of land called Yummurrpa, south of the Granites Mine in the Tanami Desert in the Northern Territory. The Yarla (Yam) Dreaming track originates from this region and travels north towards Lajamanu. In 1949, along with many Warlpiri people, Lorna Napurrula was forcibly transported to the government settlement of Lajamanu at Hookers Creek, in the country of the Gurindji people, 400 kilometres north of their own country near Yuendumu. Despite being uprooted from her traditional land, Lorna nevertheless maintained her cultural identity through ceremonial activity and art, and asserted her position as a prominent elder and teacher in the Lajamanu community. She was also a member of the artist’s co-operative in Lajamanu, the Warnayaka Art Centre.
Until her death in December 2006, Lorna lived predominantly at Lajamanu and Katherine (650 kilometres apart), travelling regularly between them. She was a senior Lajamanu artist. Lorna was custodian of the Caterpillar (luju) and Bush Potato (yarla) Dreamings that are associated with that land. She was also custodian of Dreamings associated with bush onion, yam and also bush tomato, bush plum, ngalatji (little white flower), many different seeds and water, wallaby and certain men’s stories including boomerangs for the Napurrula, Nakamarra, Japurrula, and Jakamarra skin groups. The travels of Napurrula and Nakamarrra moiety or “skin” groups were the inspiration for Lorna’s work.
While raised as a skilled painter of decorative body designs for ceremonies, Lorna began painting on canvas in 1986 with a typical dotting technique. She soon developed a very unique, personal style which became increasingly free, bold and abstract. Lorna applied the paint in liberal quantities to the brush before touching down on the canvas and layering the colours, one upon the next. The thick impasto, which may be produced with acrylic paint, was a crucial factor in her work as were bright, clear colour ranging from intense oranges to pinks, blues and lime greens. Lorna also mastered another quite different style where she relied on an expressive linear gesture as her elongated marks swirled across the surface of the canvas.
Her first solo exhibition was in 1997 and since then she exhibited regularly in solo as well as in group exhibitions. Lorna’s work is represented in public galleries in Australia and in private galleries both in Australia and overseas.
Writers:
Brown, Stephen K.
Date written:
2008
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1924
- Summary
- As a previous ceremonial painter, Lorna began dot-style painting on canvas in 1986 and soon developed her own unique style which became increasingly free, abstract and bold. She applied the paint in liberal quantities to produce works with bright, clear colours ranging from intense oranges to pinks, blues and lime greens. Widely recognised as an accomplished artist, she passed away in 2006, aged in her eighties.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 7-Dec-06
- Age at death
- 82
Details
Latitude-37.905 Longitude144.996 Start Date1924-01-01 End Date2006-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Brighton, Melbourne, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 30 November 1924
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 15-Dec-06
- Age at death
- 82
Details
Latitude48.2 Longitude16.366667 Start Date1923-01-01 End Date2006-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Vienna, Austria
- Biography
- Harry Seidler (1923–2006) was born in Vienna but left Austria in the late 1930s. He began architectural studies at Cambridge, England, then graduated from the University of Manitoba, Canada, in 1944. He worked in various Canadian firms, then won a scholarship to Harvard University, where he studied under Bauhaus pioneer Walter Gropius and graduated M.Arch 1946. He then took a design course with Josef Albers at Black Mountain College, North Carolina, and worked with Marcel Breuer in New York and Oscar Niemeyer in Rio de Janiero. He arrived in Sydney in 1948 and won his first NSW RAIA Sulman Medal in 1952, for the Rose Seidler House, Killara (completed 1950). [MORE INFO NEEDED 1950-1975] He continued building towers and substantial houses in various Australian and international locations and won numerous national and international awards (including Gold Medals from the City of Vienna and the Royal Institute of British Architects).Sources—Architecture and Arts. 1954. ‘People: Harry Seidler’, April, p17.—Architecture and Arts. 1956. ‘People: Harry Seidler, Architect’, April, p19.—Dobney, Stephen. 1997. Harry Seidler: Selected and Current Works. Master Architect Series III. Adelaide: Images Publishing and Sydney: Craftsman House.—Frampton, Kenneth and Philip Drew. 1992. Harry Seidler: Four Decades of Architecture. London: Thames & Hudson. (This is the main source for almost all project listings in companion Chronology of Sydney Architecture 1945-75.)—Spigelman, Alice. 2001. Harry Seidler: Almost Full Circle: A Biography. Rose Bay, NSW: Brandl & Schlesinger.
Writers:
Davina Jackson
Date written:
2015
Last updated:
2015
- Born
- b. 1923
- Summary
- Harry Seidler (1923-2006) was Australia's most significant and influential modernist architect. Born in Vienna and educated in Britain, Canada, the United States and Brazil, he arrived in Sydney in 1948. His practice, Harry Seidler and Associates, created many exceptional residences and commercial buildings from the 1950s to the early 2000s.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2006
- Age at death
- 83
Details
Latitude47.333333 Longitude13.333333 Start Date1923-01-01 End Date2006-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Austria
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1923
- Summary
- Seidler was an architect with a well-documented architectural career. In addition to his building works, he also designed selected items of furniture including a "modular radio-phonograph" illustrated in 1957, a wall-mounted storage unit for his Point Piper studio ca.1948 and the Rose Seidler house 1949-1950. His early commissions used the Sydney cabinetmakers Paul Kafka and M. Gerstl Cabinet Works.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-06
- Age at death
- 83
Details
Latitude-22.5216511 Longitude132.7344955 Start Date1923-01-01 End Date2006-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Napperby station, Napperby, NT, Australia
- Biography
- Born on Napperby station in 1923, Cassidy Tjapaltjarri was one of the most flamboyant figures in this small community, and in the media coverage of the Napperby artists’ first exhibition at the Hogarth Galleries in Sydney was identified as leader and spokesman for the painting group. Subsequently a pensioner, Cassidy was an elder of the Amnatyerre tribe. His traditional country was Red Hill and Napperby. He painted Caterpillar and Goanna Dreamings for this area and also Bush Tucker Dreamings from his grandfather’s country around the Mt Allan area. 'This Dreaming is about the place where I was born. This waterhole and this emu track are part of my Dreaming. It takes me two weeks to make. One day my painting will make Napperby number one. I show all the young fellas what we Aboriginal people can do for ourselves . ' ( Sydney Morning Herald , 11 July 1987)
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1923
- Summary
- Amnatyerre artist, and prominent figure in the Napperby community, his work has been exhibited at Hogarth Galleries in Sydney.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2006
- Age at death
- 83
Details
Latitude-33.0837216 Longitude151.5009464 Start Date1915-01-01 End Date2006-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Dora Creek, New South Wales, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 24 March 1915
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- Nov-06
- Age at death
- 91
Details
Latitude-39.6766915 Longitude175.7983062 Start Date1914-01-01 End Date2006-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Taihape, New Zealand
- Biography
- painter, was born on 24 March 1914 in Taihape, North Island, New Zealand, youngest of the three daughters of Edward Norris Borlase, manager of Raunui Station near Mount Ruapehu, and Bessie, née Morecroft.
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
1992
- Born
- b. 24 March 1914
- Summary
- New Zealand-born Nancy Wilmot Borlase arrived in Sydney in 1937, studying sculpture under Lyndon Dadswell under space restrictions in her small bed-sit forced a change to painting. Increasingly inspired by the Abstract Expressionist movements in Europe and New York, Borlase won the Portia Geach Memorial Prize in 2000 for her portrait of Marie and Vida Breckenridge.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2006
- Age at death
- 92
Details
Latitude-26.286773 Longitude132.13302 Start Date1971-01-01 End Date2005-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Ernabella, SA, Australia
- Biography
- Born on 5 August 1971, Nyuwara, whose language group was Pitjantjatjara, was born at Ernabella Hospital, SA. Her mother, Tjunkaya Tapaya, an established artist, is Pitjantjatjara and comes from Antalya. Her father was from Tipany and his first language was Yangkunytjarjara. Nuywara attended Ernabella School and Woodville High School until 1988. The next year she began working in the screenprinting workshop at Ernabella Arts. She began experimenting with acrylic paints with immediate success. Later in 1989 she attended an information gathering tour of Darwin and Bathurst Island and began studying batik techniques. In November, she exhibited both paintings and batiks in Ernabella Arts’s Wiritjuta exhibition at Araluen Arts Centre in Alice Springs.
In 1990 she continued her studies in design and fabric printing and attended the opening of Ernabella Arts’s exhibition Ngura Kutjara at the Tandanya Aboriginal Cultural Institute in Adelaide. In 1991, 1992 and 1993 her fabric prints were exhibited in the Central Australian Aboriginal Art and Craft Exhibition at the Araluen Arts Centre. Her fabrics were also shown in Kutjupa-Kutjupa , Ernabella Arts’s exhibition at the Aboriginal Artists Gallery in Sydney in 1991. In April 1992 Nyuwara attended the opening of Raiki Tjuta , Ernabella Arts’s exhibition at the Women’s Gallery in Melbourne. In June 1992 she spent two weeks in Yogyakata, Indonesia studying dye techniques and cap printing. In September 1992 one of Nyuwara’s caps was exhibited in the National Aboriginal Art Award and purchased by the Art Gallery of South Australia. This exposure and an exhibition of her fabric designs in an Alice Springs Gallery attracted several design commissions for T-shirts and a doona cover of the print Waru from the Community Arts Abroad catalogue. Nyuwara also studied printmaking and lithography and produced popular screenprint designs for fabrics.
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
staffcontributor
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 5 August 1971
- Summary
- Pitjantjatjara speaker and distinguished print media and textile artist from Ernabella who also worked in acrylic on canvas. She trained at Ernabella Arts and studied dye technique in Indonesia. Her work is in the Art Gallery of South Australia.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- c.2005
- Age at death
- 34
Details
Latitude-18.6683457 Longitude128.597836 Start Date1961-01-01 End Date2005-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Gordon Downs, WA, Australia
- Biography
- Although one of the younger Balgo artists in the early days of painting at the community – she was born near Gordon Downs Station c.1961 – Patricia Lee was more active than most in the activities of the older women in the Balgo community, including painting and ceremonial life. A Warlpiri speaker, she worked closely with her mother, Margaret Anjule, and grandmother, Dora Napaltjarri, both good artists in their own right. Her traditional country was in the Tanami Desert at Mongrel Downs, and her paintings often depict Wanayarra (Rainbow Snake) and Bush Tomato Dreamings from this area. Her work has a strong narrative element and she may be credited with 'introducing’ the technique of paint flicking into Balgo art. She began painting in 1984, and her work is included in the National Gallery of Australia collection. She usually sells her work through Warlayirti Artists. It was also featured on the cover of the Balance exhibition catalogue (Queensland Art Gallery, 1990) and included in Flash Pictures at the National Gallery of Australia in 1991-2.
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1961
- Summary
- Widely exhibited Kukatja artist and an active participant in her community. She may be credited for introducing a new painting technique to the Balgo movement.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2005
- Age at death
- 44
Details
Latitude52.561928 Longitude-1.464854 Start Date1951-01-01 End Date2005-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- England, UK
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 8 October 1951
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1-Nov-05
- Age at death
- 54
Details
Latitude-22.1646782 Longitude144.5844903 Start Date1951-01-01 End Date2005-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Queensland
- Biography
- Desley Henry, of the Jirrbal language group of North Queensland, was born in 1951. Her paintings of acrylics and ochres tell Jirrbal creation stories. It is her weavings however that she is mostly known for. Henry weaves bicornial baskets from lawyer cane and these baskets are in the permanent collections of the Campbelltown Arts Centre and the Perc Tucker Regional Gallery, Townsville.
This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Allas, Tess
Date written:
2007
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1951
- Summary
- Desley Henry of the Jirrbal language group of North Queensland weaves bicornial baskets from lawyer cane. Her painting practice incorporates acrylics and ochres and her works tell Jirrbal creation stories.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2005
- Age at death
- 54
Details
Latitude-22.2619822 Longitude131.8081527 Start Date1950-01-01 End Date2005-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Yuendumu, Northern Territory, Yuendumu, NT, Australia
- Biography
- Born at Yuendumu in the early ’50s, Eunice shared many Dreamings with her 'sisters’ and fellow painters Pansy Napangati and Rene Robinson Napangardi . Eunice emerged in the late ’80s as an artist in her own right, painting for Papunya Tula Artists initially and subsequently for the Centre for Aboriginal Artists. She was one of three women selected for a special furniture painting project for Bicentennial Travelling Exhibition. In 1991 she exhibited at the Aboriginal Arts Australia Gallery in Sydney with Maxie Tjampitjinpa , travelling to Sydney for the opening. She completed two major commissions: for the new Alice Springs airport opening in December 1991, and for a travelling exhibition starting in Washington in 1992. She also exhibited in Brisbane with Pansy Napangati in a two women show.
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Note: Primary biographer. Some information supplied by Veronica Johnston Centre for Aboriginal Artists and Craftsmen
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1950
- Summary
- A Luritja/Warlpiri artist and leading woman artist in the desert painting movement in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Painted mainly for the Centre for Aboriginal Artists. She completed a major commission for the new airport at Alice Springs.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2005
- Age at death
- 55
Details
Latitude47 Longitude20 Start Date1941-01-01 End Date2005-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Hungary
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1941
- Summary
- Hubay was an interior designer who also had a career as an industrial designer, artist and sculptor. He studied at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Victoria. After 1969, he established "Palazzo", a South Yarra interior design studio for residential interiors. He later designed commercial interiors for clients such as Village Cinemas.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-05
- Age at death
- 64
Details
Latitude-41.441944 Longitude147.145 Start Date1940-01-01 End Date2005-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Launceston, TAS, Australia
- Biography
- Lennah Newson, Palawa basketweaver, was born in Launceston, Tasmania in 1940. Newson spent her childhood in Killiecrankie on Flinders Island, which is in the Furneaux Group of Islands off the north-east tip of Tasmania. Though she spent periods of her life in other parts of Tasmania, Newson remained deeply attached to Flinders Island for her whole life. In particular, the coastline of the island was a touchstone of meaning and inspiration for the artist, as the beach and the sea were important sites of economic and creative activity for her family. As was the case for all Aboriginal people who lived on the Furneaux Islands, fish were an important food source for the artist’s family and Newson’s observation of her father and grandparents making fishnets and fishtraps introduced her to weaving practices in her earliest years. Newson’s family’s resourcefulness nurtured her creative capabilities in other ways, as the following quote from the catalogue for the 2001 Adelaide Biennale “Beyond the Pale” (curated by Brenda Croft) conveys: “While growing up on the island my family didn’t have much money to buy toys, so we made our own with materials gathered from the beach and the bush. Living on such an isolated island taught me to use my hands and gather the materials that were growing and living around us to make the things that would otherwise be impossible for us to have” (p. 29). Newson’s sense of belonging to Flinders Island was also underpinned by the campaigns of her mother, Auntie Ida West, a respected Palawa elder who was born on Cape Barren Island in 1919. Auntie Ida fought for many years for the Wybalenna settlement on Flinders Island, the site of over 100 unmarked Aboriginal graves, to be returned to Aboriginal people. The graves are those of mainland Aboriginal Tasmanians who were removed to Wybalenna between 1832 and 1836 by George Augustus Robinson, and title to the site was finally handed back to the Tasmanian Aboriginal community in 2005. Lennah Newson supported her mother through these campaigns, and was a respected Palawa elder herself: in 2006 she was inducted into the Tasmanian Honour Roll of Women for service to Aboriginal Affairs and the Arts. The Honour Roll recognised that “The continuation of traditional fibre art in the Tasmanian Aboriginal community will be the lasting legacy of Lennah Newson”. Newson created baskets from a variety of materials. These included watsonia grasses, juncus reed, native flax collected from Oyster Cove on mainland Tasmania, river reed which “are gathered seasonally from creek waterways and rivers and dried” (artist’s statement, “Tactility” website), feathers, as well as refuse found on the beach such as commercial fabrics, mohair wool and plastic. The artist would weave these materials into baskets using various combinations of coiling, twining and cross-stitch. As a result, Newson’s baskets are sometimes densely woven and robust, and at other times delicate and transparent. Besides the 2001 Adelaide Biennale, Newson’s baskets were included in exhibitions such as “Tactility” at the National Gallery of Australia (2003), and “Woven Forms – Contemporary Basket Making in Australia’” at Object: The Australian Centre for Craft and Design (2005). In 2005 Newson’s baskets were exhibited alongside those of Colleen Mundy and Eva Richardson in the NAIDOC exhibition “Twining Culture” curated by Jennie Gorringe at the Moonah Art Centre in Hobart. Newson mentored a number of Tasmanian Aboriginal women in the art of basket weaving, including Colleen Mundy and Newson’s cousin Verna Nichols; she also demonstrated the craft at festivals and school education programs. Newson’s work has been acquired by the National Gallery of Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria and the National Museum of Australia. Lennah Newson passed away in 2005.
Writers:
Fisher, Laura
Note:
Date written:
2008
Last updated:
2011
Status:
peer-reviewed
- Born
- b. 24 July 1940
- Summary
- Palawa artist whose basketweaving practice was informed by her love of the beaches of Flinders Island, Tasmania, where she spent most of her childhood.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 18-Jul-05
- Age at death
- 65
Details
Latitude-41.441944 Longitude147.145 Start Date1938-01-01 End Date2005-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Launceston, Tasmania, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1938
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2005
- Age at death
- 67
Details
Latitude52.8926237 Longitude-1.4307059 Start Date1935-01-01 End Date2005-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Boulton, England, United Kingdom
- Biography
- This record is a stub. You can help out by adding more detail.
Writers:
staffcontributor
Date written:
Last updated:
- Born
- b. 1 May 1935
- Summary
- The largely self-taught painter, David Aspden, established his reputation in the 1960s by painting lyrically beautiful abstracts. In the context of the time, they were sometimes described as landscapes but often their forms were determined by his response to music, often jazz.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 26-Jun-05
- Age at death
- 70
Details
Latitude-23.447 Longitude131.882 Start Date1930-01-01 End Date2005-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Haasts Bluff, NT, Australia
- Biography
- Born in a creek bed near Haasts Bluff c.1930, Gladys spoke and identified as Luritja because of her affiliations with the Haasts Bluff community. Her parents came from Warlpiri country north of Mt Wedge. Her first husband was Walter Tjupurrula, the former police tracker. After Walter’s death, she married a member of the original group of painters at Papunya in 1971, Johnny Warangkula , whom Gladys often assisted him on the backgrounds of his paintings as his eyesight failed. She also painted in her own right: a very large canvas of hers was included in Papunya Tula’s dramatic display at World Expo ’88 in Brisbane. She painted Witchetty Grub and other Bush Tucker stories from her father and mother’s country till her sight failed her. She lived in Papunya, where she was one of the senior women of the community at the time of her death in 2005.
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Note: Primary biographer.
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1930
- Summary
- Senior Luritja artist who lived in Papunya, she initially assisted her second husband, Johnny Warangkula, on his canvases. Her work is in the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2005
- Age at death
- 75
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1929-01-01 End Date2005-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, VIC, Australia
- Biography
- While Clement Meadmore (b. Melbourne, 1929) now enjoys international fame for his sculpture, in the mid-20th century his Australian reputation was centred around his work in furniture.
Meadmore began tertiary study at the Melbourne Technical College (now the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) in 1946. In 1948, the college became the first in Australia to offer a formal industrial design course to service Victoria’s powerful postwar manufacturing base. Meadmore soon began taking courses in this area of study.
By 1949, Clement Meadmore was promoting himself as an industrial designer. By 1952, he had designed his first success – a corded black steel dining chair wrapped with synthetic fibre cord (available in red, blue, green, yellow, black and white) – under the banner of Meadmore Originals, 86 Collins Street, Melbourne.
Meadmore’s corded dining chair was celebrated, appearing in design features and on magazine covers throughout the 1950s. In 1953, the chair received the “Good Design Award” from the Good Design Society, Sydney. Marion Hall Best’s showrooms in Woollahra and Rowe Street, Sydney, showed the dining chair (with arms) in saddle leather as well as the coloured cord. A Meadmore corded recliner in the same style appeared in the same year, followed by a dining table with silver ash top in the same style. It was a productive era for him.
In 1956, he formed a short-lived partnership with Max Robinson (Meadmore & Robinson) and later in the same year he became involved in a celebrated commission with the painter Leonard French for the Legend Espresso and Milk Bar at 239 Bourke Street, Melbourne (demolished 1970). This cafe, previously known as the Anglo American Milk Bar, was owned by Ion Nicolades, who commissioned Meadmore to design a new interior. Meadmore invited Leonard French to paint seven panels for the Milk Bar on the theme of the Legend of Sinbad. The Legend was a deep and narrow interior that Meadmore enhanced by placing mirrors opposite each of French’s paintings. A dramatic terrazzo floor, coloured fibreglass-topped stools, diagonally-hung fluorescent lamps and a window display of a Meadmore-designed sculpture drawn from the silhouette of Sinbad’s ship (as it appeared in French’s painting no. 3) made the Legend one of Melbourne’s most visually exciting cafes.
The Legend reopened at a time when Melbourne, goaded by architect and newspaper columnist Robin Boyd and his sympathisers, struggled to modernise itself for the anticipated international visitors for the 1956 Olympics.
Victorian industrial designers were rewarded with an inaugural 1956 Melbourne Olympics Arts Festival intended to display the cultural riches of the host nation. It was the first Olympics to incorporate an arts festival rather than art competitions. Major venues were chosen throughout the city to display Australian and Victorian achievements in industrial design, painting, architecture and other media. The Melbourne Technical College (now the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) featured graphic and industrial design and included Meadmore’s lighting design amongst designers such as Grant Featherston, Carl Nielsen and Frances Burke. Unfortunately, Meadmore’s work was not illustrated in the catalogue.
By the later 1950s, Meadmore had begun to actively exhibit his sculpture and move within the Melbourne gallery milieu. He also came into contact with Max Hutchinson, a commercial furniture manufacturer and designer. Hutchinson (1925-99) said in a 1984 interview that Meadmore came to him in 1958 and said, “ '[T]hese artists that you like [to use in interior design commissions], they need an exhibition’, ... So he ran the Gallery [A] for a couple of years until my accountant said, look, if you go on with this, you’ll be broke in another year.”
Max Hutchinson went on to found a branch of Gallery A in Sydney before Meadmore encouraged him to migrate to New York City in 1968. One of Meadmore’s first 1959 shows at Gallery A, Melbourne, featured his own sculpture with a catalogue and essay by Bill Hannan. The designer also sold a line of 'Gallery A Contract Furniture’ (“Designed to serve the discriminating, by Clement Meadmore for the coordinated series by Gallery A contract furniture.”) This new work was now fabricated for the commercial furniture market, rather than the domestic consumer.
Although he had been pursuing his sculpture throughout the 1950s, Meadmore vigorously expanded this career in this media in 1960 and moved to Sydney. He exhibited sculpture at Macquarie Galleries and Clune Galleries, Sydney; was awarded a commission for a sculptured balustrade for the Town House Hotel, Canberra; and briefly taught sculpture at the National Art School, Sydney.
His industrial design work of the 1950s gave way to sculpture. In 1963, a 13 minute documentary film titled Clement Meadmore was directed by a young Bruce Beresford and narrated by John Bell with a jazz soundtrack by Tony Curby Trio + 1. In this film showing Meadmore at work, the narrator explains that “Meadmore trained as a furniture designer…” and reflects that “Meadmore has no preconception of final work in his sculpture; he relies on inspiration for final form … The object is created first and then the [public] taste for it… This is the nature of artistic innovation…”.
Meadmore is described by Ken Scarlett in Australian Sculptors 1830-1977 as an Art Director for the fledgling editions of Australian Vogue, first published in Sydney in 1959. But a search through their first quarterly editions from 1959-1963 does not show his name on the masthead and more research is needed in this area. It is possible that he did some design and styling work for them as some of his furniture appears in an issue in the Summer 1960 edition and their Christmas 1961 edition suggests some of Meadmore’s graphic qualities.
In 1963, Meadmore moved to New York. Although his sculpture was foremost after he went to the United States, he maintained his Australian design links through Michael Hirst, a furniture designer and manufacturer working in Melbourne.
Michael Hirst, (b. 1917) ran a factory in Melbourne and remained active in furniture from 1955 to 1983. During this time, Hirst manufactured his own work as well as Meadmore items under the trademark H-Line and H/Flex. He sold through outlets like George’s, Andersons and interior decorators in Melbourne. It is not clear precisely when he began to fabricate Meadmore’s furniture. In a telephone interview in 1997, Michael Hirst explained that he too exhibited some of his design work at Gallery A, Melbourne. Some of Hirst’s work from the late 1950s has stylistic parallels with Meadmore’s work but after he left for Sydney, and later the USA, the influences wane. However, Hirst released a coffee table by Meadmore in 1965, suggesting that their commercial association continued after the designer had moved to the United States.
Although he single-mindedly pursued sculpture in the United States, Meadmore continued his interest in furniture design and in 1974 he published The Modern Chair, an illustrated survey of contemporary furniture from the Thonet Brothers to Mario Bellini. In his 1974 introduction, Meadmore reveals something of his own aesthetics of furniture. “Each chair…[in this book] has been selected for qualities that we can assess from our standpoint today, qualities which have less to do with style and period than with a solution of a defined problem. ...[However] Some of the finer adjustments of proportion, left unresolved by the mere solving of functional problems, have often been made with a visual sensitivity which undoubtedly contributes to make a chair a delightful object…”.
When the book was reissued in 1997, Meadmore pronounced himself disappointed with the designs of the last quarter of the 20th century. “...[W]hen I considered updating the book I realised that I could not think of a single chair to add. I still believe that a designer who is not solving problems is a stylist, and styling is what we have been looking at for the last quarter of the century.’
Meadmore’s furniture work studiously avoided historical references, although there were affinities with the 1950s furniture of the sculpture Isamu Noguchi and other mid-century sculptors who enjoyed exploring spatial problems. Meadmore favoured experimentation in synthetic fibres, plywood, finishes, steel alloys and other metals. It is clear that the designer found the techniques of fabrication interesting only as exercises in problem solving; craft values had no interest for him. As he states clearly in his book on modern furniture, Meadmore considers that problem solving is at the centre of good furniture design. His design work in Australia suggests that a very interesting furniture designer was lost to sculpture.
Writers:
Bogle, Michael
Michael Bogle
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 9 February 1929
- Summary
- Well known as a sculptor, Meadmore began his career as a designer. His furniture was sold at Marion Hall Best’s showrooms and his lighting design shown at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics Arts Festival alongside the work of designers such as Grant Featherston. Meadmore ran Max Hutchinson's Gallery A, Melbourne, in the late 1950s. In 1963 he moved to New York, where he concentrated primarily on his work as a sculptor.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 19-Apr-05
- Age at death
- 76
Details
Latitude52 Longitude20 Start Date1928-01-01 End Date2005-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Poland
- Biography
- Leon Saper became a member of Clifton Pugh’s Dunmoochin Artists’ Collective at Cottles Bridge and bought a bush block there c1955.
Leon took up pottery in 1970, inspired by the community of potters who had come to live and work at Dunmoochin in the 1960s.
Saper made a living selling his striking colourful work on hessian bags at the St Andrews Market. A retrospective exhibition of work collected by friends was held at the Nillumbik Council Offices in 2005..
His mark is an incised 'L. Saper’.
Writers:
7write6
Date written:
2022
Last updated:
2022
- Born
- b. 1928
- Summary
- Leon Saper became a member of Clifton Pugh's Dunmoochin Artists' Collective at Cottles Bridge. He took up pottery in 1970.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-05
- Age at death
- 77
Details
Latitude51.2254018 Longitude6.7763137 Start Date1928-01-01 End Date2005-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Dusseldorf, Germany
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 4 November 1928
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 6-Jul-05
- Age at death
- 77
Details
Latitude-31.0798092 Longitude152.842289 Start Date1928-01-01 End Date2005-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Kempsey, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Alison McMaugh was born in Kempsey in regional New South Wales. When she was a student at the National Art School in Sydney she befriended fellow student, Brenda Humble, and was credited by Humble for her ongoing support when Humble was under extreme financial pressure. Friends remember her as one of the free spirited Kings Cross bohemian crowd whose active social life stretched between the art school and the Cross.McMaugh exhibited in a group exhibition in 1954 and in a solo exhibition at Macquarie Galleries in 1957. She then followed the popular path of young Australians of her generation and travelled to London. In 1958 she met an American art student James Adley. They married in 1959 and returned with him to Michigan, where he became a professor of Art at Michigan University. She continued to paint as well as write poetry. Although based in the USA, she kept close links with Australia. She returned for an extended visit in 1982 and in 1983 had a critically successful exhibition at Garry Anderson’s new art gallery in Macleay Street. In 2003 she had a further successful exhibition with Helen Maxwell Gallery in Canberra.It was on her return from this Australian visit that McMaugh was diagnosed with Ovarian cancer. In September 2003 she became a citizen of the United States, without relinquishing her Australian citizenship. This enabled her to vote for John Kerry in the 2004 election, although she was by then already gravely ill.
Writers:
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 1928
- Summary
- Alison McMaugh was one of the many young women artists trained in Sydney in the 1950s who found more opportunities abroad, in her case in Michigan, USA. Her work is characterised by intense colourful abstract paintings and drawings, with a hint of landscape.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- Jan-05
- Age at death
- 77
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1924-01-01 End Date2005-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1924
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2005
- Age at death
- 81
Details
Latitude52.561928 Longitude-1.464854 Start Date1921-01-01 End Date2005-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- England, United Kingdom
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1921
- Summary
- Buckland was a commercial artist and painter with British art training, arriving in Australia in the 1960s. He exhibited widely featuring in regional shows such as the Mosman Art Prize, the Toorak gallery, Melbourne and the Contemporary Art Society, Sydney.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-05
- Age at death
- 84
Details
Latitude55.953333 Longitude-3.189167 Start Date1917-01-01 End Date2005-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Edinburgh, Scotland
- Biography
- Ron Gilling (1917–2005) was born in Edinburgh, studied architecture at the University of Sydney and obtained registration 1948. Joined his father, F. Glynn Gilling at Joseland & Gilling, where he remained until retirement in 1982. As president NSW RAIA 1964-66 he was embroiled in the Sydney Opera House crisis. Federal president RAIA 1970-71. RAIA Gold Medal and OBE, 1977. Influenced by Spanish-Mediterranean architecture, the history of classical architecture and his father’s design teaching. Visited US and Britain 1955 to study bank architecture for ANZ Bank. Visited Taliesin West, met Mies van der Rohe. Joseland and Gilling designed commercial and domestic architecture. Source—Johnson, Paul Alan and Susan Lorne Johnson. 1996 onwards. Martyn Chapman interview for UNSW Architects of the Middle Third research project.
Writers:
Davina Jackson
Date written:
2015
Last updated:
2015
- Born
- b. 1917
- Summary
- Ron Gilling, born in Edinburgh, was a principal of Joseland & Gilling, a Sydney architectural firm, from 1948 to 1982. He was president of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects 1964-66 (NSW Chapter) and 1970-71 (national).
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2005
- Age at death
- 88
Details
Latitude-33.88477 Longitude151.22621 Start Date1911-01-01 End Date2005-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Paddington, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- painter, lithographer, cartoonist and illustrator, was born in Paddington, Sydney on 22 February 1911, the only child of William Ungar and his wife, Robina, née Tate (d.1922). Thora knew that she wanted to draw from the age of three. Her mother died when she was a child but she later made several portraits of her father, who also posed for the male hero in several of her magazine covers, e.g. as a US soldier surrounded by Chinese children for an Australian Women’s Weekly cover, published 4 September 1943.
In 1927, aged sixteen, Thora won a scholarship to study art at East Sydney Technical College but couldn’t afford to complete the course, so she worked as a commercial artist for Sydney department stores by day and attended drawing (not painting) classes under Sydney Long and Dattilo Rubbo at the Royal Art Society for four nights a week and at weekends (1927-33). She first exhibited her paintings at RAS shows. She hated the 'daily work of drawing cups and saucers for Grace Bros. I wanted to be part of the sophisticated figurative illustrations seen in the American magazines’, she later wrote. Discovering that George Johnston , a fellow RAS student, was a successful cartoonist with the Bulletin , receiving 2 guineas for a published cartoon as opposed to the seven shillings and sixpence she was paid by Grace Bros, she took a cartoon into the Bulletin office about 1930. It was accepted for consideration but was neither paid for nor published and Thora never heard another word about it. However, the drawing remained in the Bulletin files and is now her earliest extant artwork (Mitchell Library, PX*D 545/1). In 1999 it was included in The Most Public Art exhibition at the State Library of New South Wales, curated by Joan Kerr, Craig Judd and Jo Holder; 'Granny’s column’ [Column 8] in the Sydney Morning Herald featured her pleased response to this belated recognition.
Thora Ungar and George Johnston were married at St John’s Church, Glebe, in 1934. They lived in a rented Walter Burley Griffin house at Castlecrag (The Moon House, next door to Walter and Marion Mahoney Griffin ) and both freelanced. George found a little regular work for small tabloids but Thora was the chief breadwinner, primarily through her work illustrating catalogues put out by Marcus Clark’s department store, especially items of furniture that she would draw in the firm’s Ultimo warehouse. She also continued to do hundreds of drawings of crockery, including entire dinner services for Marcus Clark; some were reproduced in the quality colour pages of the firm’s catalogues (of which she was rather proud).
In 1937 the pair decided to go to London so Thora could study at the Slade. They sold everything in order to afford the cheapest route, via China and across Russia by the Transcontinental Express. Booked to leave Shanghai on 19 August 1937, everything changed when Japan launched its attack on Shanghai on 13 August. George remained in Shanghai but Thora was forced to evacuate to Hong Kong along with thousands of women and children (sanguine drawings of a Chinese mother and baby done at Hong Kong survive – a photo of a large one is in her studio file). At the end of the year she was permitted to return, and she remained in Shanghai with George for four years. Both did commercial art for W.D. & H.O. Wills and Thora drew local people and places. When supplies arrived from Penfolds in Sydney she also painted, but apart from some small paintings and several line drawings was forced to leave all her work behind when they returned to Sydney in 1941, just before Pearl Harbour. A few Shanghai drawings and some later Chinese paintings were included in a modest retrospective held at James Harvey Gallery, Clovelly (NSW) in 2002. Although selected solely from what remained in her Northwood home and studio when she was aged ninety-one, the show still demonstrated her exceptional diversity in style, subject and medium.
Back at Sydney during the war, Thora resumed work as a commercial artist. She drew illustrations as a full-time artist on the Australian Women’s Weekly (1941 [1942 acc. Thora]-46), as well as doing casual work for Woman’s Day and the Sydney Morning Herald (1948-51). Known as Thora Johnston on the Weekly , she was a colleague of such well-known cover artists as cartoonists WEP ( William Edwin Pidgeon ) and Virgil ( Virgil Reilly ) and illustrators John Mills , John Santry and Wynn Davies . Her regular Weekly covers, which included The Kokoda Trail (painted 1942, published 9 January 1943, original artwork Australian War Memorial), a group of heads of happy wartime couples (3 April 1943) and The Woman Tram Conductor (5 February 1944), always carried the signature 'Thora’. The only other woman artist then employed on the Weekly was fashion illustrator René Dalgleish , a good friend with whom Thora swapped work (a drawing of a fashionable René blonde remains in Thora’s collection, along with one of Thora’s own fashion illustrations that was clearly influenced by her friend). She was also friendly with editor Connie Robertson.
After Thora and George divorced she lived with René and they worked together in the separate 'rabbit warren’ where the Weekly housed its 'mothercraft’ staff, in Bridge Street. In 1951 Thora married John Medhurst (d. 2002), whose portrait she painted several times. A large one – still in her studio in 2002 – was runner-up in the 1988 Atelier Acrylic Art Competition (see Australian Artist October 1988, 40) and won an award for excellence in the 1990 Royal Easter Show (see Australian Artist August 1990, 38-39). A good large charcoal sketch of John reading the paper at breakfast in their Northwood kitchen also remains with the artist.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s Thora designed book covers for Horwitz and began exhibiting her paintings – landscape, still life and portraiture – at numerous venues, especially metropolitan, local and regional art prize shows. She had a solo exhibition at Sydney’s Barry Stern Galleries in 1964, and she also exhibited at the Von Bertouch galleries in Newcastle. She revisited China in 1961 (when she saw Macao for the first time) and toured Europe with John in 1975, where she made many drawings subsequently developed into paintings, especially of Venice. In 1978 she studied lithography with Helen Best at the Workshop Art Centre, Willougby (NSW).
Thora Ungar received numerous awards for her paintings, particularly her portraits, including prizes from the Royal Agricultural Society’s annual exhibitions in 1967, 1974, 1983-84, 1986 and 1990. Her portraits were hung in the Archibald Prize ten times (1958-59, 1961-67 and 1974) and in the Portia Geach Prize for the best portrait by a woman artist eighteen times, the final occasion being 1996 when she showed a portrait of the Newcastle painter Nancy Goldfinch (the large portrait and a fresh watercolour sketch for it remain in her studio). She won art competitions at Tumut (1958), the Gold Coast (1968), Manly (1972), Armidale (1973), Kempsey (1988), Scone (1989), Gunnedah (1989) and other places, the last being from Port Macquarie Art Society in April 1996 for a still-life painting. A solo exhibition at Sydney’s Durning-Lawrence Gallery in 1996 comprised forty works spanning twenty-five years, with a special focus on her recent large, colourful modernist still-lifes. In November 2002 a retrospective of works from her studio was held at James Harvey Gallery, Clovelly (opened by Joan Kerr).
Thora Ungar died from cancer at her home in the northern Sydney suburb of Northwood on 28th February 2005. In an exhibition of Artists of the Royal Art Society, held in July-August 2006, a “Wonderful retrospective component by Thora Ungar”, was included. The main subject matter of these works were cats.
Writers:
Speck, Cathy
Peter Pidgeon
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2013
- Born
- b. 22 February 1911
- Summary
- 20th century painter, lithographer, cartoonist and illustrator, worked for the Australian Women's Weekly during WWII. Original society cartoon drawn for the Bulletin (ML), possibly never published.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 28-Feb-05
- Age at death
- 94
Details
Latitude-19.8516101 Longitude133.2303375 Start Date1910-01-01 End Date2005-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Ngarilyikirlangu, NT, Australia
- Biography
- Senior and respected figure both in Warlpiri ceremonial life and in the art movement at Yuendumu. He was born at Ngarilyikirlangu, north of the present day site of Yuendumu, in about 1910. His main totems are Emu and Bandicoot, and he usually paints Ngapa (Water), Yankirri (Emu) and Wardilyka (Bush Turkey) Dreamings, though he has also painted the Pamapardu (Flying Ant) Dreaming which passes close to Yuendumu travelling west. Darby’s family has responsibility for the Dreaming as it crosses Warlpiri country. Darby has been an active member of the painting group at Yuendumu since the early years as one of the group of senior men of the Yuendumu community who painted the 27 doors of the Yuendumu School with their Dreamings. Since the Yuendumu painting company’s first Araluen Centre exhibition in October 1985, his works have been included in numerous exhibitions of Warlukurlangu Artists in Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, Darwin, Alice Springs and the Gold Coast. Like most artists of the Western Desert – or anywhere else, Darby Ross has progressively refined his approach to and execution of his subject matter, yet his paintings have retained their distinctive early style of loose exuberant paintwork and complex, richly textured surfaces, sometimes strongly reminiscent of cave paintings from the Western Desert area. Darby’s work has been included in the Dreamings:Art of Aboriginal Australia exhibition which toured North America in 1988-9, the Mythscapes exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1989 and many other important national and international exhibitions since then.
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1910
- Summary
- Darby Ross was a senior and highly respected figure in Warlpiri ceremonial life and one of the grand old men of Yuendumu painting. He was one of the group of senior men of the Yuendumu community who painted the school doors in 1984, helping to spark off painting in the community and the establishment of Warlukurlangu Artists in 1985.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2005
- Age at death
- 95
Details
Latitude-37.864 Longitude144.982 Start Date1910-01-01 End Date2005-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- St Kilda, Melbourne, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- TIMELINE
Haines, Robert.
b.1911, St Kilda, Victoria, d. Toulouse, France, 2005.
1932.For three years, 1932-34, he studied theology at Ridley College but did not enter the Anglican Church. He shifted to social science at Melbourne University, but did not complete studies.
1938.Group Exhibition, Melbourne. Harold Herbert, “Work of Four Painters.” [including Robert Haines] Stair Gallery, Melbourne, [The Argus, 22 November 1938, p.16.]
1940-44An education officer in the army education service.
1945-1947Director, Georges Gallery Melbourne.
1947. Haines ran a coffee shop in the “Dungeon”, National Gallery School, Little Lonsdale Street and Russell Street, Melbourne. Head of the Gallery School at the time was William Dargie. [Sally Morrison, After Fire, A Biography of Clifton Pugh, Hardie Grant, 2009, p.81]
1947-1951Assistant Director, National Gallery of Victoria. Haines was the Asst director at the National Gallery of Victoria where he encouraged the acquisition of furniture-maker Schulim Krimper. [“Assistant Director of Art Gallery (appointment)”, Weekly Times, Melbourne, 19 February 1947, p.6]
1951-1960Haines was the second director of the Queensland National Gallery 1951-1960). He established the Queensland National Gallery Society in 1951 for fund-raising and the Annual Arts Ball which began in 1952. [Glenn Cooke, A Time Remembered Art in Brisbane 1950-1974, Qld Art Gallery, 1995, p.43]
He converted the 1897 Exhibition Building into a gallery space and integrated decorative arts (design) into the displays.
1960-76. Director of David Jones Fine Art Gallery, Sydney.(consultant until 1985)
“Although department stores in all state capitals had held occasional art exhibitions throughout the 20th century, none was like David Jones’s in Sydney. The company’s chairman, Sir Charles Lloyd Jones, hoped to place “an Australian painting in every Australian home”, and in 1944 established the professionally staffed David Jones Art Gallery. In 1960 his son, another Charles Lloyd Jones, offered Haines a new gallery in their Sydney store.” [Daniel Thomas, Robert Haines (1911-2005) obituary, Sydney Morning Herald, 22 October 2005.]
Writers:
Michael Bogle
Date written:
2020
Last updated:
2020
- Born
- b. 1910
- Summary
- Robert Haines was a curator & educator pioneering the integration/exhibition of design objects with fine arts. Haines was also an exhibiting painter. He managed Georges Gallery, Melbourne after 1945, was asst director at the National Gallery of Victoria where he encouraged the acquisition of furniture-maker Schulim Krimper, director of Queensland Art Gallery 1951-60 & director of David Jones Fine Art Gallery 1960-76.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2005
- Age at death
- 95
Details
Latitude53.55 Longitude10 Start Date1909-01-01 End Date2005-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Hamburg, Germany
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1909
- Summary
- Hoff took a Doctorate in Hamburg, Germany and in Australia, she became assistant curator, Prints and Drawings, National Gallery of Australia. By 1949, she was head of Prints and Drawings and in 1968, she became Deputy Director of the Gallery. She retired in 1973.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1-Jan-05
- Age at death
- 96
Details
Latitude-32.256944 Longitude148.601111 Start Date1960-01-01 End Date2004-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Dubbo, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Michael Riley, Wiradjuri/Kamilaroi photographer and film maker, was born in Dubbo in 1960 and spent his early childhood on the Talbragar Reserve. Riley was the second of Allen Riley and Dorothy Wright’s four children, the others being his older brother David and his two younger sisters, Carol and Wendy. Talbragar Reserve had been established just east of the town of Dubbo in 1898 on Wiradjuri land, land with which Riley’s father’s family had been affiliated for many generations. The Rileys were one of the last families to leave Talbragar Reserve, and Michael was seven or eight when his family moved into Dubbo. His mother was of Kamilaroi descent, and her parents, Bengalla and Maude Wright, were caretakers at the Moree Aboriginal Reserve. Riley’s childhood in Dubbo was interspersed with regular visits to Moree to spend time with his mother’s extended family.When Riley was sixteen he moved to Sydney to begin a carpentry course and he was to remain there for the rest of his life. As Brenda L Croft writes: “In Sydney, Michael initially lived in Granville, meeting people who became not only lifelong friends, but his surrogate family: Linda Burney, brother and sister John and Raelene Delany, Dallas Clayton and David Prosser. Here, too, he created enduring bonds with true family, including cousins Lynette Riley-Mundine, Cathy Craigie, Maria (Polly) Cutmore, Ian 'Yurry’ Craigie, Craig Jamieson and others” (2006 Croft, p26). In 1987 Riley moved in with Burney and his cousins Lynette and Craig in Leichhardt.In 1982 Riley enrolled in a photography course with Bruce Hart at Tin Sheds Gallery at the University of Sydney. Hart provided vital guidance and encouragement at this early stage, and subsequently employed Riley as a darkroom and studio technician at the Sydney College of the Arts. Riley’s photographic practice preceded this training however: in his early teens he had bought a 'Box Brownie’ camera and a home-developing kit and had developed his own photographs – of family, friends and landscapes – in his bedroom wardrobe. Riley initially pursued a humanist style of documentary photography, producing stills of Aboriginal people from the Redfern community, playing and watching the local football and participating in street marches. He also took a number of chic black and white portraits of Aboriginal women in the style of fashion photography. In a 2003 conversation with Hetti Perkins, Riley said of his early photographic works: “At that time I was interested in representing Aboriginal people in a different way to the negative images of Aboriginal people in the media. I’d decided to do portraits of young urban Aboriginal people in the 1980s who were doing their own thing, mixing into society, trying to break the stereotype of who Aboriginal people are.” (in 2008 Jones, p111).One of Riley’s first group exhibitions was the seminal 'Koori Art '84’, coordinated by Tim and Vivien Johnson at Artspace in Sydney. Two years later he participated in the 'NADOC ’86 group exhibition of Aboriginal and Islander Photographers’ at the Aboriginal Artists Gallery, Sydney. The first to be wholly dedicated to Aboriginal photography, this exhibition was co-curated by Tracey Moffatt and Anthony (Ace) Bourke, the latter of whom would later represent Riley at Hogarth Galleries. The work Maria (1986), an image of Michael’s cousin Maria (Polly) Cutmore, was bought by the Australian photographer Max Dupain at the NADOC ’86 exhibition.In 1987 Riley co-founded the Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative in Chippendale with nine other Sydney-based Indigenous artists. A training position at Film Australia in that year made it possible for him to write and direct the film Boomalli: Five Artists, which documented the emerging practice of five of the Boomalli founders: Bronwyn Bancroft, Fiona Foley, Jeffrey Samuels, Arone Raymond Meeks and Tracey Moffatt. The following year Riley directed another documentary: Dreamings, the art of Aboriginal Australia, which accompanied the landmark Aboriginal art exhibition of the same name which was shown at the Asia Society Galleries in New York in 1988.The spirit and subject of Riley’s projects of the 1980s and early 1990s are a reflection of his involvement in the vibrant Indigenous activist movements of the time. In the years immediately prior to Australia’s bicentenary in 1988 Riley was one of several Indigenous and non-Indigenous photographers who worked to create a wide ranging photo-essay documenting Indigenous Australian life across the country. The project, coordinated by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, culminated in the publication After 200 years: photographs of Aboriginal and Islander Australia today (1988). A number of works that Riley had created among communities in Leeton, New South Wales, and Robinvale, Victoria – communities he visited with fellow Indigenous photographer Alana Harris – were included in the publication. In their affirmation of the resilience of Indigenous Australians, these works contributed a counter-narrative to the national celebration of 200 years of white settlement. Closely connected to the Indigenous political movements of the 1980s was the emergence of a dynamic and ambitious artistic fraternity of urban-based Indigenous artists, playwrights, actors, dancers, poets and curators. The Boomalli Aboriginal Artist’s Cooperative was one manifestation of the networks and collectives that came into being at this time, and another was the Black Playwrights Conference. In 1989 the Aboriginal National Theatre Trust commissioned Riley to document the conference; for this he was assisted by fellow Boomalli founder Brenda L. Croft. The footage created became part of the collection of the Aboriginal National Theatre Trust, and later the collection of the State Library of NSW. His 1990 series Portraits by a window, which was his first solo exhibition at Hogarth Galleries, included portraits of established political figures Charles Perkins and Joseph Croft, and captured in the early stages of the careers of Indigenous artists and curators such as Tracey Moffatt, Brenda L. Croft (daughter of Joseph Croft), Hetti Perkins (daughter of Charlie Perkins) and Djon Mundine. Mundine had just conceived the Aboriginal Memorial installation of hollow log coffins made by artists from Ramingining in Arnhem Land, a response to the Bicentennary celebrations of 1988 (collection of the National Gallery of Australia). Riley’s sensitivity to the disadvantage and social justice issues that marked the lives of members of the Redfern Aboriginal community informed the creation of the experimental film Poison in 1991. According to Croft, Riley had read a Rolling Stone magazine article titled 'Seven little Australians’ which told the story of a cluster of heroin overdoses amongst teenage Aboriginal girls in Redfern, many of whom Riley knew (2006 National Gallery of Australia website). Among the actors in the film were Lydia Miller, Rhoda Roberts, Lillian Crombie and the late Russell Page, all of who went on to establish careers in the arts.From the early 1990s Riley’s work became preoccupied with revisiting and reappraising the spaces of his early childhood; the landscapes of rural New South Wales, the family body of which he was a part, and the way both had been shaped by the forces of colonisation. A common place: portraits of Moree Murries (1991) was the first of a series of projects in which Riley reflected upon his family’s experiences on missions and reserves. This series consisted of understated, subtly emotive black and white shots of family members set against a worn cloth backdrop. It was exhibited at Hogarth Galleries in 1991, the Rebecca Hossack Gallery in London in 1993, and some works from the series were included in the landmark 'Aratjara: Art of the First Australians’ exhibition which toured to galleries in Europe in 1993 and 1994. In 1998 Riley created portraits of members of the Dubbo community in the sister series Yarns from Talbragar Reserve (1998), which was exhibited at Dubbo Regional Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1999. Both series evoke the pathos of rural mission and reserve life by honouring the hardiness, humour and familial solidarity of the subjects, portraying as worthy of empathy and recognition people whose stories have been marginal to those conventionally celebrated as characteristic of the national ethos and character. Other projects from the 1990s were similarly reflective, with Riley using images and scenes that were evocative of childhood memories as a backdrop for the exploration of themes of loss, ruin and death. At this stage, Riley sought to bring an enigmatic quality to his works by using abstract symbolism, creating strange atmospheres and generating emotional resonances that were often ambivalent. The 1993 autobiographical film Quest for country, made in the year that he established Blackfella Films with Rachel Perkins (daughter of Charles Perkins and sister of Hetti Perkins), narrated his return to his ancestral country in the regions of Dubbo and Moree and his impressions of how that country has been marked by the massacres of Aboriginal people and the ruinous environmental impact of farming. The photographic series Sacrifice (1992) consisted of a constellation of metaphorical and allegorical images that expressed a critical and interrogative engagement with the impact of mission life and questioned the nature of the sacrifice Aboriginal people had made in order to be accepted into colonial society. Stylistically, Sacrifice marked a departure from studio-style or real life settings and a movement towards a more conceptual approach to the form. As he says of the series in an interview with David Burnett, it reflects “on that period of time when people did sort of start to lose things, you know, because of the assimilation process and … the government [was] trying to put people on reserves to be good Christian Aboriginal people” (2002 National Gallery of Australia website). Sacrifice was his third solo exhibition at Hogarth Galleries in Sydney; it was acquired by the National Gallery of Australia. The 1997 film Empire, which was commissioned by Rhoda Roberts for the Festival of the Dreaming, and the photographic series flyblown (1998) drew on landscape and Christian imagery to further explore the degradation of Aboriginal land and society by white settlement and the Christian faith, but also to affirm the endurance of Aboriginal spirituality. flyblown was toured to the 1999 Venice Biennale by Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi as part of an al latere exhibition at the Palazzo Papadopoli of Indigenous photomedia artists titled 'Beyond Myth – Oltre Il Mito’. The other artists in this exhibition were Brook Andrew, Brenda L. Croft, Destiny Deacon and Leah King-Smith. The 1990s also saw Riley make a number of documentary films for the ABC. Among these were Blacktracker (1996), a biographical film about his grandfather, Alexander Riley, who had been a highly regarded tracker in the NSW Police Force between 1911 and 1950. Alexander Riley was the first Aboriginal person in NSW to be made a Sergeant and in 1943 he was awarded the King’s Medal. Tent Boxers (1998) was another documentary made for the ABC. This film related the experiences of Indigenous men who had toured with country fairs and circuses as amateur boxers in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. In 1995 Riley was commissioned to create a permanent video installation, Eora, for the Museum of Sydney, which was dedicated to the original owners of the Sydney region. In 1998, Riley was diagnosed with renal failure: his immune system had never quite recovered from a case of rheumatic fever he’d suffered as a child. He continued to produce work, however his art practice was often interrupted by periods of time spent in hospital. In 1999 the Art Gallery of NSW commissioned the film I don’t wanna be a bludger for the 'Living here now: Art and Politics’ Australian Perspecta. The film, which Riley made with fellow Indigenous photographer and film-maker Destiny Deacon, was a satirical take on prevailing stereotypes of Aboriginal people. Riley’s last series of works, Cloud (2000), was the first in which he made use of digital manipulation. The recurring preoccupations with Christianity and Aboriginal spirituality, childhood memory, the spaces and animals of rural New South Wales, and the resilience of Indigenous Australia found expression in these minimalist images of lone, symbolic figures – including a boomerang, feather, locust and bible – suspended in an expansive blue sky feathered with cloud. This series marked a turning point for Riley’s international reputation: it was shown at the 2002 Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at the Queensland Art Gallery and was awarded the grand prize in the 11th Asian Art Biennial in Bangladesh. In 2003 Cloud was also selected for 'Poetic Justice: 8th International Istanbul Biennale’ along with the film Empire. In 2004 Riley was one of eight Indigenous Australian artists selected to be part of the Australian Indigenous Art Commission, which coordinated the permanent installation of their artworks and designs within the interior and exterior architectural spaces of the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, opened in 2006. Besides Riley, the other artists included in the commission were Judy Watson, Paddy Bedford, John Mawurndjul, Ningura Naparrula, Lena Nyadbi, Tommy Watson and Gulumbu Yunupingu. These artist’s works were all enlarged and adapted to different media appropriate for the space. In Riley’s case, scaled up, laminated glass images from the Cloud series are now situated behind windows in one of the Museum’s buildings at street level. Riley passed away in 2004. The National Gallery of Australia’s retrospective Michael Riley: sights unseen toured nationally between 2006 and 2008.
Writers:
Fisher, LauraNote:
Date written:
2011
Last updated:
2011
Status:
peer-reviewed
- Born
- b. 1960
- Summary
- Wiradjuri/Kamilaroi photographer, video artist and documentary film-maker who was a founding member of Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative. His works focused upon Indigenous people's struggles in the wake of colonisation and explored themes related to religion, land and forms of social injustice.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2004
- Age at death
- 44
Details
Latitude-27.467778 Longitude153.028056 Start Date1952-01-01 End Date2004-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Brisbane, Qld, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1952
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2004
- Age at death
- 52
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1951-01-01 End Date2004-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Ousback’s pottery style was simple and functional with minimal decoration. He sometimes dug and processed his own clay. At first he was particularly influenced by British potter Lucie Rie but as he explored his new profession his interests were wide: he developed a collection of pots that spanned ages, styles and traditions. Many he gave to friends whom he knew shared his enthusiasm.
In 1993, Anders Ousback spoke at a potters conference in Adelaide. He recalled the experience of studying ceramics in the course at East Sydney Technical College that he had completed the year before. In activities that involved crushing rocks, stoking wood-fired kilns and the ‘breakneck speed’ of projects like ‘stoneware, raku, majolica, lustre, slip-casting, jigger-jolley, handbuilding, throwing, humping, and flopping’ into which he had been thrown, he explained how he had become aware that pottery was not simply tangential to his former profession but was a continuation of it. As he had done (and returned to do) with food, he found himself, in pottery, ‘searching for its heart’.
‘Both cooking and clay’, he pointed out, ‘have their origins in the application of heat, a chemical change, the taking of raw produce and its transformation. The kitchen is divided into the savoury and the sweet. The former, like creating with clay, is its fullest expression. The sweet kitchen with its exactitudes and demands of proportions, equals the glaze. Ratios of butter, flour and sugar are the fluxes, stabilisers and glass formers of cuisine. You glaze a tart. The process of sauté, roast and braise all equate to the raku, midrange and stoneware of clay. You wedge clay as you knead dough. Sieves, colanders and grinders all occur in the kitchen and the pottery. Pottery was first used to cook food, to store it and to eat from. Pottery and cookery are the most ancient crafts still practiced in our modern world.’
With the thoroughness and attention to detail that was characteristic of everything he did, Anders liked to be able to look closely at objects that he loved and that he was working with. It wasn’t enough to simply see something; he liked to touch the surface and texture of a pot and hold it to test its weight. And in the same way he understood so well the associations between making and appreciating food and wine, he also understood that what pots might mean is to do with the relationships that are made between maker and user.
Since his death in May 2004, many people have spoken about Anders Ousback’s wit, wicked humour, skills, imagination and intelligence and his perfect senses of timing, appropriateness, beauty and absurdity. Leo Schofield described him so perceptively as ‘a stone thrown into a still pond.’ We have all realised that there were many ponds of related friends, colleagues and family, and the ripples made by that stone have lapped over into all of them.
Writers:
Grace CochranePowerhouse Museum
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 1951
- Summary
- Well-known and admired Sydney restaurateur and ceramicist.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2004
- Age at death
- 53
Details
Latitude52.561928 Longitude-1.464854 Start Date1950-01-01 End Date2004-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- England, UK
- Biography
- Bridget Whitelaw was born in England, but spent her girlhood in Canberra and Melbourne. While she was a student at the University of Melbourne, where she studied Fine Arts, she lived at St Hilda’s College.After graduation she worked for a while at the State Library of Victoria before joining the National Gallery of Victoria as Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings. Her thesis was on the collection of Lionel Lindsay prints and sketchbooks in the gallery’s collection. The collection and its exhibition benefited from her scholarly rigour and insight.In 1981 she travelled to Britain to work in the collection of the British Museum on a Harold Wright fellowship. On her return she met and married Dr Simon Oldfield, a love that lasted for the rest of her life. She was able to undertake that rare balance between a serious scholarly life in curatoria research and a close loving relationship with her children.In 1983 Patrick McCaughey transferred to head the 19th century Australian drawings collection and in 1985, with Jane Clark, she co-curated the ground-breaking Golden Summers: Heidelberg and Beyond exhibition. Her next major project was a re-assessment of the work of Frederick McCubbin, a project that more or less coincided with the pregnancy and birth of her youngest child. The exhibition opened in 1991. In 1992 after some time when symptoms were not understood, she was diagnosed with a rare muscle wasting disease. She resigned from the gallery, but managed to be the centre of her family’s life and lived long enough to see her children grow towards maturity.
Writers:
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2013
Last updated:
2013
- Born
- b. 4 November 1950
- Summary
- Bridget Whitelaw will long be remembered as one of the two curators who created Golden Summers, the first exhibition to define Australian Impressionism. Her career was cut short by a debilitating illness.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 10-Jul-04
- Age at death
- 54
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1943-01-01 End Date2004-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Alan Oldfield was born in Sydney’s industrial inner west,the son of a fitter and turner,whose success was very much a tribute to the quality of education made available to bright students in Australia in the immediate post war years. He discovered art because the local Marrickville library was designated to specialise in art books. At the age of eleven he was awarded the children’s prize in the local Rockdale Art Prize.
By the time Oldfield started high school the family had moved to a new house in Sydney’s south-west suburban sprawl where he attended East Hills Boys High, one of the new comprehensive schools that enabled all NSW school children to complete their secondary education. Bright boys were placed in the academic stream away from art, but his Latin teacher was Bill Collins, later to achieve national fame for his love of the cinema, so he was taught well. Oldfield left school at the age of fourteen with his Intermediate Certificate and enrolled in the National Art School at East Sydney Technical College. This introduced Oldfield to a world of freedom away from the restrictions of the suburbs. The camaraderie between staff and students and the self-conscious bohemianism of inner Sydney took him forever away from the restrictions of the suburbs. He enjoyed a robust social life, which included several spectacular appearances at the annual artists balls. He once recalled walking down Oxford Street as dawn was breaking, wearing nothing but glitter under his coat. The teaching was however less impressive. He later told James Gleeson that he found the teaching 'absolutely appalling’. Nevertheless it enabled him to join the lively young New York influenced radical artists gathered at Sydney’s Central Street Gallery, and he first made his mark as a hard edge colour field painter with an exhibition at the recently opened Watters Gallery. In 1968 he was one of the younger artists selected for the ground-breaking The Field exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria. Also at this time he wrote articles for the short lived art magazine, Other Voices. Many years later, in 2000 he wrote the catalogue introduction for the Wendy Paramour catalogue. She was the only woman in the Central Street group, and he wanted to ensure that her art was not forgotten after her death.In 1970 he travelled to the USA and Europe for the first time. He had always loved saturated colour, and his initial aim was to see the great survey exhibition of Matisse in Paris. But in Europe he was confronted with the power and beauty of the whole western tradition. As a young man Oldfield had found spiritual solace in the Anglo Catholic traditions of Sydney’s Christ Church St Laurence, and this encouraged him to look more to the great aesthetic traditions of medieval and renaissance Europe. His partner, late Jim Davenport, was an academic so the young Oldfield came to Cambridge where he later claimed he disgraced himself at High Table at Kings College.His paintings of this time included a series of meticulously painted chairs, empty, but awaiting the presence of a human body. One work included a book placed on a beach chair: it was a monograph on Caravaggio. He had seen the definitive Caravaggio and the Caravagisti exhibition in Florence and the 17th century Italian master was to remain one of his great guides. Oldfield returned to Italy in 1974, to Rome on an Australia Council Visual Arts Board travel grant. Here he had the freedom and time to paint and further study renaissance and baroque art. He began to appreciate the beauty of subtle tones and of sculptural forms shown in paint. His growing interest in medieval mysticism led to Oldfield researching The Revelations of Divine Love, by the English mystic, Dame Julian of Norwich. In 1985 he began to paint a series of works based on her visions and spirituality. His painting of Julian’s revelation A High and Spiritual Shewing of Christ’s Mother was awarded the Blake Prize in 1987. The entire cycle was exhibited in Norwich Cathedral in 1988 and his work still holds pride of place in St Julian’s Church, Norwich. Other residencies included Linacre College in Oxford, and Christchurch Cathedral Newcastle, NSW.Explorations and journeys, physical and spiritual, were a characteristic of much of his later painting. Oldfield’s connections to spiritual values led him to being awarded the Blake Prize again in 1991 and he also painted the shrines of Our Lady and Our Lord at Christ church St Laurence in Sydney. His last major series, Lizard Island, the Journey of Mary Watson, was published as a book, with text by Suzanne Falkiner. It was a finalist in the 2002 NSW Premier’s Literary Prize.Despite his involvement with interior lives and metaphysics, Alan Oldfield did not confine himself to religious art and ceremony. He was the designer for Rumours and Afterworlds for the Sydney Dance company from 1978 to 1980, and also designed Beyond Twelve for the Australian Ballet in 1987.
In 1976 Alan Oldfield joined the full-time lecturing staff at the Alexander Mackie College of Advanced Education in Sydney. He was to remain on the staff until just before his death, as the institution first renamed itself the City Art Institute and then College of Fine Arts, as part of the University of New South Wales. In 1991 he was promoted to Associate Professor. At various times he was head of undergraduate studies, head of studio studies, honours co-ordinator, acting director of the Ivan Dougherty Gallery, and most of the other academic administrative jobs undertaken by university staff. In committee meetings his sotto voce comments were usually scandalous, and much appreciated by his colleagues.As a teacher he was well-known for getting surprising results from the least promising of students. He would say with a chuckle, comments that others would not dare utter, After the student got over the initial shock of being told they needed to totally rethink their approach, they would respond. He was an inspirational teacher of art history on Renaissance art, and his passion for the art he loved was totally infectious.After the death of Jim Davenport in 1997, Oldfield was supported by his colleagues and came to realise that this art school, and indeed the wider arts community was part of his extended family, as well as his sister, her husband and their children. Later this family included his new church of St James King Street, where he served on the Parish Council, and it was here that he was farewelled in a great Anglo Catholic Requiem Mass. He had designed the ceremony in the full and gleeful knowledge that most of those inhaling the incense were atheists.
Writers:
Olivia Bolton
Joanna Mendelssohn
Michael Bogle
Date written:
2011
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 30 December 1943
- Summary
- Alan Oldfield’s early work was characterised by crisp clean abstract paintings which combined a hedonist sensibility with the austerity of hard edge abstraction. His later paintings were in a more meditative style influenced by Italian Renaissance art and his deep and abiding religious faith. Also active as a theatre/set designer.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2-Oct-04
- Age at death
- 61
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1938-01-01 End Date2004-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Joan Kerr was born on 21 February 1938 in North Sydney, NSW, the eldest of six children of Robert (Bob) Christopher Lyndon (1896-1963) and Edna May Richards (1907-1992), both from Queensland. The family moved to Cronulla where Joan went to primary school although severe asthma often kept her confined to bed. The Lyndons returned to Brisbane in 1951 and Joan attended Somerville House (1952-1955). In 1956 she commenced a BA at Queensland University, the first of her family to undertake tertiary education. She participated in debating and drama and was co-editor of the University’s student newspaper Semper Floreat. She graduated with a B.A. Hons (2) but did not complete her MA in English literature.Joan Lyndon met James (Jim) Semple Kerr (born, Rockhampton, 6 July 1932) in 1956 at university. They were married at All Saints Church, Wickham Terrace, Brisbane on 30 November 1960 but settled in Cremorne, Sydney. Jim worked for Qantas in management, Joan as a junior journalist on the publication Weekend. Their daughter Tamsin was born on 11 April 1962. Qantas posted Jim Kerr to Geneva in 1963 where their son, James Semple Kerr was born on 21 August. In 1964 Qantas transferred Jim Kerr to London, which gave the Kerrs the chance to explore England’s architectural heritage. Their formal study of architectural history began in 1966 with lectures on the great buildings of Europe followed by a two-year diploma certificate on mediaeval art and architecture at the Courtauld Institute. They also attended lectures by Sir Nikolaus Pevsner (1902-1983) at Birkbeck College, University of London. It was he, Joan Kerr insisted, who transformed her from ‘housewife to historian’. They were unable to complete their studies in London as Jim was posted back to Sydney in 1968.In 1969 Joan Kerr applied to the Fine Arts Department, Power Institute, Sydney University to undertake a Master of Arts (MA). Head of Department, Professor Bernard Smith insisted Joan first undertake Fine Arts I and II, which she completed in one year. After finishing first in both courses Smith offered Kerr a tutorship. She spent five years in the post unofficially assuming the duties of lecturer.Kerr convinced Smith to allow her to undertake an MA on colonial church architecture. Her thesis – The Development of the Gothic Taste in New South Wales as Exemplified in the Churches of the Colony: from the Beginning of Settlement up to the Establishment of the Victorian Gothic Revival Style at the End of the 1840s (awarded 1976) – crossed academic boundaries between art, architecture and history before such practices became acceptable in Australian universities.Jim resigned from Qantas and in 1972-73 completed a Diploma of Conservation at the University of York. The following year they both enrolled for doctorates at the Institute of Advanced Architectural Studies, University of York. Joan’s D.Phil thesis, Designing a Colonial Church: Church Building in New South Wales 1788-1888, was based on her MA with an extension of the cut-off date. Both Kerrs were awarded their doctorates in July 1978.In 1978 Jim Kerr became Assistant Director, Australian Heritage Commission in Canberra. Joan worked as a tutor in Fine Arts at the Australian National University (ANU) before being granted a two-year post-doctoral fellowship in history at the Research School of Social Sciences. In 1981 she was offered a lectureship in the Power Institute, Sydney University. She was promoted to senior lecturer (1983-84) and Associate Professor (1985-93). She was Acting Head of Department in 1983-84 and part 1991 and Head of Department, 1985-87.Kerr left Sydney University in July 1993 and spent three years at the College of Fine Arts UNSW (COFA). In 1997 She was one of four senior academics appointed to the new Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at ANU. After her retirement in 2001 she returned to Sydney and was again appointed Visiting Professor at COFA. She was to give occasional lectures but her major task was to obtain an ARC grant to set up the Dictionary of Australian Artists Online. In 2003 Joan Kerr was diagnosed with cancer. She died on 22 February 2004 and is survived by her husband, Jim; daughter, Tamsin; son James and her five grandchildren.
Writers:
steggd
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2013
Last updated:
2018
- Born
- b. 21 February 1938
- Summary
- Joan Kerr was the editor for two important publications on Australian artists, The Dictionary of Australian Artists: Painters, Sketchers, Photographers and Engravers to 1870 (Oxford UP, 1992) and Heritage: the National Women's Art Book: 500 Works by 500 Australian Women Artists from Colonial Times to 1955 (Craftsman House, 1995). She was responsible for a handful of exhibitions and mentor to many other researchers.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 22-Feb-04
- Age at death
- 66
Details
Latitude56 Longitude10 Start Date1935-01-01 End Date2004-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Denmark
- Biography
- John Andersson attended the Academy of Fine Art In Copenhagen under renowned Professor Kaare Klint. In a detailed eight year course from 1950 to 1958, he qualified as a furniture designer, cabinet maker, and chair maker from A. I. Iversen, and from the Academy of Arts and Crafts as a qualified Interior and Product designer with the Silver Medal.
In Copenhagen he worked in the design practice of the great Finn Juhl, where he designed projects including the Danish Embassy in Washington; the exhibition of 'Arts of Denmark’ in New York and Chicago; the Church of David in Copenhagen; the offices for SAS Airlines in Paris, Nice Berlin and Copenhagen and on interiors of two DC7 aircraft interiors for SAS.
He came to Australia in May 1962 to head the Interior Design Unit for architects Peddle Thorpe and Walker. In 1965 he established his own practice and during his life worked on around 105 projects in Australia and overseas,involving interior design, furniture design, textile and product design.
His hotel clients included Noahs Hotels, Surfrider Motelf Dee Why, Crest Hotel and Hyatt Kingsgate Hotel Sydney, Georgian House, Town House Hotel and Collins Place Hotel, MelbourneThe list of business clients is a long one and some of which include – Dalgety Australia officesConstable and Bain city officeNorth Sydney Club interiors CCH Australia NZ and UK furniture, textiles and interiors Tooheys officesTabma interiors CSR graphic design Manly Waringah and Wollongong Club interiorsSeabridge Australia new office Nedlloyd office interiorHBS Canberra Exhibition Home lighting layout, furniture details, kitchen details.
John had many private clients for whom he designed their houses, furniture, interiors and products.
He taught design at the East Sydney Technical College from 1963 and in the 1990s was an examiner at the Sydney School of Arts.
Writers:
Michael Bogle
Copenhagen
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2019
- Born
- b. 1 January 1935
- Summary
- Andersson was formerly with Fin Juhl, Copenhagen. By 1962 he was the Head of Peddle, Thorp and Walker's Design Unit. By 1965, he established his own practice in Sydney. He designed the Prestige Lighting Showroom, the interiors of the Lyceum Theatre, de George's Dress Shop and the Crest Hotel, Kings Cross. In 1969, Andersson was developing designs for Jarvis Coates's furniture manufacturers.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-04
- Age at death
- 69
Details
Latitude-37.7449752 Longitude144.9643314 Start Date1933-01-01 End Date2004-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Coburg, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- Neville Quarry (1933-2004) was born in Coburg, Victoria, and educated at the University of Melbourne, with his final year of study in 1956 in New Zealand. After several years of travelling, then teaching and building several campus structures at the University of Papua New Guinea in Lae, he moved to Sydney in 1976 to take up a position at the NSW Institute of Technology, which later became the University of Technology, Sydney. He became Professor or Architecture there and later Dean of the Faculty of Design Architecture and Building, then Chair of the Academic Board. In 1981, he was awarded the Union Internationale des Architectes’ Jean Tschumi Prize for architectural education. During the 1980s, he hosted the International Series of lectures in Sydney and Melbourne by well-known and emerging overseas architects and was a panellist on an ABC television show, The Inventors. He wrote and commented widely on architecture, wrote Canberra and the New Parliament House (with Alan Fitzgerald and Peter Mulller, 1984), edited Award-Winning Australian Architecture (Craftsman House, 19XX) surveying the history of RAIA national architecture awards. He was Commissioner to the Venice Architecture Biennale in 1991, producing an exhibition called Architetti Australiani. In 1994, he became the first academic to win the RAIA Gold Medal. In 1995 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia. He won a NSW RAIA merit award for his own house in Paddington in 19XX and, following his retirement in 1998, built three houses at Pearl Beach, and renovated a house at Byron Bay. He socialised widely with his popular New Zealand-born wife Peg, a social worker.Sources—Jones, Philip. 2004. ‘Backer of low-cost housing’, obituary in The Sydney Morning Herald, 2 November, p10.—McGregor, Craig. 2004. ‘A true believer, a great teacher’, obituary in The Sydney Morning Herald, p80.
Writers:
Davina Jackson
Date written:
2015
Last updated:
2015
- Born
- b. 1933
- Summary
- Neville Quarry was Professor of Architecture and Dean of the Faculty of Design Architecture and Building at the University of Technology Sydney (formerly NSW Institute of Technology) during the 1980s and 1990s. He organised the International Series of lectures by progressive foreign architects and Australia's first exhibition at the Venice Architecture Biennale (1991). He was awarded the RAIA Gold Medal in 1994.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2004
- Age at death
- 71
Details
Latitude-22.089 Longitude131.422 Start Date1931-01-01 End Date2004-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Mt Doreen, Northern Territory, Australia
- Biography
- Born c.1931 at Mt Doreen, and a Warlpiri speaker, Dolly Daniels was 'boss’ for the Yawulyu or women’s ceremonies at Yuendumu. Her Dreamings were Warlukurlangu (Fire), Yankirri (Emu), Watiyawarnu (Acacia Seed), Yumpulykanji (Burrowing Skink) and Ngapa (Water). She began exhibiting with Warlukurlangu Artists at the first exhibition of Yuendumu paintings in 1985 at the Araluen Arts Centre in Alice Springs, and subsequently in exhibitions around Australia including Perth, Melbourne, Adelaide, Sydney, Darwin and Brisbane. In 1987 her work was also included in special 'Karnta’ (Women’s) exhibitions in Adelaide, Sydney and Fremantle. She was part of the South Australian Museum’s Yuendumu – Paintings out of the Desert project and exhibition in March 1988, Mythscapes at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1989 and L 'é t é Australien at the Musée Fabre, Montepellier France in 1990. She travelled to New York as part of a party of Warlpiri artists who attended the Dreamings: Art of Aboriginal Australia exhibition. Her impressions of the visit are recorded in the film Market of Dreams . In 1991 she exhibited a collaborative work with Anne Mosey in Frames of Reference: Aspects of Feminism and Art , part of the Dissonance program celebrating 20 years of women’s art in Australia. Dolly also collaborated with Anne Mosey on an installation for the 1993 Biennale of Sydney. A leading personality in the Yuendumu community, Dolly was co-Chairperson (with Bronson Nelson ) of Warlukurlangu Artists, Chairperson of the Yuendumu Women’s Centre, a member of the Warlpiri Media Association and, with Lucy Kennedy and Bessie Sims , one of three women on the Yuendumu Council. Collections: National Gallery of Victoria, South Australian Museum; Australian Museum, Sydney.
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1931
- Summary
- A member of Warlukurlangu Artists since its inception, and co-chairperson of the association in the late 1980s. Since her involvement in the community's first exhibition at the Araluen Art Centre in 1985, her work has featured in major exhibitions across the country and overseas, including "Dreamings: the Art of Aboriginal Australia" and the 1993 Sydney Biennale.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2004
- Age at death
- 73
Details
Latitude-19.8516101 Longitude133.2303375 Start Date1925-01-01 End Date2004-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Wapurtali West Tanami NT, Wapurtali (West Tanami) NT, Australia
- Biography
- Born c.1925, he is a Warlpiri speaker whose country is Wapurtali, home of the Bush Carrot ancestor which spread out from here to Ngamirliri in one direction and Yintaramurru in the other. Jack also painted the Yarla (Bush Potato) Dreaming for Yamaparnta, belonging to Jakamarra/Jupurrula. Other Dreamings he painted include Wapirti (Small Yam), Liwirringki (Burrowing Skink), Pamapardu (Flying Ant), Marlu (Kangaroo), Walpajirri (Rabbit-eared Bandicoot or Bilby), Yurduwaruwaru (Bearded Dragon), Karlanjirri (Dragon) and Patanjarngi (Parrakelia). He lived at Yuendumu and had been painting for Warlukurlangu Artists since the mid ’80s. His work was included in Yuendumu: paintings out of the desert at the South Australian Museum in 1988, The Painted Dream in Auckland and Wellington 1991 and many Warlukurlangu exhibitions in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Perth, Darwin, Adelaide and Alice Springs. He was one of forty-two artists from Yuendumu who worked on a 7 × 3m canvas which toured European cities in 1993 as part of Aratjara – Australian Aboriginal Art .
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1925
- Summary
- Jack Ross started painting for Warlukurlangu Artists in the mid '80s and worked for two decades. He was in many Warlukurlangu exhibitions in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Perth, Darwin, Adelaide and Alice Springs, in addition to being held in numerous public and private collections.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2004
- Age at death
- 79
Details
Latitude-28.3275 Longitude153.395833 Start Date1921-01-01 End Date2004-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Murwillumbah, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Painter, curator, tutor and former window dresser was born in Murwillumbah, New South Wales, son of a Baptist minister. He served in the Australian Imperial Force for six years during World War II seeing active service in New Guinea and the Middle East. In 1948-49 he attended the National Art School in Melbourne under Murray Griffiths as part of war service retraining. He came to Perth in 1950 where he worked as a display designer and window dresser for ten years. He was one of a number of artists who supported themselves in this way. Brian McKay, Len Littman and Hugh Child were others. The stores; Aherns, Boans, Cox Bros. and Corots all employed artists to do this work. Baker joined the Perth Society of Artists and in 1961 became Deputy Director of the Art Gallery of Western Australia and a part time tutor for Adult Education. He spent 1967-68 in Europe and returned to become the Curator of Painting at University of Western Australia, a position he held until 1975. He won the Fremantle Art Prize in 1961 and 1963, the Melville Acquisitive Award in 1977, the Hume Award in 1985, the Challenge Bank Prize in 1986 and the Mandorla Art Prize in 1988.
Writers:
Dr Dorothy Erickson
Date written:
2010
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1921
- Summary
- Painter, curator, tutor and former window dresser. Baker became Deputy Director of the Art Gallery of Western Australia in 1961. He won numerous prizes.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2004
- Age at death
- 83
Details
Latitude-33.481536 Longitude150.1564887 Start Date1921-01-01 End Date2004-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Lithgow, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- (Harold) Bryce Mortlock (1921-2004) was born in Lithgow and graduated from Sydney University in 1950 with the University Medal. After working as an assistant to Sydney Ancher, he moved to London and worked for the London County Council 1951-1952. On return to Sydney, he became one of Ancher’s partners in Ancher Mortlock and Murray in 1952. The firm became one of Sydney’s most successful practices of the 1950s and 1960s, and gained another partner, Ken Woolley in 1964. In 1966, Sydney Ancher retired; Mortlock retired in 1982. He was president of the RAIA’s NSW chapter 1970-72 and national president 1975-76. He received the RAIA’s Gold Medal in 1979 and the Order of Australia (General Division) in 1982. He was a director of Australian Building Industry Specifications P/L 1975-1992. In 1981, he was a visiting professor at the University of NSW and from 1984-1993 he was a site planning consultant to the Australian National University, Canberra. In 1988 he was awarded an honorary doctorate of architecture (honoris causa) by the University of Melbourne.Sources—Johnson, Paul Alan and Susan Lorne Johnson. 1996. Interview with Bryce Mortlock. Sydney: University of NSW Architects of the Middle Third program.—Saunders, David and Catherine Burke. 1976. Ancher, Mortlock, Murray, Woolley: Sydney Architects 1946-1976. Sydney: Power Institute of Fine Arts, University of Sydney. In the collection of Julie Cracknell.—Taylor, Jennifer. 1972. ‘The Development of A Regional Architecture 1953-63’ in An Australian Identity: Houses for Sydney 1953-63. Sydney: University of Sydney.—Various papers archived by the NSW RAIA 20th Century Buildings Committee.—Ancher Mortlock Murray & Woolley project database under construction by Anne Higham for the NSW RAIA 20th Century Buildings Committee.—Ancher Mortlock Woolley website www.amwarchitects.com.au
Writers:
Davina Jackson
Date written:
2015
Last updated:
2015
- Born
- b. 1921
- Summary
- Bryce Mortlock was a distinguished Sydney architect during the 1950s and 1960s. After winning the University of Sydney medal for top architecture student (1950), he worked for the London County Council (1951-52), then became a partner of Sydney Ancher at Ancher Mortlock and Murray (later joined by Ken Woolley).
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2004
- Age at death
- 83
Details
Latitude52.52 Longitude13.405 Start Date1920-01-01 End Date2004-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Berlin, Germany
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1920
- Summary
- Newton was a German-Australian photographer specialising in magazine fashion and celebrity photography. He had an extensive international career in magazine journalism with numerous photography exhibitions and publications.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-04
- Age at death
- 84
Details
Latitude-34.9275 Longitude138.6 Start Date1919-01-01 End Date2004-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Adelaide, SA, Australia
- Biography
- painter, was born in Adelaide and has had a long and distinguished career in South Australia. She was educated at the Girls’ Central Art School, the SA School of Arts and Crafts (1934-37) and Adelaide Teachers’ College (1939-40). She taught at the School of Arts and Crafts in 1941-45, then resigned to work full time as an artist. Her most influential teachers were Mary P. Harris and John Goodchild (husband of Doreen ). She was also influenced by the professionalism of Dorrit Black , although not by Black’s style. In 1952 she married Frank Galazowski; they have four children.
Jacqueline Hick is primarily a figure painter in oils although she has also made prints, set designs and enamels. Her approach to media is to learn traditional methods thoroughly and then to experiment. In the early 1940s she, Thelma Fisher and Christine Miller learnt print-making from John Goodchild, then produced intaglio prints using unconventional methods. Although necessitated by a shortage of materials due to the war, this has become Jacqueline Hick’s method. In 1951 she took lessons in the use of oil glazes from Ivor Hele and subsequently used it almost in the manner of watercolour painting, particularly in her underwater bathers’ paintings of the 1970s.
Jacqueline Hick’s approach to subject matter and style is similar. She is conscious of working in the European tradition, which she studied in England, France and Italy (1948-50); she has been inspired by the work of Goya, Daumier, Kollwitz and, in Australia, Dobell and Drysdale. Her subject matter can be divided into two: a vein of social comment ranging from mild satire to trenchant criticism and more decorative work based on the Australian landscape and its fauna and flora. The former evokes wartime life in Adelaide, family life during the 1950s, the dispossession of the Australian Aborigines, the oppressive nature of the city, portraits of family and friends and the expression of her love of the performing arts. In her decorative work she enjoys the challenge of combining aesthetic needs and an awareness based on informed observation. Her hobbies are the study of geology and ornithology, and she has been a member of the Field Geology Club of South Australia and the Queensland Ornithology Society.
Throughout her career Jacqueline Hick has been active in arts organisations. She was a founder committee member of the Contemporary Art Society (SA), a founder member of the Adelaide Theatre Group, a member of the Royal SA Society of Arts, a Board member of the Art Gallery of SA (1968-75) and a member of the first Council of the Australian National Gallery (1982-85, now NGA).
Jacqueline Hick has mostly worked in Adelaide but lived in Brisbane in 1978-90. She now lives in retirement in Adelaide. She has won many awards for her painting, principally the Melrose Prize (1959) for her Self Portrait , the Cornell Prize (1958, 1960) and the Maude Vizard-Wholohan Prize (1962, 1964). In 1995 Hick was appointed Member of the Order of Australia, AM, for services to art.
Writers:
Furby, PaulaNote: Heritage biography.
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1919
- Summary
- Jacqueline Hick is a painter. She has had a long and distinguished career in South Australia. Hick won many awards for her painting, principally the Melrose Prize (1959), the Cornell Prize (1958, 1960) and the Maude Vizard-Wholohan Prize (1962, 1964). In 1995 she was appointed Member of the Order of Australia, AM, for services to art.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 11-May-04
- Age at death
- 85
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1916-01-01 End Date2004-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- illustrator, was born in Sydney and brought up and educated in Bowral. An accident with horses when she was fifteen kept her away from school for a year and left her deaf. During this time, she read a good deal and decided on a career in art. After spending two years studying at East Sydney Technical College, she worked for an advertising agency and gained useful experience in practical illustrating skills. Then came the war and she joined the Women’s Land Army.
Having already tried her hand at writing and illustrating a children’s book, in 1941 she succeeded in getting Ambrose Kangaroo published by Australian Consolidated Press. This was very successful and led to further commissions; for several years it ran as a comic strip in a Sydney newspaper. The high point was reached when the American publisher, Scribners, decided to bring out an American edition. No doubt they liked the freshness and novelty of the book and the progress of the war, with the influx of Americans to this area, had created an interest in Australia.
Her publisher suggested that she should do a picture book about a child’s life in this country. This resulted in Susan Who Lives in Australia (New York 1944) with English and American editions following. The author-artist was still very young—only twenty-eight—when Susan was published and her drawing is a little unfinished. She revised her work and used several varying styles in subsequent Australian editions of Katherine (as Susan was renamed in the English and Australian editions).
MacIntyre’s considerable versatility may be seen from her success in different spheres. She worked as a feature writer for the Age , Sunday Telegraph and Australian Women’s Weekly , and later as a television cartoonist for the ABC. Her early children’s books were ahead of her time in Australia, which was one reason why they were welcomed so warmly. Her later picture books with their humour and lively drawings continued to achieve success in America and retained their popularity here, being reprinted several times. However, the broad, poster-like style she developed and her slapstick humour divided critical opinion about their quality. (This may also have reflected increased critical awareness in response to the improvement in the quality of children’s books in general, even if few picture books were yet being published here). The Children’s Book Council Award for Picture Book of the Year to Hugh’s Zoo in 1965 was a controversial one.
But a dozen or more highly original picture books created when there was such an obvious lack of local books for young children firmly established the importance of MacIntyre’s contribution to the children’s literature of this country. She later went on to write several novels for adolescents with serious social content, published both in Australia and overseas.
In 1951 Elisabeth MacIntyre married John Roy Eldershaw. They had one daughter.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1916
- Summary
- Female children's book author whose poster-like illustrations of life in Australia made her popular in many countries. She also worked in television and as a feature writer for newspapers and magazines.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- c.2004
- Age at death
- 88
Details
Latitude47.4925 Longitude19.051389 Start Date1910-01-01 End Date2004-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Budapest, Hungary
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1910
- Summary
- George Reves (sometimes spelt Reeves) was an architect and designer of commercial interiors and buildings in Sydney. He registered as an architect in NSW in 1945 after working in Paris for Perret Freres. Some of his works were published in design and architecture trade journals during the late 1940s and early 1950s.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2004
- Age at death
- 94
Details
Latitude-31.9807252 Longitude115.7814486 Start Date1908-01-01 End Date2004-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Claremont, WA, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 5 May 1908
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 9-Apr-04
- Age at death
- 96
Details
Latitude-33.816667 Longitude151 Start Date1907-01-01 End Date2004-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Parramatta, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- sculptor, was born in Parramatta on 25 September 1907. She studied art at East Sydney Technical College from 1923 on a scholarship awarded to her from Drummoyne Public School. She specialised in sculpture, studying under Rayner Hoff from 1924. In 1930 she was awarded a Diploma in Art (Sculpture Honours), the first Art Diploma awarded at the College. She gained various prizes while a student, including an award in the 1929 Society of Artists’ Competition, and her work attracted critical attention.
Hoff, who described McGrath’s student progress as 'exceptionally brilliant’, designed and edited a book on her work which was published in 1931 with contributions from notable establishment figures, including Norman Lindsay and J.S. McDonald. Commissions included displays for Farmers department store, Pan for Beale & Co. in 1931 and illustrations for Katherine Susannah Pritchard’s The Earth Cover (1932).
For three years (1930-33) McGrath worked as an assistant to Rayner Hoff on the sculpture for the Anzac Memorial in Sydney, reputedly modelling much of the relief work. In 1933 she sailed for London with her family, attended carving classes run by John Skeaping and produced a number of portrait heads. She travelled in Europe in 1934-35 and later taught art at a girls’ school in Carlisle. In 1936-38 she illustrated books of humorous verse and cartoons for Punch , the jokes being provided by Albert Frost, whom she married in 1938. She moved to Washington DC (USA) in 1941 when her husband was appointed to the British Embassy and still lives there. She has not worked as a professional artist since this move.
Eileen McGrath was the most prominent and perhaps most accomplished artist in the group of (predominantly female) sculpture students at East Sydney Technical College whom Hoff developed into a coherent 'school’ of sculptors which dominated Sydney sculptural production in the inter-war decades. This liberated McGrath, and others, to produce an art which would possibly have not been allowed to them otherwise. Freedom from conventional constraints was won by taking on much of Hoff’s identity and the result was a markedly uniform body of work, yet a quite distinctive and powerful one.
Writers:
Edwards, Deborah
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 25 September 1907
- Summary
- McGrath was awarded the first Art Diploma (Sculpture Honours), at East Sydney Technical College. She studied under Raynor Hoff, and left Australia in 1933, studying and teaching in England and Europe before finally settling in Washington DC with her husband Albert C. Frost. Authorities (Deborah Edwards) suggest she did not work professionally after 1941.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1-Jan-04
- Age at death
- 97
Details
Latitude-45.874167 Longitude170.503611 Start Date1954-01-01 End Date2003-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Dunedin, New Zealand
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 3 November 1954
- Summary
- Alan Brown was a New Zealand-born artist and designer who trained as an architect in Dunedin and Auckland. He worked in Auckland, Sydney, Amsterdam and Byron Bay.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2003
- Age at death
- 49
Details
Latitude-33.713759 Longitude150.3121633 Start Date1945-01-01 End Date2003-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Katoomba, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- This record is a stub. You can help out by adding more detail.
Writers:
staffcontributor
Date written:
Last updated:
- Born
- b. 31 October 1945
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 26-Oct-03
- Age at death
- 58
Details
Latitude-22.1646782 Longitude144.5844903 Start Date1943-01-01 End Date2003-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Queensland
- Biography
- Waka Waka/Kallilia artist, Gloria Beckett was born in Queensland in 1943. Removed from her family as a child, Beckett’s work often reflects the pain and suffering she endured as a consequence. Beckett worked in a number of media including oils, inks, pastels, synthetics and charcoal and her style is equally diverse. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Queensland Art Gallery as well as many private collections. Beckett showed her work in the 2001 exhibition “Gatherings, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art From Queensland Australia” and stated in the accompanying catalogue that, “I sometimes paint events of my past… it helps me overcome the suffering, the bad memories and torment. I have a deep passion to paint my people as I see character, beauty and stregth in their faces, but there are times when I see the despair, suffering and sadness.”
This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Allas, Tess
Date written:
2007
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1943
- Summary
- A Waka Waka/Kallilia artist, the work of Queensland-born Gloria Beckett often reflects the pain and suffering she endured after being forcibly removed from her family as a child. Employing a range of media including oils and charcoal, Beckett's work can be found in the collection of the Queensland Art Gallery.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2003
- Age at death
- 60
Details
Latitude31.5656822 Longitude74.3141829 Start Date1940-01-01 End Date2003-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Lahore, Pakistan
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1940
- Summary
- Ingham was a furniture designer and maker with extensive training in England. He combined teaching, designing and making in the UK before taking a position with the Canberra School of Art (today, ANU), headed by Udo Selbach in 1982. Working in wood, he was a significant influence on students as well as commercial furniture manufacturing. He retired from illness in 2000.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-03
- Age at death
- 63
Details
Latitude-19.8516101 Longitude133.2303375 Start Date1940-01-01 End Date2003-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Nyinna Nyinna, NT, Australia
- Biography
- Born c. 1940 at Nyinna Nyinna near Docker River, Billy grew up traversing the vast reaches of Pintupi territory across the WA border. He came east by donkey in one of the early Pintupi migrations. He had observed the painting group at West Camp for many years before taking up painting himself in the mid ’70s. He usually painted Tingari stories for his country and lived at Kintore.
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Note: primary biographer
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1940
- Summary
- Nolan came east in one of the early Pintupi migrations. He had observed the painting group at West Camp for many years before taking up painting himself in the mid '70s.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2003
- Age at death
- 63
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1940-01-01 End Date2003-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- THIS IS A STUBB. PLEASE HELP THE DAAO BY WRITING A FULL BIOGRAPHY
Writers:
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2015
Last updated:
2015
- Born
- b. 1940
- Summary
- Geoffrey Bardon was an artist and art teacher who came to Papunya in February 1971. His active mentoring of artists at Papunya and encouraging them to use acrylic paints when painting the kind of art that came to them naturally, was the spark that lit the western desert art movement.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 6-May-03
- Age at death
- 63
Details
Latitude-26.406265 Longitude146.2420417 Start Date1933-01-01 End Date2003-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Charleville, QLD, Australia
- Biography
- Pastellist and painter, and founding member of the Pastel Society of Australia. Leslie Joyce (Les) McDonaugh was born in Charleville on 6 January 1933, first child of James Leslie Joyce McDonaugh and Dorothy Charlotte McDonaugh née Thorne. He was educated in Warwick and later St Patrick’s School, Brisbane, when the family settled in Fortitude Valley and later Toowong in the mid-1940s.Les McDonaugh enthusiastically made art throughout his youth; regularly entering the Sunday Mail’s weekly children’s corner drawing competition, for which he occasionally won prizes. Works by McDonaugh were also published and awarded purple certificates in The Sun’s ‘Cousin Marie’ children’s feature.(2) As a 19-year old, McDonaugh exhibited in the annual exhibition of the Younger Artists’ Group of the Royal Queensland Art Society. He was educated at the Central Technical College, where he studied drawing and painting under Melville Haysom and David Fowler.(3)Les married Lavinia Maud Lawson (6/3/1937-3/4/1993) on 22 December 1955. Lavinia supported Les’ art career economically and emotionally until her death.(4) In the late 1960s and early 1970s McDonaugh exhibited at the RNA art exhibitions, and from the mid-1970s was featured in solo exhibitions at commercial galleries. At the same time he continued to participate in exhibitions at the Royal Queensland Art Society. Critics noted his vibrant palette and bold application throughout his works.(5) In 1978 he travelled to Sturt’s Stony Desert near Cadelga to paint, and in 1979 his first solo show of oil paintings was hung. (6) In 1985 his work was featured in an exhibition of Northern Australian artists organised by the 1985 Australian Art Expo in Cairns; this exhibition later travelled to the United States with support from the Queensland Government.(7) Around the same time, McDonaugh was involved in the establishment of the Pastel Society of Australia, in which he executed Vice-Presidential duties.(8)In the 1980s and 1990s, McDonaugh continued to exhibit work in solo and group exhibitions including several exhibitions at Beaver Galleries, Canberra, and produced a series of instructional videos and pastel and painting. He also painted murals for the Inala Library.(9) One of his grandsons, John Woodrow Charlton was commissioned to paint over his mural in 2008 as it was beyond repair.(10)After the death of his wife Lavinia in 1993, he changed his style and exhibited more nostalgia, referencing his Irish heritage in his 1995 exhibition.(11) He regularly discussed his biography throughout interviews in later life. He continued to produce work and exhibit until his death.(12)McDonaugh died on 7 February 2003. He was survived by his second wife, and children from his first marriage, Elena, James, Gary and Robyn.(13) Works by McDonaugh are usually signed 'L McDonaugh’, sometimes bearing the date of creation.
(1) Patricia Kelly, ‘Bay islands became artist’s great muse’, Courier Mail, Tuesday 4 March 2003, p 18.(2) Sunday Mail, 23 April 1944, p 5; 28 May 1944, p 5; 10 December 1944, p 6; 12 September 1948, p 7. The Sun, 14 April 1946, p 6; 2 March 1947, p 10; 9 March 1947, p 4; 15 February 1948, p 3; 11 April 1948, p 3; 19 December 1948, p 3.(3) Courier Mail, Wednesday 11 January 1950, p 11; Tue 19 August 1952, p 2. Northern Australian Artists exhibition catalogue: 1985, Australian Art Expo, Cairns, p 7.(4) Information supplied by descendants of Les McDonaugh.(5) Sunday Mail, 20 June 1976; 28 May 1978(6) Sunday Mail, 28 January 1978; 7 October 1979.(7) Northern Australian Artists exhibition catalogue: 1985, Australian Art Expo, Cairns.(8) The Pastellist (newsletter), February 1988. Bayside Bulletin, 18 April 1995, p 4.(9) The Satellite, 13 June 1990, p 1; Bayside Bulletin, 18 April 1995, p 4.(10) Information supplied by descendants of Les McDonaugh.(11) Information supplied by descendants of Les McDonaugh.(12) Bayside Bulletin 18 April 1995, p 4; Tuesday November 3 1998 p 61; Patricia Kelly, ‘Bay islands became artist’s great muse’, Courier Mail, Tuesday 4 March 2003, p 18.(13) Patricia Kelly, ‘Bay islands became artist’s great muse’, Courier Mail, Tuesday 4 March 2003, p 18.
Writers:
Timothy Roberts
JWCharlton
Date written:
2016
Last updated:
2021
- Born
- b. 6 January 1933
- Summary
- Pastellist and painter active in Brisbane, and founding member of the Pastel Society of Australia.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 7-Feb-03
- Age at death
- 70
Details
Latitude-22.815924 Longitude127.7642195 Start Date1932-01-01 End Date2003-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Kiwirrkura, WA, Australia
- Biography
- Born near Kiwirrkura c.1932, Napanangka Yukenbarri was a Kukatja speaker. Her country was Winpupulla and Puturr, north of Jupiter Well). She lived in Balgo and started painting for Warlayirti Artists in 1989. A strong, senior woman who was one of the hardest working artists in Balgo. She developed a highly individual style where the paint was applied in heavy, coalesced dabs. A bold pattern of colours was created which served to represent different areas of the artist’s country. The works are usually totally abstract but all concern old campsites and their food and water-sources.
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1932
- Summary
- Kukatja speaker and prolific painter at Warlayirti Artists in Balgo (WA). She developed a distinctive style with heavy dabs of paint.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2003
- Age at death
- 71
Details
Latitude-22.33179445 Longitude128.7182772 Start Date1930-01-01 End Date2003-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Lake Mackay, WA, Australia
- Biography
- Born c. 1930 “in the bush”, on the north-west side of Lake Mackay, Sam Tjampitjin was a Kukatja speaker. His Dreamings were Tingari and Water, and his traditional country was the site of Lanta-lanta, the area north-west of Lake Mackay. The artist had only been painting for Warlayirti Artists since early 1990. His works impressed with their strong, bold colours and design. Coming from a senior person in Men’s Law, these images presumably speak from the deep well-springs of the artist’s knowledge and experience. All his works communicate something of the artist’s sense of the power of the land. Many deal with Water Dreaming and associated rainmaking rituals.
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1930
- Summary
- Sam had been painting with Warlayirti Artists since the early 1990's. His paintings are strong, with bold colours and designs. His paintings reflect his knowledge as a senior lawman and his connection with the land and associated rainmaking rituals.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2003
- Age at death
- 73
Details
Latitude55 Longitude-3 Start Date1928-01-01 End Date2003-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- United Kingdom
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1928
- Summary
- Fawcett trained in England, later moving to Melbourne taking a position with David Lancashire's studio as a "lettering artist'. He moved toward retirement with the appearance of computer-generated typography.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-03
- Age at death
- 75
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1927-01-01 End Date2003-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 6 April 1927
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2003
- Age at death
- 76
Details
Latitude41.8755616 Longitude-87.6244212 Start Date1926-01-01 End Date2003-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Chicago, IL, USA
- Biography
- This entry is a stub. Please help the DAAO by adding biographical material
Writers:
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 11 July 1926
- Summary
- Chicago born Carl McConnell became the most significant potter in post World War II Brisbane as he introduced porcelain and stone firing techniques to Brisbane. As with many studio potters of his generation he was profoundly influenced by Bernard Leach's A Potters Book.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2003
- Age at death
- 77
Details
Latitude-26 Longitude121 Start Date1920-01-01 End Date2003-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Western Australia, Western Australia?
- Biography
- Born 'in the bush’ c.1920, probably near Hidden Basin, Alan Winderoo was a senior law-man of the Kukatja tribe within the Balgo community. His country on his father’s side was Yinpirkuana (Impirrkarwanu) near Lappi Lappi and his principal stories were Tingari and Water Dreamings. He began painting in Balgo for Warlayirti Artists in 1987, but may have painted prior to this, through his links with the Yuendumu community. His works exhibit a stong sense of tradition. The often rough application of paint serves to confirm that what was important to the artist was the message, which in turn is concerned with powerful events and forces of the mythological past. A painting of the artist’s was exhibited at the Madrid Art Fair in February 1990.
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1920
- Summary
- A senior Kukatja law-man and artist at Balgo (WA). His rough application of paint brings attention to his Dreaming, which is indifferent to aesthetic effects. His work is held in major art collections.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2003
- Age at death
- 83
Details
Latitude-34.9275 Longitude138.6 Start Date1919-01-01 End Date2003-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
- Biography
- cartoonist and writer, was born in Adelaide and educated at Norwood High School and Urbrae Agricultural High. In 1939 he left Adelaide by pushbike for Kings Cross. He joined the AIF in 1940, sailed to Singapore and was captured at its fall. Gunner Sprod spent three and a half years as a prisoner of the Japanese. He drew cartoons in Changi and produced a hand-made magazine 'Smoke-oh’ to entertain other POWs; he also illustrated Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland at Changi in 1944. His POW cartoons were reproduced as a special feature in the Australian Women’s Weekly on 17 November 1945, eg two diggers carting 'Ishibishi Gasoline Coy’ tank through jungle: '“Gee, I wish it was full of beer.”/ “Don’t be silly. We haven’t got any glasses” (ill. Lindesay 1994, 32).
Sprod returned to Kings Cross in 1945 and was appointed the Daily Telegraph (ACP) cartoonist on the strength of his POW drawings. In 1949 he sailed for London and worked in Fleet Street for 20 years, primarily as a feature artist for Punch during the whole of his stay (Joan Kerr owned a collection of his Punch cartoons). He returned to Sydney in 1969 'owing to a wee bit of domestic trouble’ (Jensen, p.11) and resumed living at Kings Cross. He drew cartoons and illustrations for the Sydney Morning Herald for many years, e.g. [scene of traffic accident chaos, with man in flares, jewellery and fur saying to a policeman] “Can’t you hurry up with the formalities? – We’re on our way to a happening” (ill. Lindesay 1979, 316). ML has 4 original cartoons of the 1960s (PXD 764) and 17 originals of 1981-82 and undated (PXD 739) drawn for the Bulletin , including The People Plague published 30 June 1981, 97 (high rise buildings ruined by a woman hanging out her washing) and another of a bloke unable to leave his terrace house because his female partner is wearing the clothes. Both were included the 1999 SLNSW b/w exhibition. NLA has neg. of 'Strong willing girl wanted’ from Chips off a shoulder .
Sprod entered White Meat , a cartoon published in the Spectator , in the 1992 Stanley Awards (exhibited SLNSW). A longtime member of the Australian Black and White Artists’ Club, he was 'smocked’ in 1994. He was still living at Kings Cross in February 1999 when he visited the Artists and Cartoonists exhibition at the S.H. Ervin Gallery in February 1999 and drew a cartoon in the visitors’ book. He may have moved to a nursing home in 2000. He died early in April 2003.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1919
- Summary
- Popular Adelaide born, mid 20th century Sydney and London based cartoonist and writer. From his early cartoons to cheer his fellow POWs at Changi, Sprod became one of the most popular London Punch cartoonists of the 1960s.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- Apr-03
- Age at death
- 84
Details
Latitude-33.8260081 Longitude151.2254326 Start Date1918-01-01 End Date2003-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Cremorne, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- comic strip artist and illustrator, won a Walkley Award in 1972 for an Australian Women’s Weekly illustration. In the late 1970s or early 1980s he created the strip Lucky Cat for the Sun-Herald . An original Bulletin cartoon, dated 16 February 1982 is at ML PXD 739.
This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 11 June 1918
- Summary
- Late 20th century Sydney comic strip artist and illustrator and the creator of the 'Lucky Cat' strip that appeared in the Sun Herald in the late 1970s/early 1980s. In 1972 Batten won an Walkley Award for an Australian Women's Weekly illustration.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2-May-03
- Age at death
- 85
Details
Latitude-19.2569391 Longitude146.8239537 Start Date1912-01-01 End Date2003-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Townsville, Qld., Australia
- Biography
- Artist, violin maker and socialist, was born in Townsville, Qld. He left school early and worked in odd jobs from the age of nine. In 1934, aged 22, he became a committed socialist after hearing a speech in Townsville by the left-wing Queensland lawyer Fred Patterson. He moved to Sydney that year to study art at East Sydney Technical College on a scholarship, working at odd jobs around the city, posing at night as an artist’s model, went to sea on coastal traders, worked as a fitter and turner and as a portrait painter. As an artist, sculptor, photographer, designer and woodworker, he was part of a group of painters, writers, poets and filmmakers who lived close to Sydney’s wharves in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. He joined the Communist Party and several Trade Unions. He was involved in a number of strikes as well as actively working against Menzies’s referendum to ban the Communist Party in 1951, where he used his talents to design logos and other visuals in the 'Vote No’ campaign. At a Communist Party meeting he met his wife Phyllis; they married in Paddington in 1939 and had three children.
In the early 1940s Johnson began building violins (although he couldn’t play them). Using traditional materials and methods, he became world-renowned for his instruments. Always inscribed with the letters TIMBFGNBOS (“this instrument may be freely given, never bought or sold”), they were given to promising young musicians who otherwise could not afford them. In 1992 he estimated that he had built 60 violins. He was awarded the OAM in 1991 for 'services to arts, in particular, music instrument making’, complementing the OAM Phyllis had received in 1989 for 'services to women’s affairs and consumer rights’. He died in 2003, aged 90, survived by Phyllis and two of their children, Peter and Alice. Another son, Ralph, predeceased him.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1912
- Summary
- An artist of diverse media, a world known violin maker and a committed socialist, Johnson was awarded an OAM in 1991 for services to the arts.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2003
- Age at death
- 91
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1910-01-01 End Date2003-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
- Biography
- cartoonist, was born in Sydney in July 1910. Adopted at the age of six months, he went to primary school in Balmain and Drummoyne. In 1918, aged eight, he moved with his family to a place called Dry River, at Cobargo on the far south coast of NSW, and completed his education through Correspondence School. Returning to Sydney in 1929, he worked as a blacksmith’s striker for six months, a job his hero Les Darcy had also held. Also in emulation he enrolled at Jack Dunleavy’s gymnasium, but withdrew from the boxing profession before his first fight. An accident while driving a petrol wagon for the Vacuum Oil Company put him in hospital for a long time, when he began taking art lessons by correspondence. Afterwards, on the dole, he studied life drawing at the Catholic Guild, Sydney.
Dixon freelanced with the Bulletin , Rydges Business Journal and Smith’s Weekly and drew comic stories for Frank Johnson publications until appointed art editor of Smith’s Weekly after Jim Russell left. His original cartoon '- and the judges have called for a photo’ was donated to the SLNSW ML in 1999 by the wife of a reporter on Smith’s , along with over 20 other originals and a copy of the final issue (28 October 1950) signed by all the cartoonists. Another of his cartoons, in the Thomas Ottaway donation, 'But only God can make a tree’ (ML ) n.d. [1940s?], was probably also done for Smith’s .
Les joined the army in 1941 but served only three months because his earlier injuries prevented him from wearing a tin hat. He was the dominant figure of Smith’s post-war years, leaving in 1949 (not long before it folded in October 1950) to join the Sydney Production Unit of the Brisbane Courier Mail as art editor (Cullen, Horseman and other Smith’s artists also moved there). He left in February 1957 to take over 'Bluey and Curley’ after Norman Rice died (who had succeeded the strip’s creator, Alex Gurney). He continued it until 26 July 1975 and also created the comic strip, 'Phill Dill’.
Dixon was made a life member of the Australian Black and White Artists’ Club in 1991 and was awarded a Silver Stanley in 1994 for his contribution to Australian cartooning. Mid 1990s strips in the Black and White Artists’ Club Collection are at SLNSW ML. After he retired he lived at Summerland Point and drew a regular strip (and often other cartoons) for the free national monthly newspaper, The Australian Senior Citizen. He has organised art competitions for Aboriginal children throughout Australia. Contributed to S.H. Ervin cartoonists’ book in February 1999. Included in Brenda Rainbow’s Federation Cartoonists (2001).
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. July 1910
- Summary
- Prolific newspaper cartoonist.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- May-03
- Age at death
- 93
Details
Latitude-38.228973 Longitude143.136785 Start Date1910-01-01 End Date2003-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Camperdown, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 31 August 1910
- Summary
- Cecily Adams was senior decorator at Beard Watsons, Sydney, later in private practice in Castlecrag. She was a founding member of the SIDA in 1951. Educated at Strathcona Melbourne, she relocated to Sydney in 1932 and studied art at the East Sydney Technical College under Rayner Hoff. Her book, "From the Diary of an Australian Decorator", published by Child and Henry in 1986 is a memoir of her career in interior design.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 23-Dec-03
- Age at death
- 93
Details
Latitude-20.12069 Longitude127.79392 Start Date1960-01-01 End Date2002-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Balgo Hill, WA, Australia
- Biography
- Matthew Gill’s work has received much attention from non-Aboriginal people, in part because of his fascination, to a far greater degree than anyone else in the Balgo community, with non-traditional designs and techniques. For example, he combined the X-ray technique of Arnhem Land with his own desert motifs. Born at the old Balgo Mission in about 1960, he began painting in 1982. He usually painted Snake, Emu and Water Dreaming stories from the area surrounding Lake Lazlett. A Kukatja speaker, he lived either at Balgo or in the Nyirrpi community. He was the son of Mick Gill . In 1989 the artist spent three months living and painting in Japan. Former Warlayirti Artists coordinator Michael Rae once described Matthew Gill as 'the most original and talented of all the younger artists at Balgo’.
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1960
- Summary
- A Kukatja artist, and resident of both Balgo (WA) and Nyirrpi (NT), Gill's experimentation with different painting techniques produced a unique style. His work is in major collections in Australia and overseas.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2002
- Age at death
- 42
Details
Latitude-23.447 Longitude131.882 Start Date1950-01-01 End Date2002-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Haasts Bluff, NT, Australia
- Biography
- Born at Haasts Bluff in 1950, Goodwin spent his boyhood walking around the Haasts Bluff area. The family came to Papunya when the settlement was established in 1960 and Goodwin attended school there briefly. During the ’70s he worked as a stockman at Haasts Bluff, Hermannsburg, Vaughan Springs, and Orange Spring near Jay Creek. In the early ’80s he began to paint for Papunya Tula Artists, with instruction from Charlie Egalie and Turkey Tolson. He painted Dingo and Rock Wallaby stories from his traditional country around Nyuuman, south-east of Kintore, where close relative Mick Namarari had an outstation.
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Note: primary biographer
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1950
- Summary
- Initially a stockman, Goodwin took up painting in the early 1980s through close contact with senior artists such as Mick Namarari, Charlie Egalie and Turkey Tolson.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2002
- Age at death
- 52
Details
Latitude-27.467778 Longitude153.028056 Start Date1946-01-01 End Date2002-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Brisbane, QLD, Australia
- Biography
- Ron Hurley was born in Mt Gravatt, Queensland on 19 October 1946. He is from the Gooreng Gooreng people on his mother’s side, and the Mununjali people on his father’s side. His family totem is 'Gnyala’ – the Owl. His personal totem is 'Wajgan’ – the Willy Wag Tail. From an early age Hurley showed skill in areas of sport and art – he was a high achiever in athletics, cricket and football, and he topped his classes in art throughout his primary and secondary education. His love and talent for art grew and saw him develop his first exhibition in 1966 at the age of 19. On August the 6th of this same year Hurley married Colleen Rose Kirk, from Cherbourg. They have two children, daughter Angelina and son Simon. Hurley was the first Aboriginal person to graduate from the Queensland College of Art when in 1975 he obtained a Degree in Visual Arts. He furthered his study at the Brisbane College of Advanced Education Kelvin Grove from 1976 to 1977. Hurley’s career is as diverse as his talent from being a sign writer and commercial artist, to later on as an arts manager, curator, teacher and lecturer. Hurley’s achievements were many including being awarded the 1992 Australia Council for the arts residency at the Cite des Arts in Paris, and exhibited at the Australian Consulate; working in collaboration with Minale Tattersfield Bryce and Partners as the Artist designer of the highly acclaimed Sydney 2000 Olympic Games Bid Logo; he was the first artist to initiate and facilitate artistic workshops to the Indigenous Artistic communities of far north Queensland specifically Aurukun. His work developing into the now growing trend of casting traditional Indigenous sculpture into cast metal medium and unique pieces of art. He was awarded the Ian Fairweather Memorial Prize, Redcliff Arts Prize, Gatton Art Prize, and NAIDOC National Poster Competition. Arts residencies include at Queensland University of Technology, Kelvin Grove Campus, and Capricornia Campus, Rockhampton. Along with curator Djon Mundine, Hurley was the judge on the panel of the very 1st Telstra Indigenous Art Award in Darwin. He held numerous positions of expertise and authority including: being the first Aboriginal member of the Board of Trustees of the Queensland Art Gallery from 1996 to 1997, chairing the Visual Arts Committee of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Board of the Australia Council for the Arts from 1993 to 1996, and chairing the Indigenous Reference Panel, of Queensland’s Indigenous Arts Marketing Export Agency (QIAMEA), with State Development from 2000 to 2002. Hurley’s first passion however was for producing art. His skill, knowledge and talent spanned various media including ceramics, painting, sculpture, photography and film, public art, linocut and screen printing, clothing, jewellery and even furniture. Hurley’s work was often based on historical and political figures, and examining the plight of Aborigines in urban society. Ron’s aim was to immortalise Indigenous people and culture through his work. It is exhibited and collected both nationally and internationally. His most celebrated painting 'Bradman Bowled Gilbert’ (1989) was purchased by the Queensland Art Gallery in 1990. Refusing to adopt the “dot” style of the stereotyped art from Aboriginal artist, Hurley commented on his art in contemporary Australian culture stating, “traditional Aboriginal art forms have always had their fair share of exposure and promotion. Stereotyping, being what is it, relegated these forms to the realm of kitsch. At long last the world is responding in a more positive manner, and traditional art is being looked at in its rightful context. It is the very fibre of our country’s imagery. The urban Aboriginal situation is the one, which captures my imagination, for it is here that one experiences 'limboism’, being neither Black nor White, so I am told. A world of such extreme contrast is the one to which I have learned to respond, survive, and attempt to create in”. Hurley is highly respected as an artist not only throughout the arts industry but also throughout Indigenous communities all over Australia. A proud Aboriginal man, he dedicated his whole artistic life to his homelands in Queensland and his Aboriginal culture. He was a mentor for Australian Indigenous young and emerging artists and was a tireless campaigner, advocate and promoter of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art and culture. Hurley’s career spanned over 4 decades. He passed away on 3 November 2002.
Writers:
Hurley, Angelina
Date written:
2008
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 19 October 1946
- Summary
- A proud Aboriginal man, Ron Hurley's work reflected and represented various aspects of Indigenous Australian people, life and culture. From immortalising Aboriginal people and culture in his work to making significant political points and raising awareness
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 3-Nov-02
- Age at death
- 56
Details
Latitude48.666667 Longitude19.5 Start Date1943-01-01 End Date2002-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Bratislava, Czechoslovakia (Slovakia)
- Biography
- The symmetry of Paul Partos’s career as a painter, bracketed within two landmark exhibitions of Australian abstract art, both at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) – 'The Field’ (1968) and 'Fieldwork: Australian Art 1968-2002’ (2003) – resonates with the artist’s use of a border in his canvases to frame, in his words, 'the allusive [sic] world of felt experience’. Contained within the self-imposed physical and conceptual limits of a square or rectangle, Partos’s canvases reveal intense passages of his inner life, expressed in markings ranging from quietude and restraint to exuberant expressions of form and colour, universalised in the process of painting. Paul Partos arrived with his family in Western Australia in 1949, he and his brothers spending an initial six months in a Perth orphanage before being reunited with their parents for the move to Melbourne, an experience that coloured his life and art. From 1959 to 1962, Partos studied at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology alongside fellow students Robert Jacks, Guy Stuart, George Baldessin and Gareth Sansom. Following his critically acclaimed, sell-out first solo exhibition in 1965 at Gallery A in Melbourne and Sydney (curated by James Mollison) and later inclusion in 'The Field’, Partos became interested in conceptual art, resulting – after two years in New York (1970-72) – in austere, sparsely painted works. Although never entirely absent in his work, sensuality returned to his paintings in the late 1970s. In the 1980s, Partos experimented with etching, finding satisfaction in creating surfaces that matched his paintings in richness and sensitivity. In 1987, he left his fourteen-year teaching position at the Victorian College of the Arts to paint full time, exhibiting with Sherman Galleries in Sydney and Christine Abrahams Gallery in Melbourne from 1992. The beauty and vitality of his last exhibitions with these galleries (2000 and 2001 respectively) drew particular praise from an art world where abstract painters occupy a persistent presence in contemporary art. Paul Partos was represented in important solo and group exhibitions in Australia and abroad, among them 'Minimal Art’ (NGV, 1976); 'The Work and its Context’ (San Francisco Museum of Art, 1978); 'Australian Perspecta’ (Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1981); 'Eureka’ (Serpentine Gallery, London, 1982); 'The Field Now’ (Heide Park and Art Gallery, Melbourne, 1984); 'Windows on Australia 1’ (Australian Embassy, Tokyo, 1995); '1968’ (National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1995); and Clemenger Award, Triennial Exhibition of Contemporary Art (NGV, 1996). In 1992, he was awarded an Australia Council Fellowship Grant. His work is held in the National Gallery of Australia, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, major state and regional collections and in several important corporate collections. The Estate of Paul Partos comprises a number of works spanning the artist’s career and a comprehensive archive of written and visual documentation. The Estate provides material for researchers, curators and students interested in the artist and Australian art from the late 1960s until 2002.
Writers:
Murray-Cree, Laura
Date written:
2006
Last updated:
2008
- Born
- b. 4 January 1943
- Summary
- Paul Partos's canvases reveal intense passages of his inner life, expressed in markings ranging from quietude and restraint to exuberant expressions of form and colour, universalised in the process of painting.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- Dec-02
- Age at death
- 59
Details
Latitude-19.8516101 Longitude133.2303375 Start Date1940-01-01 End Date2002-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Pikilyi (Vaughan Springs), NT, Australia
- Biography
- Born at Pikilyi (Vaughan Springs) c.1940, Charlie’s language/tribe was Warlpiri/Luritja. He received some basic European schooling at the mission school in Yuendumu, and was initiated near Haasts Bluff. He worked as a stockman for seven years on the station at Haasts Bluff and later in Queensland. After marrying Nora Nakamarra, he worked on Narwietooma station for many years. Charlie and his wife came to Papunya in the very early days of the settlement. They had two sons and two daughters, of whom Natalie Corby began painting in the early ’80s under her father’s instruction. Charlie Egalie lived with his family at Mt Liebig, where his mother and father were settled closer to their country round Kunatjarrayi. Charlie himself dated his painting from Peter Fannin’s time running Papunya Tula Artists (1972-5). Billy Stockman , Kaapa Tjampitjinpa and Johnny Warangkula guided him in the beginning. His paintings depict Woman, Sugar Ant, Budgerigar, Wallaby, Bushfire, and Man Dreamings at sites across this region. Nora Egalie Nakamarra occasionally painted stories of her country at Kunatjarrayi after her husband showed her how to paint in 1989.
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Note: primary biographer
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1940
- Summary
- Warlpiri/Luritja artist who commenced painting in Papunya as early as 1972. His work is included in many major art collections.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2002
- Age at death
- 62
Details
Latitude-20.93877525 Longitude128.9563258 Start Date1935-01-01 End Date2002-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Lake Dennis, WA, Australia
- Biography
- Born 'in the bush’ in 1935, probably in the area of Lake Dennis, Bridget Mudjidell was a member of the Ngarti language group. Her country was Tulku, on the west side of Lake White near Yagga Yagga. She mainly painted about food and water sources in this region. The artist spent the first part of her life in the area and knew it intimately. A gregarious, friendly woman, Bridget Mudjidell was a leader in women’s activities at Balgo. Her works all reflect a great knowledge and love of the land. An energetic painter, her work was always deeply personal, telling of her recent visits to places and of her ancestors’ activities there. She began painting for Warlayirti Artists in 1988.
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1935
- Summary
- Ngarti speaker who painted the food and water sources of her country at Tulku (WA). She led women's activities in Balgo and was one of Warlayirti Artists' leading painters.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2002
- Age at death
- 67
Details
Latitude41.764582 Longitude-72.6908547 Start Date1932-01-01 End Date2002-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Hartford, Hartford, Connecticut, USA
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1932
- Summary
- In 1965 James Doolin came to Australia and became closely involved with the younger generation of abstract and colour field artists who worked and exhibited at Central Street in Sydney.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 22-Jul-02
- Age at death
- 70
Details
Latitude-22.5216511 Longitude132.7344955 Start Date1932-01-01 End Date2002-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Napperby station, Napperby, NT, Australia
- Biography
- Born c. 1932 at Napperby Station. Language/tribe Anmatyerre. His father was born at the site of Ngarlu (Ngwerritye Alatiye) west of Mt Allan. His mother came from Warlugulong, south west of Yuendumu. The name Possum was given to Clifford by his paternal grandfather. Clifford received no formal education, growing up “in the bush” and then at Jay Creek during the late 1940s. He did stockwork at various stations across the Centre including Hamilton Downs, Glen Helen, Mt Wedge, Mt Allan and Napperby. One of last men to join Geoffrey Bardon’s group of 'painting men’ at the beginning of the 1970s – with the encouragement of his brother Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri.
Clifford Possum was already a woodcarver of reknown, and had been employed at Papunya School teaching woodcarving to the children and was Chairman of Papunya Tula Artists during the early 1980s. During the ’70s and ’80s, he and his family lived at Papunya, Napperby Station, M’bunghara outstation near Glen Helen, and then Alice Springs. Subsequently, Clifford divided his time between Alice Springs amd the homes of his daughters Gabrielle Possum and Michelle Possum (who are both painters) in Melbourne, Adelaide and Kempsey on the NSW Central Coast. He also travelled widely in Australia and to Europe and North America.
Clifford Possum’s country was around Mt Wedge (Kerrinyarra), Napperby station (Tjuirri) and Mt Allan and his vast repertoire of Dreaming stories included Possum, Fire, Water, Kangaroo, Fish, Snake, Man’s Love Story, Lightning, Mala, Goanna etc. He died in Alice Springs on June 21 2002, the day he was to have been awarded his AO.
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Olivia Bolton
zreview
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. c.1932
- Summary
- Leading Papunya Tula artist. One of last men to join Geoffrey Bardon's group of 'painting men' at the beginning of the 1970s and the first to be recognised as an artist in his own right. His illustrious career has been the subject of several books and a major retrospective organised by the Art Gallery of South Australia, which toured nationally in 2003/5.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2002
- Age at death
- 70
Details
Latitude-32.716667 Longitude151.55 Start Date1926-01-01 End Date2002-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Maitland, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- sculptor, nun and Anglican priest, was born in Maitland, NSW, where she spent her childhood. Due to recurrent bronchitis ('I grew too quickly’), she was sent to boarding school in Moss Vale where it was hoped that the air of the southern tablelands would improve her health. Holidays were spent in the company of her two brothers, either roaming the grassy plains of her father’s home country of Moree or in the Hunter Valley droving cattle from Aberglassyn. The sounds, smells and excitement of the bullock teams moving up Maitland High Street to the noise and dust of the saleyards, the crack of the stockmen’s whips and the music of the blacksmith’s forge all left impressions that were to re-emerge in her sculpture.
Solling was always interested in healing work and considered studying medicine but was dissuaded by the prevailing attitude that professional careers were wasted on girls. So in 1945-46 she enrolled at East Sydney Technical College under the sculptor Lyndon Dadswell . Being among the first intake after the war, many of her fellow students had come straight from the army. It was 'an exciting and dynamic time’, an education she valued highly and later claimed was superior to anything she learnt overseas. She made the mandatory pilgrimage to London in 1947. Although rather lonely, she thoroughly enjoyed the world of the Tate Gallery, Bond Street and the latest exhibitions. She studied at the Slade ('the traditional thing to do’) but found it had little to offer her and set up in a studio in Chelsea, where many of her wire sculptures were completed. They were exhibited in 1951 at the Galerie Apollinaire, London.
She returned to Australia in 1952 and had a solo exhibition at David Jones Art Gallery in September. Then followed a freelance period with many commissions for portrait busts, including those of the singer Rosina Raisbeck and author Hans Christian Andersen. The latter, commissioned by the Danish community in 1955, was presented to the City of Sydney and installed in the grounds of Phillip Park. It disappeared in mysterious circumstances in 1984. Solling was one of only two women sculptors in the group exhibition held by the Society of Sculptors and Associates at David Jones Art Gallery in 1955, the other being Kathleen Shillam .
She returned to the UK in 1956 with a firm commitment to a religious vocation and entered the closed order of St Clare of Assisi where she remained until returning to Australia in 1975 to found a similar community at Stroud (NSW). She was the energy and guiding force behind the construction of a remarkable group of buildings and chapels built of handmade earth bricks and local timbers. Her sculpture – 'meditations on things you see’ – and her religious faith were never in conflict but worked in harmony to carry the message of St Clare, whom Sister Angela considered one of the earliest feminists.
Aged 66, Sister Angela decided to seek ordination. She was made a deacon, then a priest in 1992. She created a second stage of her monastery, which she planned to open to lay involvement and ministry. Dedicated in 1997, it was named 'Gunya Chiara’ from the Aboriginal word for house and the Italian word for light. She became interested in learning from Aboriginal women, developing ideas about the relationship between Aboriginal Dreaming and the Franciscan tradition and encouraging non-Aboriginal women to spend weekends at the monastery to learn about the sacredness of the land.
An accident with molten wax while Angela was absent from Gunya Chiara resulted in the burning down of the library and of Angela’s workshop and her works in progress. Already in trouble with numbers and over its aims, this sealed the fate of the monastery as a woman-centred place. It became the home of the First Order of Franciscan Brothers at the Hermitage, along with other Anglicans, and is now administered by the Samaritan Foundation, the social care agency of the Diocese of Newcastle. At 74 Angela accepted an offer to become an assistant priest in Church of the Good Shepherd in the diocese of Massachusetts (USA), where she worked with an artist interested in the visually impaired (Brennan). She died from a sudden massive stroke; her funeral service was held in St Philip’s Episcopalian Church, Brevard, North Carolina on 9 February 2002. Her ashes were scattered wide: on the hills of the local riding school for disabled people that was involved in and in Australia: on the hills surrounding the Stroud monastery and in the outback desert. Memorial services were held on 7 March in the Anglican Cathedral, Newcastle, and on 11 May in Gunya Chiara.
Solling/Sister Angela’s sculptures are held both privately and publicly. The Man from Snowy River (1955-56), a wood and copper wire mural, is in the Ashfield Hotel, Sydney, while one of her many sculptures on religious themes is in the Anglican cathedral at Newcastle (NSW). A small collection was included in an exhibition of modernist sculpture at the Ivan Dougherty Gallery, UNSW COFA, c.1999
Contemplation and sculpture were always the dominant forces in the life of Wendy Solling (later Sister Angela). As a child she was more at ease making toys with hammer and chisel than with dolls, having been introduced to tools by her doctor father. At school she chose drawing classes, but found static, still-life arrangements and an emphasis on perspective and shading little to her liking. Dissatisfied and restless, she longed to draw a tree, to catch the movement-'the spiralling thing’-so abandoned her lessons and began to carve straight into her material: fence post, wooden ruler and rifle butt.
As Sister Angela, she considered contemplation to be about shedding the inessentials and reaching back to 'the bare bones of what Clare is about’. Hence her decision to abandon plaster, colour and all embellishment and use the unadorned wire’s sinuous curves for movement and its cast shadows as shading ('we make our own shading’) was a logical development in her art.
It was not so much homesickness as an expatriate’s longing for the spaciousness of the Australian plains and a touch of nostalgia for the droving life – the cuppa over the fence, the swearing and cursing at the stockyards, the 'mystery and the poetry’ in the frosty light of early morning musters – which led her to the use of such icons of national identity as the bullocky, the drover, the shearer and his sheep. She remembers school holidays 'up Moree way’ where in the heat, dust and dryness everything, even clothing, is stripped to the bare minimum. The grasslands with their interminable wire fences are dry, parched expanses, littered with the sun-dried bones of animals: truly 'a land that could dry out the body and spirit’.
Sister Angela shared with the poet Judith Wright not only their images of the archetypal male Australian heroes, the Bullocky and the Drover, but also the same insistence on bone, bare and bleached. Both ignored the bravado of much masculinist representation; for instance, in this case the drover is not presented as a man of action but in a moment of repose, the horse’s head hanging tiredly down (Wright’s 'bone whisper[ing] in the hide’), the insubstantiality of the wire frame an allusion to the passing of an era. In Wright’s 1943 poem the bullocky, too, is rendered vulnerable by obsolescence:
Grass is across the wagon tracks,
and plough strikes bone beneath the grass,
and vineyards cover all the slopes
where the dead teams were used to pass.
The ghosts of dead teams and the fine-drawn shadows of the wire sculptures, now become ghostly mementos, are in marked contrast to the swirling, dusty action in Tom Roberts’s The Breakaway or Adam Lindsay Gordon’s 'running fire of stockwhips and a fiery run of hoofs’. The figure of the drover, at one with his horse and constantly on the move, thus epitomises the poet’s spiritual journey into the country of the self and the artist’s own search for creative and spiritual identity.
Writers:
Steggall, Susan
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
1992
- Born
- b. 1926
- Summary
- Sculptor, nun and Anglican priest. Sister Angela's sculptural practice was informed by her religion, her sense of the sacredness of the land and her contemplations on light, space and the materials of her art. In 1975 she began to oversee the construction of a monastery at Stroud, NSW, which was finally dedicated in 1997.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2002
- Age at death
- 76
Details
Latitude-37.560833 Longitude143.8475 Start Date1921-01-01 End Date2002-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Ballarat, Vic, Australia
- Biography
- Painter, entered the NGV Art School as an ex-soldier (former Sergeant) after WWII; 42 of the 59 new students in 1946 were ex-servicemen. In 1947 he entered Second Class 1947, oil on canvas (Warrnambool Art Gallery), for the Travelling Art Scholarship – a realistic painting that included portraits of friends and fellow students (John Brack, Grahame King – with whom he shared a studio – Helen Maudsley and Fred Williams). George Bell gave advice on the composition. He won the scholarship although many considered the painting shockingly moderne in its rounded modelling and everyday subject matter. He went to England, where he found accommodation at The Abbey Art Centre in New Barnet, Hertfordshire, where various Australian artists lived, including Mary Webb , James Gleeson, Robert Klippel, Noel Counihan, Bernard Smith, Leonard French and Stacha Halpern (see Bernard Smith reminiscences, vol.2), while others visited, e.g. Albert Tucker, Michael Shannon and Alan McCulloch.
Green returned to Melbourne in the early 1950s and struggled to survive, first as a graphic designer then as an art teacher. He kept painting and exhibited in a few, ever decreasing modest shows. After a 30-year wait, he finally emerged in the 1980s showing pencil, ink and gouache close-up environmental drawings of foliage and natural debris on the bush floor at Pinacotheca gallery – the results of long study of oriental art, especially shanshui drawings of the Sung Dynasty. Subsequently showed 2 painted scrolls (massed clouds over Port Phillip Bay and dawn sky viewed from the bush near Castlemaine, where he lived after he retired). For the last decade of his life he became increasingly reclusive, repeatedly doing coloured drawings of dead mistletoe, which were much admired by the cognoscenti and occasionally included in curated exhibitions.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 5 March 1921
- Summary
- Trained in art after serving in WWII. Won a travelling Art Scholarship to England with a realistic painting showing some very well known friends and fellow students including John Brack and Fred Williams.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2002
- Age at death
- 81
Details
Latitude41.8933203 Longitude12.4829321 Start Date1920-01-01 End Date2002-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Rome, Italy
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1920
- Summary
- Molina designed and built a number of racing cars and special models and competed in race meetings and rallies.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-02
- Age at death
- 82
Details
Latitude-26 Longitude121 Start Date1920-01-01 End Date2002-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Western Australia
- Biography
- Born 'in the bush’, probably around Lake Wills and Lake Hazlett c.1920, Mick Gill was one of several senior Tjakamarra men in the Balgo community who all came from the country surrounding Lappi Lappi or Hidden Basin (others include Alan Winderoo and Albert Nagomara ). The artist’s country was Liltjin, south-east of Balgo. These men and their wives were all Kukatja speakers who live and sometimes worked together. Mick Gill , who usually painted Water Dreaming stories for this site, started painting in 1985. His paintings were sold through Warlayirti Artists. His work was marked by the sense of controlled energy gained from his close, swirling lines. He talked of areas of country being the 'same’ as parts of the body and his work conveys something of this feel. He was married to Susie Bootja Bootja .
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1920
- Summary
- Senior Kukatja artist of Warlayirti Artists at Balgo (WA). His principal subject matter, Water Dreaming, was often depicted in tight swirling lines.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2002
- Age at death
- 82
Details
Latitude-19.8516101 Longitude133.2303375 Start Date1919-01-01 End Date2002-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Kurlpurlurnu, NT, Australia
- Biography
- Born 1919 at Kurlpurlurnu, Abie Jangala’s language/tribe was Warlpiri and his country Kurlpurlurnu/ Parrulyu/ Puyuuru [Mikanjijangka – Kurlpurlurnukurra – from Mikanji through to Kurlpurlurnu] – a wide-ranging set of country. His main Dreamings were Ngapa (water) and Watiyawarnu. He and Jimmy Kelly shared Dreamings. Abie started painting in 1986 in the Traditional Painting course at Lajamanu. He was one of the first active painters at Lajamanu – the “grand old man” of Lajamanu painting. He was an important ceremonial leader and a most charming and personable old man. In 1989 he visited the Dreamtime Gallery in Perth for several months and painted in the gallery. His late wife used to paint too. In 1993 he had his first solo exhibition at Coo-ee Gallery in Sydney.
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1919
- Summary
- Warlpiri artist and important ceremonial leader, Jangala was also known as the 'grand old man' of Lajamanu painting. He had his first solo exhibition at Coo-ee gallery, Sydney, in 1993.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2002
- Age at death
- 83
Details
Latitude-33.9217004 Longitude151.2557975 Start Date1919-01-01 End Date2002-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Coogee, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 December 1919
- Summary
- John Duffecy was a self-taught furniture designer and maker whose business, John Duffecy Furniture, operated from a shop in Glenmore Road, Paddington, in the 1960s and 1970s. Some of his furniture was manufactured by Bowmer & Rogers (Shapiro sale SH126, 2016).
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2002
- Age at death
- 83
Details
Latitude55 Longitude-3 Start Date1917-01-01 End Date2002-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- United Kingdom
- Biography
- Writers:
Date written:
Last updated:
Status:
peer-reviewed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1917
- Summary
- Michael Hirst was a designer/manufacturer with a small factory in Hawthorn (2-3 workers), dates uncertain. He began designing with Clement Meadmore in 1955 and Hirst was active as designer from 1955-1983 under Michael Hirst P/L, Michael Hirst Furniture and/or "H-Line". Sold through Andersons, Georges , interior decorators, he also exhibited at Gallery A, Melbourne. (info based on telephone interview in 1996).
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-02
- Age at death
- 85
Details
Latitude-34.9275 Longitude138.6 Start Date1917-01-01 End Date2002-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
- Biography
- Photographer, was born in 1917, son of the English film star Madge Campbell and her husband Douglas Murray (whom she met when he was at Cambridge) of a well-known South Australian pastoral family that lived on a property called Murray Park – now the Adelaide suburb of that name. He was educated at St Peter’s College, Adelaide and at Cambridge then spent some time as a jackaroo, despite having absolutely no interest in rural life. Instead he was keen on photography, painting and drawing so drove to Sydney to work as an artist and never returned to Adelaide. In 1947 Ure Smith published his Alec Murray’s Album , a collection of portraits of Sydney society, diplomats, dancers and painters ('friends’) who included the young Kerry Packer sitting by a fish pond, the dress designer Luciana Arrighi and her sister Marcella, journalist David McNicoll, decorator Lesley Walford and lots of glamorous women. Many of the photographs were taken at Merioola, a large boarding house in Rosemount Avenue, Woollahra owned by Chicka Lowe (see Christine France, 1986) where lots of avant-garde artists lived, including Donald Friend , Justin O’Brien, Loudon Sainthill and Jocelyn Rickards. Murray lived in the stables.
He left Australia the year after the book was published and was joined in London by Rickards and Harry Tatlock Miller, later by Sainthill. They all found it difficult to get work in Britain but Murray got a job as a photographer for a magazine called Illustrated and his salary supported the four of them in a small flat in South Kensington. Failing to enlist during WWII because he was diabetic, he talked the authorities into appointing him a photographer in the Royal Navy. Packing a quantity of insulin and secretly injecting himself twice a day, he went to the Pacific Islands. 'Brave, but mad’, his wife later commented.
By 1951 Murray had his own London studio and his first commission from Paris Match . He covered the Coronation for the magazine and was its London photographer for more than a decade. From the mid-1950s until the late 1960s he drove his two-toned Rolls Royce coupe to Paris twice a year for the fashion collections (see also Louis Kahan earlier from Austria), working for the London Daily Telegraph , the Sunday Times and the Australian Women’s Weekly . At the end of each day his assistant Mike Martin would print the black and white photos in the hotel room, washing them in the bidet then ferrying them to the Qantas airbag and direct to the Women’s Weekly . During the 1960s he met and later married the model Sue Robins, who was to become a leading fashion stylist and costume designer. They bought a small cottage near Newbury in Berkshire as a weekend retreat from their elegant Belgravia house – hung with pictures of Murray Park’s finest merinos – where they went every Friday with their small dogs, Adelaide and Sydney. Occasionally they travelled to Sydney to stay with Murray’s oldest friend, the painter Margaret Olley .
Murray retired in 1985. His photographs were rarely exhibited publicly but rather displayed in silver picture frames on grand pianos in private homes, said Julia Clark, until Clark curated the National Portrait Gallery exhibition High Society at the NLA in 1995. In 2001 a retrospective entitled Alec Murray’s Album was mounted at the National Trust SH Ervin Gallery in Sydney; it was on view at Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Victoria, when Murray died in 2002.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 9 October 1917
- Summary
- Australian fashion photographer who lived at Merioola in Sydney in the 1940s before moving to Swinging London.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2002
- Age at death
- 85
Details
Latitude-22.1646782 Longitude144.5844903 Start Date1916-01-01 End Date2002-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- QLD
- Biography
- Artist, illustrator and comic strip artist born in Queensland.
This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a full bio.
Writers:
DAAO staff writer
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1916
- Summary
- Mid 20th century painter and illustrator.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2002
- Age at death
- 86
Details
Latitude-31.9559 Longitude115.8606 Start Date1915-01-01 End Date2002-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Perth, WA, Australia
- Biography
- Silversmith, woodworker, leatherworker and teacher Herbert Kitchener Currie, known as Kitch, was born in Perth in 1915. He was the younger brother of Betsey Currie, who lived with James W. R. Linton. Currie was educated at Wesley Colleges, South Perth, and Melbourne, returning to Perth at the end of 1930. He enrolled the next year at the Perth Technical School. The family lost their fortune in the Depression and in 1932 Currie went to work for a footwear importer, spending his evenings at the newly opened Linton Institute of Art. He worked for about four or five hours a week for Linton, learning his silversmithing skills “on the job”. When Linton’s wife moved interstate in 1938 and he and Betsey moved to Hovea, Western Australia, Currie joined a brother working for a gold-refining plant in Wiluna, returning to the metropolitan area after the war and again assisting Linton until his death in 1947. Currie then lived with his sister at Hovea, working as a craftsman in wood and leather until 1957 when the Hovea property was sold and they moved to Greenmount, Western Australia. There he took up silversmithing and copper work again. In 1964, Currie joined the Education Department as a lecturer in the Art Studies course at Fremantle Technical College, Fremantle, Western Australia. This legitimised his standing and gave him time to experiment. A measure of interest in the community and the success of the silversmithing courses can be gauged by the student numbers in one venue alone. When Currie commenced there were nineteen students. When he resigned and Terry Walsh took over there were one hundred sixty. The contact with the students was an excellent commissioning network and Currie was engaged to make jewellery as wedding and twenty-fifth wedding anniversary presents and for other special occasions. Currie’s mature style developed after an extensive tour of Europe and Morocco in 1974-75 when an Australia Council grant enabled him to spend three months studying this jewellery. The richness of the Arab work is reflected in a number of his subsequent pieces. It is seen in a large, opal-set bracelet, commissioned soon after he encountered the work. It is also seen in one of his loveliest pieces, a peacock necklace made in 1973 now in the Art Gallery of Western Australia. This has fanning scrolls of silver set with opal. Currie’s major works were made in the 1960s and 1970s, among them a number of ecclesiastical commissions and official gifts for the Department of External Affairs. These gifts were mostly serving-spoons and sets of teaspoons. Curry spoons made in 1962 are typical and show the influence of J. W. R. Linton’s work. This is not surprising as Currie had considerable reverence for Linton whose spoons were household equipment and readily available as models. Currie uses three motifs: repeatedly scrolled lines manipulated by pliers, a beaded wire filed by hand from square section and solid fan-like finials, individually carved, which he is adept at making quickly and uses as “finishers”. Currie has an attraction to undulating and scrolling line, and considers he has a natural ability to place these artistically. Currie deliberately kept away from wildflower and other designs used by Jamie Linton and partners, as he did not want to be in competition with men who made their living from their craft. This has meant that in restricting himself to the three basic motifs he has developed an easily recognisable style of his own, based primarily on scrolling wirework and inspired by his mentor J. W. R. Linton. In the late 1980s Currie made an imposing silver and lapis lazuli necklace, with the regular geometry of the stones contrasted against the scrolling detail of the filigree wire. The combination of geometry with scrolling in the smaller pieces is carried into larger works. For instance, Currie made a large copper fire screen and table for chemist Eula Gray in 1973. This is in much the same spirit as the peacock and triangle necklaces with the geometric cartouches, in which both the screen and pendant are contained, giving an air of crispness to the designs. The fire screen is massive with the scrolls constructed from copper rod especially sheared from a heavy-gauge sheet before being fitted into an industrially made steel frame manufactured by Geoff Woodland. Many commissions came through social contacts. One such was the 1973-74 contract for St Cuthbert’s Church in Darlington: a chalice and paten, pyx, lavabo, and a sanctuary lamp. This suite is heavily hammered over mechanically-spun shapes, resulting in an ambience quite false to the method of fabrication The commissioning priest, Father Andrew Donald, a high-church vicar, was very specific about detail. For instance no engraving was to be visible. Currie presented careful renderings of a cup based, it would appear, on Linton sketches in his possession. As an atheist he had little interest in the church dogma. The wide-bowled chalice is a modern variant of the twelfth-century Icelandic Cup in the Victoria and Albert Museum and although a copy is in the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Currie may never have seen this. The chalice, paten, pyx (wafer box) and lavabo (basin) are all set with enamelled copper domes in the manner used on occasion by Linton and Gordon Holdsworth. Twisted wire and small, carved, flower motifs complete the decoration. Later cutlery developed the scrolling-wire theme further and introduced a reeded effect seen in much of Jamie Linton’s work. A 1987 ladle is one of Currie’s most stylish pieces. This is reminiscent of Jamie Linton at his best. Another recent spoon, “Ram’s head and Wheat”, 1987, is also extremely stylish. Currie marked his work with: “KC” (in a square cartouche), “STG. SIL” (in a rectangular cartouche), and a swan mark (also in a separate square cartouche). Currie ceased work in 1988 when failing eyesight, due to cataracts, interfered with his ability to see. Operations undertaken in 1990 enabled him to commence work again in 1991 and he continued almost until his death in 2002.
Writers:
Dr Dorothy Erickson
Date written:
2010
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1915
- Summary
- Herbert Kitchener Currie was born in 1915. He was a silversmith, woodworker, leatherworker and teacher. Currie ceased work in 1988 when failing eyesight, due to cataracts, interfered with his ability to see. Operations undertaken in 1990 enabled him to commence work again in 1991 and he continued almost until his death in 2002.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2002
- Age at death
- 87
Details
Latitude-37.560833 Longitude143.8475 Start Date1915-01-01 End Date2002-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Ballarat, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- Eleanor Constance (Nornie) Gude was born in 1915 at Ballarat. Very advanced in painting at a young age, Gude was accepted into the Ballarat School of Mines Technical Art School at the age of 15. She completed her Ballarat studies between 1932 and 1936, winning the MacRobertson Scholarship in 1934. Gude then studied at Melbourne’s National Gallery School winning the NGV Travelling Scholarship in 1941.
Gude’s husband, Scott Pendlebury was also a painter and her children Anne and Andrew became an actor and musician respectively (see original DAAO entry) .
The work of Nornie Gude is represented in collections such as the Art Gallery of Western Australia; Ballarat Fine Art Gallery; Bendigo Art Gallery; Castlemaine Art Gallery & Historical Museum; Geelong Art Gallery; National Gallery of Victoria; and the University of Ballarat Art Collection.
Nornie Gude died in Melbourne on 24 January 2002.
Writers:
Gervasoni, Clare
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2008
- Born
- b. 8 December 1915
- Summary
- An accomplished painter from an early age, Eleanor Gude, or Nornie as she was known, took up her studies at the age of 15 before going on to win the prestigious MacRobertson Scholarship in 1934 and the NGV Travelling Scholarship in 1941, reputedly the first woman to do so.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 24-Jan-02
- Age at death
- 87
Details
Latitude-42.880556 Longitude147.325 Start Date1913-01-01 End Date2002-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 21 November 1913
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2002
- Age at death
- 89
Details
Latitude-41.441944 Longitude147.145 Start Date1911-01-01 End Date2002-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Launceston, Tasmania, Australia
- Biography
- Painter, was born in Launceston but lived and worked in Sydney for most of his life. He took classes at the National Art School (East Sydney Technical College) in 1935 while working as a draftsman in the Lands Title Office. He began exhibiting his paintings with the Australian Watercolour Institute and the Society of Artists in 1937. He was posted to the ACT Public Service in 1940-49 where he did much to revive the Artists’ Society of Canberra. Influenced by Cézanne, his early watercolours and oils recorded sites around Bathurst, Canberra, Richmond and the pastoral outreaches of Sydney. After a study trip to Britain in 1953-54 he moved back to Sydney, where he lived in a sparsely-furnished wooden cottage in Leichhardt, painting domestic backyards and semi-industrial views of the immediate neighbourhood – Annandale, Pyrmont, Forest Lodge, Rozelle and Balmain in the 1950s and ’60s – then more abstract works. He chiefly exhibited with the Painters’ Gallery at Darlinghurst, but he did not have a solo show until 1976 at Macquarie Galleries. In 2000 he had another at Gitte Weise to accompany the launch of Martin-Webber’s monograph. He died in 2002 aged 90.
This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 1911
- Summary
- Influenced by Cézanne, his early watercolours and oils recorded sites around Bathurst, Canberra, Richmond and the pastoral outreaches of Sydney.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2002
- Age at death
- 91
Details
Latitude48.2 Longitude16.366667 Start Date1905-01-01 End Date2002-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Vienna, Austria
- Biography
- painter, printmaker and stage designer, was born Ludwig Kahan in Vienna on 25 May 1905, son of a Russian-Jewish tailor. His family nickname Louis was adopted throughout his life. Although he wanted to train as an artist, his father persuaded him to be a tailor, although he attended evening art classes and continued to draw. He moved to Paris in 1925 and was employed as a master tailor for Paul Poiret. Within a few weeks he was appointed a designer for Poiret; designing clothes for Josephine Baker, Colette and other celebrities. He met Matisse, Derain, Dufy, Vlaminck and other artists who visited Poiret. When he rejoined his father’s flourishing business in Vienna (working from premises designed by Adolph Loos), he continued to visit Paris twice yearly to see the collections. Later he worked in Paris as a freelance designer, illustrator and painting portraits.
When war was declared he tried to enlist but was interned as an enemy alien. His only alternative was to serve with the French Foreign Legion; he was in North Africa when France capitulated. He held his first solo show at Oran in 1942. When the allied forces landed in North Africa he became an interpreter and technical draughtsman. Supporting himself by weekend work, he also drew 15 to 20 portraits a day for five days a week of wounded soldiers in hospitals on air letters which were photographed (10 copies to each soldier) then sent to families and friends. He was known as 'a guy from Paris’, which was how he signed the drawings. Encouraged by Albert Marquet, he also began oil painting in North Africa, beginning by copying prints by Cézanne and Renoir. After the war he returned to Paris and in 1946, as a staff draughtsman on Le Figaro , covered the trial of Pétain’s ministers while studying printmaking at the Bibliothèque Nationale and taking lessons in the medium at Colarossi’s. He also worked on painting (possibly at La Grande Chaumière, Paris).
Kahan came to Australia in 1947, via the USA, to visit his parents in Perth. He worked in Perth in 1947-50 (the Art Gallery of Western Australia acquired two drawings from a solo exhibition he held there) then lived mainly in Melbourne where he designed for the National Theatre and Australian Opera as well as painting and drawing. In Australia he was best known as a painter. He had over 50 exhibitions from 1947. He exhibited regularly in the Archibald, e.g. portrait of Albert Tucker, and won the prize for his portrait of Patrick White in 1962. He did many drawings and prints, mainly etchings. Many of his drawings of writers were published in Meanjin , in the Melbourne Age and in various books.
He met his wife Lily Isaacs, 21 years his junior, when visiting his parents and sister in Perth. They married in 1954 and went to Paris and London where Kahn studied and worked (including designing for the Welsh Opera Company). He returned to Melbourne in 1958 to work as a painter also, from 1969, teaching Adult Education art classes. He also continued to visit Paris and make numerous drawings there, his last visit being in 1999 when he was 94. He did many etchings and he designed stained-glass windows for churches and synagogues (e.g. Great Synagogue windows, Sydney, 1983) but is especially known for his portrait drawings of writers, musicians, artists (e.g. Max Meldrum 1951) and historians, most now in public collections. In 1961 the Art Gallery of New South Wales purchased his portrait of Albert Tucker and in 1962 he won the Archibald Prize for his portrait of Patrick White. A retrospective was held at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in 1992. Kahan died in July 2002, aged 97, survived by Lily and two daughters, Rachelle and Dena.
A woodcut self-portrait of Kahan exists: 'The Artist and His Tools – The Artist’s Only Woodcut’ 1947, woodcut (edn 80), illustrated Butler 1981 (also illustrated as 'Self Portrait’ in Lebovic & Warner, Fifty Years , cat.39). Kahan’s work in the National Gallery of Victoria includes work in Artists in Profile , a collection of drawings commissioned by the Age and presented by that newspaper in 1965.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 25 May 1905
- Summary
- Louis Kahan was a versatile, multi-talented artist and designer. He served in the French Foreign Legion and worked as a tailor in Paris where he associated with Josephine Baker and Matisse. He settled in Australia in 1947 and was best known as a sketcher and painter, winning the Archibald with a portrait of Patrick White in 1962.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- Jul-02
- Age at death
- 97
Details
Latitude-18.324439 Longitude127.55465 Start Date1940-01-01 End Date2001-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Canning Stock Route, WA, Australia
- Biography
- Born near Well 33 on the Canning Stock Route c.1940, Michael Mutji was a Kukatja speaker with country at Kinyu and Tjunpartja. He resided at Balgo, where he began painting for Warlayirti Artists in 1988. He usually painted Dingo/Wati Kutjarra (Two Men) Dreaming. A quiet man who did a lot of painting and tried many different approaches to his art, yet always imparted the look of tradition. The head of a household containing a number of artists, he painted with great diligence and seriousness.
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1940
- Summary
- Kukatja speaker of Balgo Hill and a committed artist of Warlayirti Artists. He was the head of a household of Balgo painters.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2001
- Age at death
- 61
Details
Latitude-19.8516101 Longitude133.2303375 Start Date1940-01-01 End Date2001-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- east of Haasts Bluff, NT, Australia
- Biography
- Born c. 1940 about just east of Haasts Bluff. Turkey’s family had been moving between traditional country around Kintore and Hermannsburg mission, where they could collect rations of flour, tea and sugar. After Turkey’s birth they remained in the area around Haasts Bluff. When Papunya was being established and there was work to be had the family 'came in’ from the bush and Turkey, recently initiated, was employed as a labourer on construction work around the new settlement and also in the Papunya communal kitchen. Later he married and moved to an outstation west of Papunya. His first wife died, and he remarried and later moved to Kintore in 1983. He had an outstation on his traditional lands at Yuwalki to the south-east of Kintore. Chairman of Papunya Tula Artists for much of the 1990s and one of the best known of the company’s artists, Turkey Tolson was one of the pioneer painters at Papunya in the early 1970s. While some of his 1980s work was amongst the most innovative and figurative of all the Papunya Tula artists’, he also painted in the classical severely traditional Pintupi style of circles and connecting lines. Artist-in- Residence Flinders University 1979 with David Corby Tjapaltjarri . Painted Bush Fire, Emu, Snake, Woman, and Mitakutjirra Dreamings from his traditional country south of Kintore around Yuwalki, Mitakutjirra and Putjya rockhole. The artist and his work featured in East/West: Land in Papunya Paintings at Tandanya Aboriginal Cultural Institute in Adelaide 1990 and in the associated documentary Market of Dreams . Turkey’s daughter-in-law Brenda Rowe began painting in 1989.
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Note: primary biographer
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1940
- Summary
- One of the youngest of the pioneering painters at Papunya, who became Chairman of Papunya Tula Artists in the 1990s and one of the company's leading painters.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2001
- Age at death
- 61
Details
Latitude-42.880556 Longitude147.325 Start Date1939-01-01 End Date2001-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Hobart, Tas., Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1939
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2001
- Age at death
- 62
Details
Latitude-32.936 Longitude117.178 Start Date1938-01-01 End Date2001-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Narrogin, WA, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1938
- Summary
- Narrogin weaver specialising in figurative sculpture.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2001
- Age at death
- 63
Details
Latitude-32.8175039 Longitude151.4833649 Start Date1933-01-01 End Date2001-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Kurri Kurri, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- weaver, was born at Kurri Kurri, NSW, an only child. Trained at East Sydney Technical College (National Art School), Sydney, 1951-56. Married painter Leonard Hessing in the late 1950s and worked as a teacher and design consultant until 1962, when she became a full-time 'fibre artist’. In 1967 she went overseas to study weaving and spent a significant year in India in 1968, where she was commissioned by Patwant Singh, editor of Indian Design to make a wall-sized tapestry. From the late 1960s to the 1980s she became known for her giant weavings in public buildings, which were widely exhibited from the early 1970s, in particular in Clay + Fibre -with ceramic artist Marea Gazzard – at NGV and later at Bonython Gallery, Sydney, 1973. That same year she was awarded a Churchill Fellowship to study overseas and returned to India. (She had a last Indian trip in the late 1990s.)
Hessing used a range of materials including silk, jute, sisal, wool and synthetic fibres. She said in 1972: 'The concept of a non-rigid, yielding, flexible form that grows and develops at each touvh is tremendously exciting. It includes a subtle relationship of things within things and the final form that contains within itself countless co-ordinated events.’ Major commissions included weavings for the Wentworth Memorial Chapel, Vaucluse (1967), the Menzies Hotel, Sydney (1969), the Australian Embassy, Paris (1977), the Orange Civic Centre, NSW (1978) and the Sydney Masonic Centre (1979). Her enormous Banner (1970) is in the Clancy Auditorium UNSW.
In 1974 Hessing was one of the three craftspeople featured in the film One Weft Double Cloth , commissioned from Film Australia by the Crafts Council of Australia. Shortly afterwards, she moved to rural NSW with the film’s director James Coffey, 'to create’, she said, 'total environment, sustaining and beautiful’. She led a reclusive life, breeding horses and participating in Landcare projects, though she continued to make smaller weavings, including the Cycle Series One 1984 – her response to severe drought. After briefly living in Mudgeeraba, Queensland in the late 1980s, she moved to Tuross Head on the NSW South Coast in 1990 to care for her mother, where she remained permanently. She began working and exhibiting more seriously again, showing the results at the Hidden Valley Gallery, Bodalla, at the Priory, Bingie, and in late 2000 at the Canberra Museum and Art Gallery. Aged 68, Hessing died suddenly of a brain hamorrage while driving from her home at Tuross Head to Canberra. She was survived by her partner of recent years, Norman Sanders.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1933
- Summary
- Late 20th century textile artist and weaver.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2001
- Age at death
- 68
Details
Latitude-27.6160323 Longitude152.7608348 Start Date1932-01-01 End Date2001-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Ipswich, Queensland, Australia
- Biography
- Painter and bushman, was born in Ipswich, Qld. Self-taught, he became a full-time artist in 1961 after leaving the navy. A good draughtman and an experienced bushman, he became known for his sentimental paintings of Australian rural life, often featuring stereotypical old time shearers, drovers, farmers or small rural communities. His most popular works were a series of murals he did for RSL clubs and surf pavilions around NSW. Photographic prints of his paintings were sold in framing and other modest commercial art shops throughout Queensland and NSW, e.g. Cunnamulla in 2000. The originals sold well to private collectors; not long before his death a British collector paid $100,000 for his Man from Snowy River . Darcy Doyle died at home in Mudgeeraba, Qld, on 28 August 2001, aged 68. His work is not represented in any public collection.
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Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1932
- Summary
- A self trained artist, Darcy Doyle was known for his popular murals and sentimental paintings of Australian rural life.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 28-Aug-01
- Age at death
- 69
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1932-01-01 End Date2001-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 June 1932
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 28-May-01
- Age at death
- 69
Details
Latitude-22.043 Longitude132.491 Start Date1930-01-01 End Date2001-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Coniston, NT, Australia
- Biography
- Born at Coniston c.1930 of the Anmatyerre language group, Dick’s boyhood companions included Clifford Possum and his older brother Tim Leura . Dick moved into Alice Springs, establishing himself at Morris Soak. At the beginning of the ’80s he began painting on canvas independently in the Western Desert style – one of the first to do so – selling his work through the Centre for Aboriginal Artists and occasionally Papunya Tula Artists. Dick served for nine years on the Aboriginal Congress and was co-author of Settle Down Country and Health Business with Pam Nathan. His country lay around Mt Allan, and his work usually portrayed Sugar Ant and Women Dreamings from this region. He was married with nine children, two from a previous marriage. His daughter, Wendy Lechleitner began painting in the late 1980s, early 1990s.
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Note: primary biographer
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1930
- Summary
- Anmatyerre artist and author, who sold his work privately for many years and occasionally through Papunya Tula. His work is represented in major public and private collections.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2001
- Age at death
- 71
Details
Latitude-37.8902423 Longitude145.067469 Start Date1928-01-01 End Date2001-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Murrumbeena, VIC, Australia
- Biography
- Painter and printmaker, born Margaret Vickery in 1928 in Murrumbeena, Victoria. Her mother died during childbirth in 1930 and Margaret was raised by her widowed father, William, a Gallipoli veteran. Between 1930 and 1940 they boarded in seventeen different households from Albert Park to South Yarra, mainly with elderly widows, before eventually settling in Sandringham. Margaret attended Sandringham State School until the age of twelve, then moved to the Methodist Ladies College in Kew, where she remained until the completion of her leaving certificate.
Even as a teenager Margaret was interested in studying art, and wanted to study at the National Gallery School. But her father insisted that academic studies were needed to increase the chances of secretarial work. This eventually led to her employment at the Commonwealth Bank where she met a young banker, Peter Dredge. Peter and Margaret married in 1950.
Margaret Dredge’s initial art training was with Inez Hutchinson in the mid 1950s. Dredge’s early paintings were figurative and still life works, but her output soon led into abstraction. In 1958 she joined the Beaumaris Art Group and began exhibiting in their group exhibitions. Soon after (1961) she joined the Contemporary Artists Society (CAS) and the Melbourne Contemporary Artists (MCA). At this time, as well as painting consistently, she became increasingly involved in the art world, becoming a Council Member of CAS, teaching at Beaumaris, holding life classes at her home and visiting galleries and exhibition openings.
1961-79 was an intense period of exhibition for Dredge, with numerous group and five solo shows. Her first solo exhibition was held at Peter Burrows Gallery in Queens Road, Melbourne, in 1964 and another at the Three Sisters Gallery in Brighton during the same year. She was commended in the 1970 Inez Hutchison Award; was the co-winner in the 1976 Shire of Flinders Art Award; and was awarded the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery 21st Exhibition Acquisitive prize of 1978. Her work was also attracting positive reviews – Graeme Sturgeon wrote of an exhibition of thirteen major works at Gryphon Gallery in 1979: “With this exhibition, Margaret Dredge has assumed a place among the top dozen women working in Melbourne” (The Australian, 3 April 1979).
It was following this period that Dredge virtually withdrew from exhibiting publicly. She continued working over the next twenty-two years, but only participated in group shows five times between 1980 and 1992 and not at all between 1992 and 2001. The reasons for this withdrawal were many, including the increasing commercial pressure to produce more of the same style of work. Her withdrawal can also be seen as a reaction against the assimilation of post-painterly abstraction into Australian art, which had been heralded by 'The Field’ exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1968. In the 1970s Dredge spoke of her desire to express “the human apart from the designer of pretty patterns of perfection”. While she had explored post-painterly abstraction in the 1970s with some critical success, she became more and more self-expressive in her paintings, particularly after switching to acrylics in 1973.
In 1980 the Dredges sold their suburban Sandringham home and shifted to the inner city area of Richmond. Dredge studied etching with Bill Young, Maggie May, Geoffrey Goldie and John Spooner, and in 1982 had a new studio built. From 1983 her output was more prolific, nine paintings in 1985 alone.
Dredge suffered her first heart attack in the late 1980s. She continued to work, however, and during the 1990s she completed a series of identically sized paintings. It was not until 1997 that her work came to a halt due to incapacitation from heart drugs.
Following the death of her husband, Peter, in March 2000, Dredge produced two major paintings – very lyrical abstractions incorporating almost calligraphic brush work – PJD Vale , dedicated to her husband, and Words .
Margaret Dredge died in September 2001.
Writers:
Dingle, Max
Date written:
2010
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1928
- Summary
- Born in 1928, Margaret Dredge did not have the opportunity to study art until the mid 1950s when she started studying painting with Inez Hutchinson. Early paintings were figurative and still life works, leading into abstraction, she quickly became involved in the Melbourne art scene. Dredge died in 2001.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2001
- Age at death
- 73
Details
Latitude-33.8931044 Longitude151.2040292 Start Date1927-01-01 End Date2001-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Redfern, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- cartoonist, was born in Redfern, Sydney, on 15 June 1927. He was drawing caricatures of his family and visitors from the age of five. He attended Glebe Primary School and North Newtown Intermediate High where he drew for the school paper. Lindsay Foyle noted in his obituary ( Australian 27 July 2001, 12) that he 'read voraciously from the age of 12 and there were visits to the Art Gallery of NSW, “mainly to perve on the Norman Lindsays”.’ Elsewhere it is mentioned that he studied part-time at ESTC in 1943, although Foyle claims that
His first formal art training was at the Julian Ashton School. His mother got him in at a reduced rate because he showed talent. He was working night shift [as a compositor] at the [ Daily ] Telegraph and attending art school during the day. It proved too much for his health. Something had to go, so he moved to the mail room and from there into the art department.
Tanner did illustration and design at the Telegraph ; his first cartoon was published in 1944. Initially, he was influenced by WEP ( Bill Pidgeon ) who told him not 'to be afraid to try something new you don’t think you can do. You make a mess and then you clean it up.’ Tanner said it was the best advice he ever received, says Foyle, who also notes that when They’re a Weird Mob was published in 1957 with WEP’s illustrations Tanner was proud that nobody noticed that he had drawn the illustration on the dust-jacket.
Tanner was with the Occupation Force Newspaper BCON ( British Commonwealth Occupation Newspaper ) in Osaka, Japan in1946-47, returned to Sydney in 1948 and joined the Communist Party (which he left in 1956 after Hungary and moved to the right). He became a full-time Repat. student at ESTC and joined AM magazine as an illustrator. He also met Margaret (Peg) King (1925-1996) in 1948, when both were amateur actors at Sydney’s New Theatre. They married the following year and had a daughter (Judy) and two sons (Mark and Michael).
Though a member of the Communist Party, Tanner worked as a political cartoonist on the Daily Telegraph in 1952 and on the Sunday Telegraph in 1954-60. [Dates differ according to writers; Foyle says began full time on the Tele in 1954, Petty says he was there only 1956-60 etc.] He used to submit three roughs to the editor each day, says Foyle, 'one for the money, one for the show and one for himself – but he soon realised that it was the one for himself that generally got in’. Bruce Petty comments on his 'elegant free-form pencil roughs’, followed by 'a stylish pen-and-wash drawing’.
He left for London in 1959 and worked on the Daily Sketch as a gag artist for a year (1960-61). He won the London Cartoonists’ Club award for the most promising newcomer in 1961. Then he returned to Sydney. He spent seven years (1961-67) as art director and cartoonist with the Bulletin after it was purchased by Frank Packer’s ACP; Donald Horne was the first editor, then Peter Hastings and Peter Coleman. Examples of his Bulletin cartoons include: (disgustingly fat beach inspector to slim woman in two-piece bathing costume) “Get off the beach! You’re obscene” 1961, used to exemplify his work in the Foyle obituary (and ill. Rolfe 297). Cf his NLA original (?), “I don’t care who you are, you’ll have to get off the beach”, showing a policeman on Cyprus talking to Boticelli’s Venus rising from the sea.
Peter Coleman, with whom Tanner wrote Cartoons in Australian History (1967), mentioned in Voices 1997 (p.93) that Tanner opened up 'other lines’ when he was at the Bulletin , including a plaster bust of Menzies ('which sold well among the great man’s critics’) and a popular coffee mug in the shape of Sir Henry Bolte (NPG), cf Frith 's toby jugs. (Under Coleman’s editorship the Bulletin also put out records, notably collections of 'naughty’ songs by Barry Humphries and Will Rushton , and published Len Evans’s first book on wine.) Coleman resigned in 1967; his final editorial in February attacked the hanging of Ronald Ryan was accompanied by a Tanner cartoon of Bolte the Hangman. The issue was pulped by Packer. Soon afterwards editor Graham Perkin (who became a close family friend) offered Tanner twice the salary to work on the Age , where he moved in 1968 [in July 1967 according to Petty, who had been given work at the Bulletin by Tanner]. Foyle notes that he had been at the Age for only a week 'when the acting editor rejected one of his cartoons. After a blazing argument involving the editor and managing director, it was agreed Tanner wouldn’t be asked to do an alternative cartoon if another were rejected. Tanner wasn’t going to be censored at the Age .’ A Roman Quarrel , published in the Age on 7 November 1975, was included in Christine Dixon’s exhibition. From 1978 he again contributed from time to time to the Bulletin (Rolfe, 271). Altogether, he wrote in 1989 (?), he worked under some 16 editors.
Cancer caused him to have his larynx removed and for a time he communicated only by notes – an affliction that is said to have caused him to take up drinking seriously, according to Foyle. Later, he acquired an electronic voice enhancer that allowed short comments.
By 1973, when he was aged 45 and again living in Sydney, Tanner had won two Walkeley Awards for Best Cartoon of the Year (one in 1962) and was writing a weekly column as well as drawing cartoons in the Age . Rolfe states that he is best known for his defence cartoons of the 1960s and his joke blocks of patio intellectuals, the latter virtually an extinct [cartooning] genre now when politics is all. Travel broadens the mind (on Senator Colston), published in the Age on 6 March 1997, was exhibited in the National Museum of Australia/Old Parliament House exhibition Bringing the House Down: 12 Months of Australian Political Humour (Canberra, 1997), cat. 73.
Tanner retired from the Age in 1997 after three decades working for the newspaper. A member of the Black and White Artists’ Club, he lived at Nicholson Street, Fitzroy. He died of a heart attack in his sleep in Melbourne on 23 July 2001, aged 74. His colleagues Petty, John Spooner and Foyle, who all wrote obituaries, emphasised his compassion for the poor and rejected of society and his hatred of power, pomposity and hypocrisy. 'During the Cold War’, said Spooner, 'he managed to antagonise both the Left and the Right.’
A respectable historian of cartooning, Tanner donated a good collection of his own cartoons to BFAG in 1983, as well as a collection of early Bulletin originals he had found round the office when he was Art Director in 1971 (see Filmer). Indeed, the donation of various old Bulletin original cartoons to art galleries around Australia after Packer purchased the magazine seems to have been solely Tanner’s work.
When the Victorian Government hanged Ronald Ryan [prison escapee who had murdered a warden], the whole issue [of the Bulletin ] of February 9, 1967, with a leader, 'Day of the Quicklime’, and a cartoon by Tanner showing the Victorian Premier Sir Henry Bolte holding a rope and saying “I do not bow to mob protest – only mob support” [reproduced by Coleman in Voices article] was pulped on the orders of Sir Frank Packer’ (Rolfe, 305, also Coleman, 12). Coleman notes that Packer did this shortly after he had resigned and it was not the reason for his resignation, despite stories to the contrary: see P. Coleman, Voices , pp.94-95, ill.).
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 15 June 1927
- Summary
- Influential mid 20th century political cartoonist. Tanner worked as a cartoonist for the Melbourne Age for 30 years as well as contributing to a number of other publications. The controversial 1967 Bulletin issue which attacked the Victorian Government's decision to hang criminal Ronald Ryan, and which featured a cartoon by Tanner, was pulped on the orders of Sir Frank Packer.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 23-Jul-01
- Age at death
- 74
Details
Latitude43 Longitude12 Start Date1925-01-01 End Date2001-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Italy
- Biography
- Along with Wolfgang Sievers, Mark Strizic, Dieter Muller, Henry Talbot, Helmut Newton, David Mist and others, the Italian-born, Melbourne-based Benini became one of a group of influential émigré commercial photographers working in post-war Australia. While Max Dupain is recognized as a genius of 20th century Australian architectural photography and Wolfgang Sievers the master of industrial photography, Bruno Benini can be regarded as one of Australia’s most elegant and refined mid-20th century fashion photographers.
Born in 1925 in Massa Marittima, a medieval town in Tuscany, he migrated to Australia with his family in 1935 just prior to the outbreak of World War II. He studied science at Melbourne Technical College (now RMIT University) and worked for a brief period at General Motors Holden at Fishermens Bend, Victoria before returning to Italy with a brief stopover in London in the late 1940s. It was during this trip that he decided to pursue a career in photography. He joined Peter Fox Modern Photography Studio in Melbourne in the early 1950s working initially as a salesman and receptionist with the camera operators Henry Talbot and Katherine Perkins.
After setting up his first studio at 24 Cotham Road in Kew in the mid-1950s, Benini then also covertly honed his photographic and lighting skills by working as a male model with Helmut Newton, Henry Talbot and other Melbourne-based photographers. At the same time, he also became friendly with several local printers who assisted him to gain proficiency in the aspect of photography that Bruno went on to master and thoroughly enjoy. From Kew, Benini moved to various locations in the city before settling in his 6 McKillop Street studio that he shared with model-turned-photographer, Janice Wakely, and later with his wife Hazel Benini during the 1960s.
Bruno met Hazel, a New Zealand-born artist and display designer, in 1959 when she was already a working fashion display artist and he an established Melbourne fashion photographer, with numerous prestigious clients on his log books including the Australian Wool Bureau, the Gown of the Yea and Theo Haskin’s Salon Milano. Hazel and Bruno went on to form an indivisible partnership as leading Melbourne fashionistas – Bruno as the elegant photographer and Hazel as a vivacious and creative fashion publicist and stylist.
“When I first met Bruno I was working at a big store called Hicks Atkinson, which ran from Collins Street through to Bourke Street (Melbourne). So we were getting to know each other then and I think he was doing a big colour photograph and he was worried he couldn’t get the right pink background. I organised a big roll of paper, heavy paper that they put under linoleum in those days and delivered it to his studio. I mixed up the paint and I painted just the background for him. So that was my first job helping him out.”1
In his obituary for Bruno Benini in 2001, Philip Jones summed up beautifully the world which Hazel and Bruno inhabited in Melbourne:
“Habitués of Lygon Street, Carlton, have long been familiar with a couple of elegant indivisible boulevardiers. He tall, silver-haired, sanguine, handsome, an overcoat slung over his shoulders, Roman style. She blonde, petite, stylish and intense. The Benini’s were intrinsic to the artistic and social life of Melbourne.”
Predominantly shot in black and white, Benini’s photographs were much sought after by newspaper and magazine fashion editors and regularly appeared in major interstate newspapers including the Hobart Mercury, the Perth Independent, the Brisbane Courier Mail, the Canberra Times, the Adelaide Advertiser, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Sun Herald. Today, the photographic prints, negatives and transparencies survive as vibrant, clearly delineated records of what would otherwise survive only as grainy press prints.
Bruno Benini’s remarkable photography archive was acquired by the Powerhouse Museum in 2009 with funding assistance from the Australian Government through the National Cultural Heritage Account. The archive was meticulously accumulated over 50 years by Bruno and Hazel Benini. It came to the Museum after literally being stored in boxes under beds, in the bottom of cupboards, in drawers and on the tops of wardrobes. With each change of address or studio, came the need to rationalise stock. Over time material was lost, damaged or discarded. Hazel re-tells the story of a tea chest of very early shots which Bruno stored in his father’s garage. When his father decided to throw them all out, permanently lost were shots of Barry Humphries’ first wedding and a portrait, which Humphries claimed was the best photo he’d ever had taken. Years later he would phone Bruno and Hazel and implore, ‘Bruno, please try and find the negative.’ Well, Bruno knew it wasn’t there.
After Bruno’s death, it became imperative that the collection was preserved. Despite the loss of material over time, the Benini archive is still a very substantial and comprehensive collection, providing a vivid record of the Australian fashion industry over five decades – from the elegant couture of the 1950s, the mod and hippy modes of the 1960s, through to the confronting funkier styles of the 1970s, body conscious images from the 1980s and athletic fashion from the Nike-dominated 1990s.
There are over 250 photographic blow-up prints and several thousand black and white negatives and colour positive transparencies, as well as hundreds of contact sheets and proof prints, biographical material including scrap books, posters, tear sheets, diaries, magazines and newspaper cuttings dating from the 1950s through to the photographer’s death in 2001. Haute couture gowns, niche labels and ready-to-wear brands are represented including Norma Tullo (perhaps the only Australian label with its own outlet in the Isetan Department store in Tokyo in the 1970s), Phillippa Gowns, Theo Haskin’s Salon Milano, Hall Ludlow, Simona, Solo, Prue Acton, Mike Treloar, Ninette and its related youth brand Nutmeg, Gala, Sportscraft and Sportsgirl.
Many top Australian models appear: Maggie Tabberer, Maggi Eckardt, Helen Homewood, Jan Stewart, Nerida Piggin, Pip Colman, Janice Wakely and Bambi Shmith, formerly Patricia Tuckwell, violinist with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and later, Countess of Harewood. International fashion labels retailed in Australia through small boutiques are also captured by Benini’s lens – like Fiorucci from Italy and Laura Ashley from England. The unusual Australian settings of some of Benini’s shots make them uniquely memorable – like the shot of Liz Scarborough modelling a Le Louvre coat in a blackened landscape after the Ash Wednesday bushfires of 1983, and the photograph of Di Sweeney modelling Bottega’s newly imported blue Italian gumboots and jip-jacket wet weather suit inside a car wash in Carlton in 1976.
By the late 1980s, Benini began to tire of fashion photography and decided to turn his lens to male nudes. He later added delicate colour still life photographs of flowers to his portfolio as a refreshing diversion from the countless nude male text shots he was commissioned to shoot for models aspiring to join Greg Tyshing’s Giant model agency. The archive also contains many portraits of Australian and visiting actors, writers, artists, dancers, designers and pop singers as they would often pop into Bruno’s studio to have their portraits taken.
The Powerhouse Museum first drew attention to the significance of Benini’s collection in 1996. In April of 2009, Peter Garrett, Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts announced that the Bruno Benini photography archive would be acquired by the Museum with funding assistance from the National Cultural Heritage Account. It is now widely appreciated that this uniquely comprehensive and well documented archive provides a vivid record of fashion design, manufacture, retailing, marketing and consumption as well as a close look at accessories, shoes, sunglasses, hair, makeup and swimsuits. The Benini collection supports the Museum’s dress collection and enriches the Museum’s pioneering holdings of Australian design and fashion photography archives.
Over 50 photographs from the Bruno Benini photography archive were presented as a screen projection in the Powerhouse Museum exhibition 'Inspired!: design across time exhibition’ in 2009.
1. Hazel Benini, interview with the author, Melbourne 2008
Writers:
Anne-Marie Van de Ven, Powerhouse Museum
staffcontributor
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2013
- Born
- b. 1925
- Summary
- Photographer Bruno Benini migrated to Australia from Italy in 1935. As a commercial and fashion photographer, Benini captured the works of many Australian and international fashion designers.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2001
- Age at death
- 76
Details
Latitude-19.8516101 Longitude133.2303375 Start Date1924-01-01 End Date2001-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Yinjirrimardi, NT, Australia
- Biography
- Born c. 1924 at Yinjirrimardi, a site near two soakages where Two Dreamtime Women emerged from underground. Daisy Nelson was Warlpiri and lived at Yuendumu with her husband Paddy Jupurrurla Nelson . She painted Warnayarra/Pikilyi (Rainbow Serpent/Vaughan Springs), Watakiyi (Bush Orange) and Yuparli (Bush Banana) Dreamings, the last inherited from her father. Some of these Dreamings she gave permission for her (sister’s) son Michael Jagamara Nelson to paint in his work for the 1986 Sydney Biennale. Daisy Nelson had been part of the group of senior women artists at Yuendumu since the beginnings of the painting enterprise at Yuendumu, showing in the first exhibition of their work at the Araluen Centre in Alice Springs in October 1985. Since then, her work has been included in exhibitions of Warlukurlangu Artists in Perth, Melbourne, Adelaide, Canberra, Sydney and Brisbane, and in shows in Portsmouth UK, Seattle USA, and Madrid Spain. In 1988 she won an award for Best painting at the Victor Harbour Art Show. She was represented in Yuendumu – Paintings out of the Desert at the SA Museum 1988, Windows on the Dreaming Australian National Gallery 1989 and Tigari Lai Contemporary Aboriginal Art from Australia at the Third Eye Centre Glasgow, Scotland in 1990. In 1993 her work was shown in Aratjara: Art of the First Australians , Dusseldorf, Germany, Humleaek, Denmark, and other European cities.
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1924
- Summary
- A senior Warlpiri artist who was at the forefront of the painting movement at Yuendumu in the early years. She has represented Warlukurlangu Artists in exhibitions both nationally and internationally.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2001
- Age at death
- 77
Details
Latitude-33.8670797 Longitude151.2259967 Start Date1920-01-01 End Date2001-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Potts Point, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Sculptor, was born at Potts Point, Sydney, on 19 June 1920, son of a successful businessman. He was educated at Cranbrook and Sydney Grammar and studied art at East Sydney Technical College. During WWII he served in minesweepers and as a gunner on a tanker, then was transferred to making scale models of ships for the Royal Australian Navy to use in recognition training. This led to a new interest in sculpture, beginning with monumental carved stone figures and changing in the 1940s to surrealist works. 'His sculptures and drawings completed in London and Paris in the 1940s are among the finest products of postwar European surrealism’, Edwards states. Influenced by Zen and Indian philosophies in the 1950s.
It was not until Klippel went to New York in 1957 and later, while teaching at the Minnesota School of Arts, that his talents began to be appreciated. After periods living in NY in the late 1950s and early 1960s, where his contemporaries included the giants of abstract expressionism, he settled in Birchgrove, Balmain, and began making the 1960s and ’70s spectacular non-figurative junk assemblages – monumental civic sculptures and intimately scale metal and plastic assemblages – for which he is best known.
In 1979 a solo exhibition at Sydney was a sell-out, with prices up to $18,000 and for many years before he died, on his 81st birthday, he was unquestionably Australia’s most celebrated sculptor. An exhibition of his large assemblages was held at Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1995. 30 small metal sculptures on show at Watters when he died (his dealer was Frank Watters), all made within the past 12 months, were of equal quality to any of his work. Deborah Edwards was preparing a retrospective when he died, on his 81st birthday.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Michael Bogle
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 19 June 1920
- Summary
- While Klippel is best known as a sculptor, he also worked in industrial design. Klippel's interest in sculpture began during WW2 while making scale models of ships for the Navy for recognition training. This lead to his early monumental carved stone figures and Surrealist works of the 1940s. His later works, for which he is best known, were non-figurative assemblages.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 19-Jun-01
- Age at death
- 81
Details
Latitude-37.7435744 Longitude142.0243127 Start Date1918-01-01 End Date2001-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Hamilton, VIC, Australia
- Biography
- Painter, sculptor and teacher, Taylor was born in Hamilton, Victoria and moved with his family to South Australia before 1919, then to Western Australia in 1932. He was a scholarship winner to Perth Modern School where he exhibited an interest in cricket, athletics, drawing, photography, and aviation. In 1937 he enlisted in the Royal Australian Air Force undertaking pilot training at Point Cook. He transferred to the Royal Air Force in July 1938, was shot down in May 1940 and spent the rest of the war as a P. O. W. It was while at Stalag Luft III c. 1943, that he met Guy Grey Smith. They both drew in the camp. Demobilised in Perth in February 1947, he returned to England, married Sheila Smith, and enrolled in painting at Birmingham School of Art. They returned to Perth in January 1949 and settled at 'Aldersyde’ Bickley, where they raised three children. Bickley quickly became home to the entire extended Smith family who emigrated from the UK. Life in the Perth hills was the catalyst for Taylor’s fascination with the bush landscape and forest forms, which became central to his work. In 1960 he visited Britain and Europe for six months. He taught painting and drawing part-time at the Perth Technical College from 1951 to 1961 and at the School of Architecture and Planning at the Western Australian Institute of Technology from 1965 to 1969. In late 1967 he moved to Northcliffe in the heart of the tall-timber karri and jarrah forests of the south-west of Western Australia, where he produced some of his most powerful, impeccably crafted evocations of nature. The first work acquired by the Art Gallery of Western Australia in 1949 was a self-portrait. He took many public commissions, including for the Fremantle Port Authority’s new overseas terminal building 1960-62, AMP, ANZ, and Curtin University. Many of these can now be viewed at Curtin and UWA. Two retrospective exhibitions of his work were held at Art Gallery of Western Australia in 1985 and 2004. In 1986 he received the Inaugural Emeritus Award from the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council. A monograph by Ted Snell was published in 1995. Retrospective exhibition catalogues were published by the Art Gallery of Western Australia in 1985 and MCA/AGWA in 2003. Daniel Thomas in the artist’s obituary stated that “ after the death of the very different and much more erratic Arthur Boyd, Howard Taylor was Australia’s best artist of any kind.”
Writers:
Dr Dorothy Erickson
Gary_Dufour
Date written:
2010
Last updated:
2023
- Born
- b. 29 August 1918
- Summary
- Painter, sculptor and teacher, his work was presented in two retrospectives, in 1985 at the AGWA, and from 2003-06 at ten-venues organised by the MCA and AGWA. He received the Emeritus Award from the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council in 1986; Member Order of Australia, 1989; Hon. Doctor of Letters, UWA, 1993; Hon. Doctor of Technology, Curtin University, 1997; and 'State Treasure' Western Australia 1999.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 19-Jul-01
- Age at death
- 83
Details
Latitude-37.7435744 Longitude142.0243127 Start Date1918-01-01 End Date2001-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Hamilton, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- Howard Taylor was born in Hamilton, Victoria, on 29 August 1918. He moved to Perth with his family in 1932. In 1937 he joined the Royal Australian Air Force and in 1938 transferred to the Royal Air Force. In 1940, during a sortie over Alsace-Lorraine, he was captured and became a German prisoner of war. While he was interned Taylor began to draw and to read books supplied by the Red Cross, and he pursued his interest in art. After the war he studied at the Birmingham College of Art from 1947 to 1948 under a RAAF rehabilitation program, and he made painting excursions around the English countryside.
In 1949 Taylor returned to Western Australia and settled in the Darling Ranges on the outskirts of Perth. This locality was the catalyst for his fascination with the bush landscape and forest forms, which became central to his work. In 1960 he visited Britain and Europe for six months. He taught painting and drawing at the Perth Technical College from 1951 to 1965 and at the School of Architecture and Planning at the Western Australian Institute of Technology from 1965 to 1969. In late 1967 he moved to Northcliffe in the heart of the tall-timber karri and jarrah forests of the south-west of Western Australia, where he produced some of his most powerful, impeccably crafted evocations of nature.
Howard Taylor died on 19 July 2001 in Perth.
Writers:
Gray, Dr Anne
Date written:
2006
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 29 August 1918
- Summary
- Howard Taylor began to draw and explore his interest in art while a prisoner of war in Europe in the early 1940s. After studying at the Birmingham College of Art, Taylor returned to Western Australia where he began to explore his fascination with the bush landscape and forest forms, which became central to his work.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 19-Jul-01
- Age at death
- 83
Details
Latitude-30.7073143 Longitude152.9183972 Start Date1916-01-01 End Date2001-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Macksville, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1916
- Summary
- Joyce (nee Blumer) with her husband Janek was one of Schulim Krimper's largest clients. She commissioned more than 50 pieces which comprised the sole furnishings for their house in St Ives. She drove the extent and nature of their collection of Australian paintings by Drysdale and Dobell, introduced to her by Janek's closest friend Rudy Komon. The couple also collected European decorative arts.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1-Jan-01
- Age at death
- 85
Details
Latitude-33.8894781 Longitude151.1274125 Start Date1914-01-01 End Date2001-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Ashfield, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Gordon Andrews. (b.1914) Born in Ashfield, NSW, this designer’s career has embraced industrial design (cookware, furniture), graphic design, development of exhibition concepts and design as well as photography. He trained at the Sydney Technical College, Ultimo and the East Sydney Technical College but gained his formative experience in graphic design with the advertising agencies Samson Clark Price Berry, Sydney and Stuart, London in the 1930s. He returned to Sydney in 1939 and briefly ran a personal design practice. During the 1939-45 war, he worked in the De Havilland drawing office and later supervised an experimental hangar.
In 1946, he held a one-man show of paintings and ‘constructions’, including contemporary furniture, with some models later copied by others. In 1949, he took his family to London and set up his own design office, which was retained by the Design Research Unit to design exhibitions for Ilford, Peter Robinsons, The Tea Board, the British Council. He also worked on exhibitions and showrooms for Olivetti, and Smiths Instruments. In 1951, he was made Fellow of the Society of Industrial Designers.
During 1953-1954, he and his family lived in Turin, Italy, while he designed an encyclopaedia, styled a fountain pen and produced an exhibition for the 1954 Fiera de Milano. Then he turned down a three-year contract with Olivetti to bring his family back to Sydney. On return, he designed exhibitions, shops, showrooms and furniture for Olivetti, David Jones the Commonwealth Bank, NSW Government agencies, and other notable clients.
He is best known for designing the first decimal currency bank notes that were released in Australia on 14 February 1966. Working with Hal Missingham, Douglas Annand and Alistair Morrison as advisers, Gordon Andrews designed for the Reserve Bank of Australia its first $1, $2, $5, $10, $20 and $50 paper notes. These designs won almost universal appreciation.
He was also one of Australia’s foremost industrial designers and a designer of international significance. He worked in Britain. France and Italy, as well as Australia and was the first Australian designer to be elected as a Fellow of the UK Society of Industrial Artists and Designers (1955). He was also awarded membership of the Faculty of Royal Designers for Industry and the Alliance Graphique Internationale. Prolific career across a broad range of disciplines and the extraordinary breadth of his interiors for the Australian Pavilion of the Comptoire Suisse trade fair (1960), the New South Wales Government Tourist Bureau, Sydney (1961) and the New Zealand Government Tourist Bureau (1965). The retrospective exhibition Gordon Andrews: a designer’s life, was held at the Powerhouse Museum in 1993, curated by Judith O’Callaghan. Andrews’ own monograph Gordon Andrews: A designer’s life, was published by the New South Wales University Press in the same year.
Gordon Andrews’ design career has been remarkably diverse, making difficult an overall assessment of his work. He is considered by his peers and critics to have worked successfully in virtually every medium he has chosen.
Andrews retired to Lovett Bay on the Hawkesbury River until bushfires destroyed his home on his 80th birthday. He died in Sydney on 17 January, 2001, aged 87. He was survived by his former wife, Mary, children Lynn, Richard and Michael, and sister Betty Horsburgh.
Sources (include)—Andrews, Gordon. 1993. Gordon Andrews: A Designer’s Life. Sydney: University of NSW Press.—Architecture and Arts. 1956. ‘People: Behind the Blueprints in this issue: Gordon Andrews, Designer’, April, p17.—Powerhouse Museum website www.powerhousemuseum.com/opac/89-735.asp
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Michael Bogle
zreview
Davina Jackson
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2015
- Born
- b. 10 January 1914
- Summary
- Gordon Andrews was one of Australia's prominent mid-20th century multi-disciplinary designers. While best known for designing Australia's first decimal currency notes (1966), his international career included industrial design (cookware), furniture, jewellery, interiors, graphics, murals, exhibitions and photography.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 17-Jan-01
- Age at death
- 87
Details
Latitude-35.2576239 Longitude138.8956803 Start Date1912-01-01 End Date2001-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Strathalbyn, SA, Australia
- Biography
- Noel Wood was born at Strathalbyn in South Australia in 1912 the fourth and youngest son (the eldest, Rex, became a printmaker of note) born to Anglican minister the Reverend Thomas Percy Wood and Fannie née Newbury. His paternal grandfather, also Reverend Thomas Percy Wood, produced watercolours in India from 1882. Noel Wood trained at the South Australian School of Art, Adelaide under Marie Tuck and Leslie Wilkie and from his early years was regarded as a capable portrait painter. Wilkie, a portraitist of note, said that he would never be without work as long as he painted portraits. That, however, was never Wood’s interest. It appears he lived in Melbourne for a time working as a photographic model for Vogue and also produced fashion drawings.
The Reverend Wood married Noel and Eleanor Weld Skipper at St John’s Church, Monalta, South Australia on 25 August 1933 and they went to live in his brother’s small cottage 'Eumala’, on Kangaroo Island, South Australia. They stayed for about two years and Wood painted consistently. On their return to the mainland Wood provided linocuts for Chapbook issues 1 and 2 in 1935 and 1936. According to daughter Ann, they purchased a Model T Ford with the profits from three successful exhibitions in South Australia and drove to North Queensland in 1936. The couple visited Townsville and eventually, Bedarra Island, in the Family Island Group where they purchased 15 acres of land at Doorila Cove, on the north-eastern corner of the island. It was as remote an existence as he desired, as Mission Beach on the mainland was 40 minutes away by motor boat. Wood set up a series of gardens to emulated a life of self sufficiency. Two daughters, Virginia Maray and Ann Oenone, were born.
Wood began a series of successful exhibitions from the late 1930s. His images of his tropic idyll captured the public’s imagination and, at that time, he was possibly the most widely recognised artist in Australia. When the war came Eleanor and their two daughters were evacuated in 1940. They eventually settled at Woodend, Victoria and essentially maintained separate existences. Successful exhibitions were held in Brisbane and Sydney in 1946 but, unfortunately, an exhibition proposed for Sydney the following year was terminated when the paintings were lost in transit (according to daugher Ann the shipment was sent via rail). Despite this set-back Wood continued his planned trip to Europe in 1947 and, after painting in Ireland and France was living in London by March 1949 but by May 1950 was conducting art classes in Cairns. Wood travelled overseas later in the decade when he worked as an assistant art director for the film industry in the USA for two years before returning to Australia in about 1957. He stopped painting in the 1970s to devote himself to his garden.
In 1982 Sean Dixon travelled from Townsville to Thursday Island by canoe and recorded his visit to Bedarra Island:
It was here we met Noel Wood, a fascinating man of around 70 years. He had lived the life of a recluse on his island for 45 years – having travelled overseas thrice [sic] to pursue his work as an artist painter, the spell of Bedarra bound him to return. Noel built his house from driftwood and local materials, living out the fancy of a shipwrecked mariner with the island, as it was, to be the sole provider. He subsequently introduced many varieties of exotic tropical fruits and vegetables, not the least of which were the coconut palm and Taro plant, to supplement his early diet of fish and native plants. In all to create for himself the authentic 'Tropical Island Paradise’.
Wood, in fact, practiced permaculture decades before the concept was popularised in the 1980s.
Although life was difficult in the early years of Wood’s sojourn on the island, the romantic vision of his hermit-like existence, so favoured by writers when they reported on his activities, was never quite accurate. Timana Island, also part of the Family Island Group, became the winter residence of Melbourne sisters and painters Yvonne Cohen and Valerie Albiston from 1938. Another neighbour was Hugo Brassey who owned Dunk Island. A portion of Bedarra Island was acquired by a Frank Coleman in 1938 and, shortly afterwards, paying guests began to arrive on the island. Several small resorts on various parts of the island (one of which became the Bedarra Hideaway Resort in 1981) were developed in the following years. Wood’s studio, a 'true bohemian artist’s pad’, had undergone a modern makeover, “the epitome of modern minimalist luxury design by noted architects Engelen Moore” according to Elizabeth Kind in the Financial Review of 2001. By the 1980s the modern tourist world had well and truly caught up with Wood. The ABC produced a feature on his life, The island and the painter , which went to air on 12 February 1987. Wood settled in the Montville area in 1988 but soon returned to Bedarra Island. He planned to sell his parcel of land in 1993 but retired to Mission Beach in 1996. He died at the Tully Hospital on 10 November 2001.
The paintings which established Wood’s reputation reflect the bold colour and lush vegetation of the tropics. As Ross Searle in the catalogue of his 1991 exhibition at Perc Tucker Regional Gallery, Townsville remarked on the work of Cohen and Wood:
“Cohen’s painting, like that of her contemporary, Noel Wood, was more intuitive in conception and showed a far more vigorous approach use of colour and feeling for design in its treatment of the luscious vegetation. They were after all living in the most idyllic of circumstances, and were profoundly influenced by the environment.”
The developing awareness of the importance of tourism to North Queensland and its pioneering artists, demonstrated by the exhibitions `Artists in the tropics’ 1991 and `Escape artists: modernists in the tropics’ 1998, has established Wood’s profile. A profile, one must add, established on a small body of identified work. He exhibited in Brisbane and Sydney into the 1950s, and his landscape subjects of the tropical north found ready appeal when he exhibited in group exhibitions such as at the Australian Art Academy, Melbourne in 1939. Three works were included in the 'Exhibition of Queensland Art’ at the Queensland Art Gallery in 1951 and other group exhibitions include 'Queensland Artists of Fame and Promise’ (Brisbane) in 1953, and the Gold Coast City Art Prizes 1968 and 1971.
Research Curator, Queensland Heritage, Queensland Art Gallery
Writers:
Cooke, Glenn R.
Date written:
2008
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1912
- Summary
- Noel Wood's escape to the tropical paradise of Bedarra Island in far North Queensland fostered a romantic image and the colourful paintings he produced there established a considerable profile during the 1930s and 1940s.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 10-Nov-01
- Age at death
- 89
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1910-01-01 End Date2001-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- painter, printmaker and commercial artist, was born in Melbourne on 2 December 1910. He went to school at Ballarat, where he excelled at art 'but not much else (though he was a precocious reader)’, according to Griffiths. At the age of seventeen he began an apprenticeship in Henry Wicks’ commercial lithographic studio in Melbourne, on the second floor of the old St James building on the corner of Little Collins and William Streets – a building where Norman and Lionel Lindsay had a studio in 1892, as had Ernest Moffitt . Jack Castieu, who with Bernard O’Dowd established Tocsin , Australia’s first socialist magazine, also had rooms there at the time. In the 1920s it became Dalgarno’s home as well as workplace when he moved out of his parents’ house to set up his own studio and become involved in the revolutionary magazine Strife .
In 1926-30 Dalgarno attended drawing classes at the National Gallery School at night and met Nutter Buzacott and Noel Counihan . He also met other left-wing artists and intellectuals at the Swanston Family Hotel, Melbourne.Then he moved to Sydney and studied art with Dattilo Rubbo (1930-33) and occasionally at East Sydney Technical College (1932-34). In Sydney he shared a studio with Geoffrey Grahame (a crayon portrait of him by Dalgarno dated 1934 offered by Josef Lebovic in 1997) and with James Cant until Cant went to England. He spent much time at Packey’s {Packie’s?} Hotel in Sydney where the bohemian set met. In 1933 he returned to Melbourne and joined the Communist Party (which he left in 1949). He drew illustrations for the Bulletin and for Wireless Weekly .
In 1934 {1935 according to Bernard Smith} Dalgarno married Nadine Rankin and returned to Sydney (Sydney drawings exist dated 1934). He visited North Queensland in 1935 then settled in Brisbane for ten years. He began working as art director at Johnston & Jones’ advertising agency in 1936; Merewether notes that he produced advertisements for Bulimba Breweries by day and did cartoons for the brewery’s striking workers at night. According to Griffiths, this led to him being sacked from the agency. Later he claimed he was 'harassed by the security police’. He spent some time in North Queensland and began to take painting seriously, doing pictures of cane-cutters, fishermen and other workers. In 1940 he held his first major painting show in Brisbane, with Noel Wood: An Exhibition of Tropical Paintings . Soon afterwards, he began work as a camouflage artist for the RAAF based in Darwin, serving in North Queensland and the offshore islands. During this time he sketched station and mission workers and Aborigines. Some of his 1941-44 drawings of Brisbane Labor leaders and people of North Queensland were exhibited at Josef Lebovic’s gallery in 1997. He contributed to the important 'Australia at War’ exhibition at the NGV in 1945 and won a second prize in the industrial section.
At the end of the war he returned to Sydney and became involved in the Labor movement there. He joined with James Cant, Dora Chapman and other realist artists in founding the Studio of Realist Art (SORA), which had an active life from 1946 to 1949. He designed the cover of the SORA Bulletin . The Mae West , a wartime pen and wash portrait, was purchased by the Art Gallery of New South Wales from the 1948 SORA exhibition. In 1947-49 he also taught drawing and painting part time at East Sydney Technical College and was a member of the Contemporary Art Society (NSW). In 1947-48 four federal trade unions – the Ironworkers, Miners, Seamen and Waterside Workers, of Port Kembla, Newcastle, Cessnock, Lithgow and Wollongong – commissioned him to make a series of drawings and prints about working life, 'Australians at Work’ [1947 drawings in Lebovic, 1948 in Merewether]. W.S. Robinson of the Zinc Corporation of Australia (forerunner of BHP) commissioned him to paint and draw the miners of Broken Hill, leading to a solo exhibition of industrial paintings and drawings the SORA studio, opened on 16 July 1948 by James Boswell, lithographer, illustrator, painter, art educator, member of the Society of Industrial Artists and the Artists’ Association and art editor of London’s Liliput magazine. Some of his Broken Hill drawings were used as illustrations in George Farwell’s Down Argent Street: A story of Broken Hill (Frank Johnson, Sydney, 1949). The Sydney Morning Herald paid him to travel inland and record the faces of rural Australia, while film director Harry Watts employed him as artist on the 1947/48 film Eureka Stockade. Drawings of Chips Rafferty and Peter Finch on the set and other figures dated 1948 were sold by Josef Lebovic in 1997.
Dalgarno left for Europe in 1949 {1950 according to Griffiths}, first going to Czechoslovakia and joining up with the Artists’ Union, then studying in Paris at l’Ecole des Beaux Arts (1951-53) and learning lithography and etching at William Hayter’s famous Atelier 17 (1951 53). He became a habitué of the Café Flore and met existentialists and expatriate surrealists such as Tristan Tzara {BS}. He was fond of drawing the workers in the Paris markets (Les Halles) both on and off duty. He showed work in the Salon des Etrangers (1952) and held solo shows in 1953 and 1955.
In 1956, at the suggestion of Australian writer Hugh Atkinson, Dalgarno went to India where he remained for 20 years, basing himself at Bombay (Mumbai), setting up a lithographic workshop (active 1965-73), working as art director for Lintas International and lecturing in lithography at the Bombay School of Fine Arts. He was co-founder of publisher Editions Anarmali in 1956 and a member of the Board of Studies for the Fine Arts Faculty, University of Baroda (1968-75). He won various prizes in Paris and India, mostly for his graphics. He produced a great many lithographs and etchings in India on 'the ever-present plight of the poor and needy, the mysticism of gods and temples, the power of Indian philosophy and politics’ (Anna Griffiths), which were unrecognised in Australia. As always, his chief focus was on ordinary people.
In 1976, after the death of his second wife, Betty (Elizabeth Bridge), Dalgarno moved to New Zealand. He settled in Auckland where he continued to paint and make prints – and exhibit them – almost up to his death. He was a longstanding member of the Print Council of Australia, although he never again lived in Sydney {Merewether & Concise Dic are wrong in stating that he returned to Sydney c.1978}. 'In 1980, after attending the Pratt Center in New York, he added photographic techniques and colour to his printing repertoire, and experimented, none too convincingly, with abstraction’, Anna Griffiths wrote in his A&A obituary.
Sydney’s Rudy Koman Gallery exhibited his series of Broken Hill miners in 1984. His steelworkers were shown at Holdsworth Galleries in 1986 and his sheep-shearing series at David Ellis Gallery in 1988. An exhibition of his Australian social realist prints, Roy Dalgarno: Working Life , was at Wollongong City Gallery from 11 November 2000 to 21 January 2001. 'The steelworkers at their work remained the most inspiring thing for me’, he said in an interview not long before he died, 'and the steel works were like a huge modern cathedral’ (quoted Griffiths Art and Australia obituary). The exhibition closed just before Dalgarno died, in Auckland on 1 February 2001, aged 90. He was survived by his first wife, Nadine, and their sons Lynn and Lowan, his and Betty’s daughter Yogaratna Danielle, his third wife, Anna Brough, who lives in Auckland, and two grandsons, Loren and Samuel.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 2 December 1910
- Summary
- A diverse artist working primarily with drawing and as a printmaker, Roy Dalgarno had a long and varied career. His work mostly depicts the plight of the worker in Australia and later in India.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Feb-01
- Age at death
- 91
Details
Latitude-31.9559 Longitude115.8606 Start Date1909-01-01 End Date2001-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Perth, WA, Australia
- Biography
- Edward Herbert (Ted) Farmer (1909-2001) was born in Perth and studied architecture in Melbourne. He worked for Leighton Irwin and was transferred to Sydney in 1936 to run its Sydney office. In 1939, he joined the Government Architect’s branch of the NSW Public Works Department, and carried on the architectural traineeship program that had been initiated by Cobden Parkes and Harry Rembert. Farmer’s team built up an enviable record in achieving quality in architecture. The first significant building was Fisher Library, which won the RIBA bronze medal and the Sulman Award from the RAIA. As well as the more prestigious public buildings of the Fisher Library, Goldstein Hall at the University of NSW, the Art Gallery of NSW and the State Office Block, the office also produced a large number of hospital buildings and schools and educational buildings, with the high schools’ program a major thrust. During Farmer’s 15 years in the role of Government Architect after 1958, the office won six Sulman Awards, two Blacket Awards and numerous merit awards. Farmer himself was awarded the RAIA Gold Medal in 1972. However, he found himself in an awkward position when Jørn Utzon resigned as architect for the Sydney Opera House. Through the newly appointed Minister for Public Works, Davis Hughes, Farmer assisted in appointing a panel of Peter Hall, David Littlemore and Lionel Todd to complete the work Utzon had begun. From 1965 until his retirement in 1972, he was the NSW RAIA’s representative on the NSW National Trust. Sources—Johnson, Chris. 2001. Architecture Australia obituary on website http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0NIT/is_5_90/ai_86468933—NSW Government Architect’s website, www.govarch.dpws.nsw.gov.au/history/farmer_johnson.htm (accessed October 2005)
Writers:
Davina Jackson
Date written:
2015
Last updated:
2015
- Born
- b. 1909
- Summary
- E.H. (Ted) Farmer was the New South Wales Government Architect from 1958 to 1972 (when the Government's major project was construction of the Sydney Opera House, designed by Danish architect Jørn Utzon).
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2001
- Age at death
- 92
Details
Latitude-33.9143894 Longitude151.1032133 Start Date1909-01-01 End Date2001-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Campsie, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- cartoonist, caricaturist and comic strip artist, was born in Campsie (NSW), son of a council plumber and national secretary of the Plumbers’ Union who was killed in an accident in 1915 and Catherine MLC, the first woman member of an Australian Upper House. His elder brother, Dan , also became a cartoonist. Jim went to school at Lewisham Christian Brothers until 1924, when aged 14 he began work as a copy boy on the Daily Guardian . Later that year he transferred to Smith’s Weekly , where he worked as a copy boy to Stan Cross and began to draw cartoons. He also studied at Julian Ashton 's Sydney Art School for six years (1924-30) while working at various jobs, including being box office attendant at the Sydney Stadium. This led to a brief boxing career, which included winning all five bouts as a welterweight at Sydney Stadium. He also played tennis. In 1926 he had some basic art tutoring from the head artist of Fox Films – which he paid for, although he worked there unpaid for two years.
In 1928 Russell became Australia’s youngest political cartoonist, being employed on Sydney’s Evening News until the paper folded in 1931. Then he briefly went to the Referee as sports caricaturist until he rejoined Smith’s (on the art staff) the same year. Examples in Smith 's include: (re swearing man) '“Did George ever take lessons in golf?”/ “No, but he speaks it beautifully, doesn’t he?”'26 May 1934, 23; '“Father, dear father, come home to us now” – 1935 version’ (son pleading with father to leave a milk bar) 26 January 1935; two girls at a party '“He’s a smooth liar, isn’t he?”/ “Smooth? He’s streamlined”’ 13 July 1935, 10; (couple walking along swinging tennis rackets) '“How do you like married life?”/ “It’s alright when the wife’s out”’ 1935; and 'The Shape of Things to Come’ 11 March 1939, 12. Two undated originals in the Cross collection were probably also done in the 1930s: (shop assistant to leering customer) 'She: Could I show you something?/ He: I’ll bet you could’ and (chorus girls with orchestra and two men in evening dress in audience) “That’s my girl, second from the right! Can you see her?”/ “Most of her.” In 1939 he temporarily abandoned cartooning and accompanied the Australian Davis Cup team to the US as a tennis writer. The team won the cup as WWII broke out. Russell tried to enlist in the RAAF, unsuccessfully.
When Stan Crossleft Smith’s in 1940 Jim Russell succeeded him as art editor and also took over drawing Cross’s comic strips, including You and Me , which he renamed Mr and Mrs Pott , from 1950 The Potts . This internationally syndicated strip has long been identified with Russell, particularly his new character the bachelor brother of Mrs Potts, Uncle Dick introduced in 1957 after an editorial directive banned domestic rows. Often seen as semi-autobiographical, Uncle Dick was apparently initially based on the character Sheridan Whiteside in the film, The Man Who Came to Dinner , 1941 (played by Monty Woolley, apparently based on American critic Alexander Woolcot), although Russell later wryly admitted: 'I’ve grown more like Uncle Dick and Uncle Dick has grown more like me. My wife [Billie, who died in 1995] says he is me.’ In 1990 Russell established a world record of 51 years continuously drawing a comic strip. The Potts (retitled Uncle Dick in the USA) was syndicated to some 40 newspapers in Australia, the US, NZ, England and India, he was still drawing it when he died, on 15 August 2001. (Strips continued to appear in the SMH for several weeks afterwards).
During WWII Jim Russell not only enlisted the Potts into the war effort, he drew two weekly satiric features, Adolph, Musso, and Herman (which made fun of Hitler, Goering and Mussolini) and Schmitt der Sphy . Both were reputedly resented enough in Germany to get Russell on a Hitler hit-list, especially the former. He won the Voluntary Services section prize in the NGV’s 1945 exhibition , Australia at War . Jim occasionally used the pseudonym 'Mick Newton’ for his comic strips Kanga’s K.O. Comics (1949) and for a later version of Wanda Dare in Tex Morton Comics (see Shiell ed. – attributes the earlier Wanda Dare to older brother Dan Russell). When Smith 's closed in 1950, Russell followed Cross to the Melbourne Herald and Weekly Times Ltd. He also wrote film reviews and other articles, was a radio and TV personality, a publisher of dancing and music magazines and ran two travel agencies. For most of the last years of his life he lived at Sylvania.
In 1924 Jim Russell was one of the founders of the original Black and White Artists’ Club (see Harry Weston for full list of members) and organised some of the early B/W Artists’ balls. He succeeded Cross as president in 1955-57, then again in 1965-73, with Doug Albion in the interim. He won the Club’s first Silver Stanley in 1985 for his contribution to black and white art, was elected life member and patron in 1986, 'smocked’ in 1993 on his return from overseas where he was elected a member of the National Cartoonists’ Society of the USA, the only Australian ever to receive this honour. In 1978 he was awarded the MBE, then later the AM. Russell organised a ABWAC tour to the National Cartoonists’ Society’s annual Reuben awards at La Jolla, California in May 1994 and was said to be organising another to Boca Raton, Florida, for the Reuben awards and convention in May 1995 ( Inkspot 24, summer 1995, 12). He was actively cartooning and contributing to professional and charity events until the day before he died, aged 93. Indeed, he had agreed to go to Engadine to judge the L.J. Hooker primary and secondary schools’ cartoon competition and to conduct a workshop on cartooning on the day he died, said Lindsay Foyle, but had to cancel because he was unwell. He was survived by a daughter, three grandchildren and a great-grandson.
In the late 1970s the Herald donated a large collection of Potts strips of the 1960s-70s to the SLNSW. One Russell cartoon of the 1950s, and others (possibly for the Bulletin ) are in the SLNSW ML. 'Hullo, Rhubarb! What are you doing these days?’ was donated to ML by the wife of a Smith’s reporter in 1999 along with over 20 other originals and a copy of the final issue, 28 October 1950, signed by all the cartoonists.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1909
- Summary
- Prolific cartoonist: took over 'The Potts' from Stan Cross; created "Uncle Dick". In 1924 Jim Russell was one of the founders of the original Black and White Artists' Club.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 15-Aug-01
- Age at death
- 92
Details
Latitude50.8036831 Longitude-1.075614 Start Date1907-01-01 End Date2001-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Portsmouth, England, UK
- Biography
- cartoonist and painter, was born in Portsmouth, England, the youngest boy in a family of 12 children. He came to Perth in 1911, aged four. Two years later the family moved to Sydney and settled in Balmain. They were very poor and moved frequently, 'just one step ahead of the landlord’, he once commented (Rae, 52). Eric left school at 14 and tried a variety of jobs before leaving home to explore Australia at the age of 16 [15 according to Stephens obit.]. He 'humped his bluey through Queensland and New South Wales and worked as a rabbit trapper and shearing shed hand’ (Blaikie, 102) at Cowra, Canowindra, Coonamble and Walgett [for six years according to Stephens]. Although Jolliffe’s heart was in the bush, he needed money to live so moved back to the city where he worked as a window cleaner during the day and attended art classes at East Sydney Technical College at night.
Pre-WWII he worked as a freelance cartoonist mainly drawing for the Bulletin, which bought his first drawing. After his mate Arthur Horner moved to Smith’s Weekly Jolliffe drew Old Andy for the Bulletin from 1930 to 1939 (the anthology Andy was published by Frank Johnson c.1940). Other freelance jobs were for the ABC Weekly (1939), Pix (1946) and the Sun newspaper (1966-70). In fact, his only full-time jobs in a lifetime of drawing cartoons were at Smith’s Weekly for a year or so (1944) and at the ABC Weekly for a few months.
Jolliffe was a camouflage artist with the RAAF during the War, travelling to Arnhem Land and the Kimberley, where he got to know a number of Indigenous people. He specialised in bush humour, both black and white, and was admired by both races. (Billy Palm Island is said to have described Jolliffe as his favourite cartoonist at the opening of the Tambo exhibition at the National Library of Australia in November 1997) His 'comic studies of Aborigines in the more or less raw and the Outback’ featured in the Sun-Herald and Pix (especially) for many years. He sketched everywhere he went. He first met Aborigines from Arnhem Land and the Kimberley while working in a camouflage office with the RAAF in the Northern Territory during the war. They inspired Witchetty’s Tribe , e.g. “I see Daughter’s got herself another beau” ('caveman’ Aborigine dragging female by the hair, original NLA). He also drew hundreds, possibly thousands, of white bushie jokes, many featuring Saltbush Bill, e.g. “Couldn’t imagine Christmas dinner without a bit o’ poultry, Ma”, Bulletin 1941 (Bill about to behead an emu). Douglas Stewart recollected that as 'an exponent of life in the outback’, he 'used to carry the most charming little flying possum in his pocket’ at the Bulletin office (Stewart, 36).
Jolliffe’s 'Saltbush Bill’, 'Witchetty’s Tribe’ and 'Sandy Blight’ cartoons in Pix were nationally renowned, e.g. Corroboree 3 February 1945, 16-17; Walkabout 31 March 1945, 16-17; Back o’ Beyond 26 May 1945, 16-17; Piccaninny Playtime 14 July 1945, 10-11; a double-page spread of 'Jolliffe Jollities’ 16 August 1947, 22-23, on what might happen 'if aboriginal tradition mingles with the influences of our Western civilisation’; The eternal “She” in the Never-never 11 October 1947, 12-13; As Jolliffe sees the Abo 24 July 1948, 12; With Jolliffe in Arnhem Land 30 October 1948, 14-17 (on the Smithsonian Institution-sponsored Arnhem Land expedition – [and/or 'with Bill Harney and Charles Mountford on a National Geographic expedition and with Professor A.P. Elkin, the anthropologist’, according to Stephens] including jokes about most of the individual members of the expedition confronting the Yirrkala people, e.g. the anthropologists). In many of his Aboriginal cartoons the joke depends on the incongruity of the Indigenous Australian’s two worlds, e.g. woman outside humpy smacking baby while husband with spear is saying, “ Now , where’s the exponent of child psychology?” 1955 (ill. Lindesay 1979, 277). His 'Saltbush Bill’ cartoons ran in Pix magazine for nearly 50 years from 1945 (Stephens).
Jolliffe was an immensely prolific artist. By 1983 he had published 130 anthologies of his cartoons and drawings, mainly from Pix , according to Rae, and they were still appearing in People (with which Pix merged, separated, then merged again) in 1997. Annual anthologies exist to 2001; his son-in-law, the cartoonist Ken Emerson , told Tony Stephens that Jolliffe published ’132 books of comics’ (obituary Sydney Morning Herald [ SMH ]). The first was Andy (Sydney: Frank Johnson, c.1940) of which the publisher noted, '“Andy” has become a national figure and the sales of this book of fun on the selection have been phenomenal’ (ad. in Lock anthology 1941). Others include Corroboree: Aboriginal Cartoon Fun (Sydney, 1946) – with poem 'The Artist’ (Albert Namatjira) by Norma L. Davis; Witchetty’s Tribe: Aboriginal cartoon fun no.13 (Rosebery NSW: Sungravure, n.d. [1950s?]) – cartoons from Pix , including a sputnik joke [presumably post October 1957], plus a centrepiece series of portrait heads); Witchetty’s Tribe: Aboriginal cartoon fun no.28 (Rosebery NSW: Sungravure, n.d. [1960s?]) – more cartoons from Pix , plus 45 sympathetic sketches of 'some of the 45 aboriginal dancers from Arnhem Land who recently delighted Sydney and Melbourne audiences with their corroboree dances’, organised by Stephen Haag of the Elizabethan Theatre Trust, plus Jolliffe’s description and sketch of a 'Pukamuni [ sic ] death dance’ on Melville Island. Later he published his own annuals, e.g. Jolliffe’s Outback Australia (E. Jolliffe: Dee Why NSW, 1979), which consisted of Saltbush Bill gags, plus articles on cedar getting on the Macleay River and on the koala, with a portrait of a pretty Aboriginal girl inside the back cover 'for framing’), and Jolliffe’s Outback 129: Saltbush Bill’s 50th Anniversary (Jolliffe Studios, 1994) celebrating 50 years since Bill’s first appearance in Pix as a weekly feature.
In 1980 the Federal Anti-Discrimination Board accused Jolliffe of racism in the way he portrayed Aboriginal people in his cartoons. A burst of publicity ensued, with Ken Slessor, Prof Elkin, Lenny Lower and Jolliffe’s cartoonist mates rallying to his defence (some of whom were presumably cited posthumously). Blaikie said that Jolliffe had, in fact, replaced the earlier offensive Smith’s Weekly moronic 'Jacky Jacky’ stereotype (notably those drawn by Stan Cross ) with athletic hunters with a sense of humour and women 'as beautiful as white models’. Letters and cartoons about the incident are reproduced in The Best of Witchetty’s Tribe by Jolliffe (Jolliffe Publications, Dee Why, 1980). Joan Kerr’s papers include a copy, also photocopies of newscuttings and letters about the incident from Jolliffe’s own files.
Perhaps partly in response to this public insult, Jolliffe won the Stanley Award for best single gag artist in 1985 and 1986. He had also won the Sydney Savage Club Cartoonist Award twice (in 1960 and 1961). He was a fellow of the Australian Institute of History and Art [details unknown] and was awarded the OAM for his services to art as a cartoonist and illustrator, states Stephens. Yet even though he continued to draw cartoons and produce annual anthologies, few contain Aboriginal subjects from the 1980s and there are almost no Aboriginal gags in the Mitchell Library’s collections [ML] of his original drawings.
At the age of 82, Jolliffe added watercolour painting to his repertoire. From then on he regularly exhibited views of outback Australia. He lived in a retirement unit at Bateau Bay (NSW) with his wife, May, whom he married c.1932, but still spent much time travelling in the Northern Territory visiting his many Aboriginal friends. May died in 1993 after 61 years of marriage and their daughter May (wife of Ken Emerson) died in 1997. The Australian Black and White Artists’ Club gave Jolliffe a 90th birthday celebration in Sydney in 1997. He attended both b/w exhibition openings at Sydney in 1999 with his friend John Clements. Eric Jolliffe died in November 2001, survived by Ken Emerson and granddaughter Jane Emerson. His funeral service was held at Ourimbah on the Central NSW Coast on Wednesday, 21 November 2001.
Images include Aboriginal rock painter, “Actually he’d rather do landscape like Namatjira, only he’s scared they might give him citizenship rights” original not located (see Kerr, Artists and Cartoonists ); Aborigine painting on a rockface to his critic, “What d’you mean, 'chocolate boxy’?”
Aboriginal being chased by croc, Bulletin original ('Saltbush Bill’ OR 'Sandy Blight’ collection?), published 1 July 1946 (ML Px*D438/38), showing sheep, cows and rabbits at the top of tree with a bushie saying to a male visitor, “It’s a sure sign of heavy rain” (in State Library of New South Wales Australians in Black & White, the most public art exhibition, 1999).
A small 1960s-70s group of Jolliffe’s Sandy Blight strips are in ML (Pic Acc 3088), donated by the SMH c.1979, while a number of outback cartoons are in the ML Bulletin collection.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1907
- Summary
- Prolific mid 20th century Sydney-based cartoonist and painter and the creator of "Witchetty's Tribe". Despite having a number of close friendships within the Indigenous communities of northern Australia, in 1980 the Federal Anti-Discrimination Board accused Jolliffe of racism in the way he portrayed Aboriginal people in his cartoons - a claim that was met with outrage amongst his peers.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- Nov-01
- Age at death
- 94
Details
Latitude-33.713759 Longitude150.3121633 Start Date1900-01-01 End Date2001-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Katoomba, Blue Mountains, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- painter, craftworker, designer and editor, was born in Katoomba, NSW on 25 August 1900, second eldest child and eldest daughter of ten children – five brothers and four sisters. She grew up at Balmain and attended Sydney Girls’ High School, leaving at the age of 15 to help her mother care for 'the brood’. Nancy was interested in art and the first job she had was at the Jack O’Lantern studios in Sydney, creating pokerwork for £2 a week. She continued to work there as a commercial artist in the 1920s, decorating furniture and artefact and producing polkerwork designs in her own studio.
From 1918 Nancy Hall attended Julian Ashton’s art studio, where her contemporaries included Roland Wakelin , Dorrit Black and Grace Crowley . In July 1924 she published the first issue of the magazine Undergrowth , which she edited with Dore Hawthorne until 1929. A linocut by Ysobel Irving (later Irvine), published in the July August 1928 issue, showing a young woman in a smart suit and hat moving purposefully towards a seat on a ferry in many ways typifies the stated aims and unstated achievements of this student magazine. Begun as a four page, hand-typed newsletter for the Sydney Art Students’ Club, Undergrowth progressed rapidly to become a handsome, professionally printed magazine. Titled by its editors Undergrowth: A Magazine of Youth and Ideals , it contained articles, poetry, stories and plays from students and others. The cover designs were linocuts and woodcuts by Hawthorne, Crowley, Florence Taylor , Ruth Ainsworth , Miriam Moxham , Gwen Ridley and Roland Wakelin. The other illustrations were mostly linocuts and woodcuts by students with occasional photographs and coloured reproductions of works by established artists such as William Dobell , Wakelin and Roy de Maistre .
Its youthful acceptance of new ideas resulted in a leaning in favour of modern art; indeed, Undergrowth became the main forum for information about, debate on and support for modern art in Sydney. By virtue of the number of female artists working in a modernist style, including Anne Dangar , Grace Crowley, Thea Proctor , Ethel Anderson and Margaret Preston , the number of letters and articles by and about women artists and supporters of modern art outnumbered similar items concerning or by male modernists. As has often been remarked, women students in art schools always far outnumber the men. Although Undergrowth printed contributions from male students, it reflected the prevailing gender ratio and hence gave women an unprecedented voice to express their views and publish their work. The female editorship was unique in a Sydney publication at the time, and it is perhaps telling that women artists such as Ysobel Irving found their only public recognition in Undergrowth . When it ceased publication after the July August 1929 issue, most disappeared, leaving almost no trace in the art world.
At the age of 27 Nancy Hall went to Sydney University, graduating BA in 1931. At the conferring ceremony her father rose to his feet, clapped loudly, and shouted 'Bravo! Bravo!’ Becoming devoted to the ideals of Christian Science, she started two Christian Science schools at Vaucluse – Hillcrest and Edgeworth – where she taught French and Latin. Edgeworth was founded towards the end of the 1930s and named after her friend Sir Edgeworth David. Her brother Ian Hall notes that after the Japanese shelled the eastern suburbs in the early 1940s she transferred Edgeworth with some 19 students to a large old house in the 'country’ at Castle Hill. She rented the property, which had plenty of room, but no amenities. Chaos reigned as she did the chores and taught a bunch of adventurous children for a year with the help of a few dedicated volunteers, then returned to make great progress at Vaucluse.
Nancy Hall, who never married, painted in oil and watercolour and did illustrative designs almost up to her death. She spent her last years in the Lady Gowrie Village at Gordon, where she encouraged other residents to become interested in activities beyond the daily routine. 'Nan was never critical, just loved and loving’, wrote Ian Hall, the last surviving sibling, in an Sydney Morning Herald obituary. She died peacefully at Gordon on 22 June 2001, aged 100.
Writers:
Johnson, Heather
Note: Primary
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1900
- Summary
- Sydney based painter, craftworker, designer and editor. In July 1924 she published the first issue of the magazine Undergrowth, which recognised many female artists of the time.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2001
- Age at death
- 101
Details
Latitude-28.5483333 Longitude153.5011111 Start Date1943-01-01 End Date2000-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Mullumbimby, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1943
- Summary
- Mullumbimby-born designer behind the Dandie/Dandy boutique in Kings Road in Swinging Sixties London.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2000
- Age at death
- 57
Details
Latitude-23.447 Longitude131.882 Start Date1938-01-01 End Date2000-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Haasts Bluff, NT, Australia
- Biography
- Born c. 1940 at Haasts Bluff in his mother’s country. Two Bob’s family fled Warlpiri country and went to live in the area of Mt Wedge after the 1928 Coniston massacre, later moving to Haasts Bluff and thence to the new settlement at Papunya in the early ’60s. Two Bob was one of a group of younger Warlpiri artists, including also Don Tjungurrayi , Maxie Tjampitjinpa and Michael Nelson , who started painting at Papunya in the late 1970s, early 1980s and emerged over the decade of the 1980s as major painters for Papunya Tula Artists. Two Bob’s Dreaming stories included Goanna, Man, Woman, Bush Tucker, Bush Grapes, Mukaki and Carpet Snake. He and his wife Nellie Nangala, a Luritja woman (who also painted for Papunya Tula occasionally), had three sons and two daughters. Two Bob travelled to Canberra, Sydney and Adelaide with Papunya Tula Artists.
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1938
- Summary
- Two Bob was one of a group of younger Papunya-based artists, including also Don Tjungurrayi, Maxie Tjampitjinpa and Michael Nelson, who emerged over the decade of the 1980s painting for Papunya Tula Artists.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2000
- Age at death
- 62
Details
Latitude-19.8516101 Longitude133.2303375 Start Date1935-01-01 End Date2000-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Kintore Range, NT, Australia
- Biography
- Born in the Kintore Ranges c.1935, Johnny Scobie grew up walking these regions as his father had before him. As a young man, Johnny went droving, north to Lajamanu and east as far as Broken Hill before returning to Alice Springs to marry his promised wife Narpula Scobie , sister of Turkey Tolson . and go to live in Papunya. Johnny’s recollection is that he started to paint in the late ’70s when John Kean was running Papunya Tula Artists, resuming after a break back in Kintore, where he was Chairman of the Walungurru (Kintore) Council for many years. His country from his mother’s side was around the Kintore Ranges out to Lake Mackay and the Balgo area. He also painted the Wedgetail Eagle Dreaming for a hill to the west of Yuendumu.
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Note: Primary biographer
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1935
- Summary
- Pintupi artist and Walungurru Council Chairman whose early work for Papunya Tula Artists was included in the Peter Stuyvesant Collection, which toured internationally from 1977.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2000
- Age at death
- 65
Details
Latitude-25 Longitude133 Start Date1931-01-01 End Date2000-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1931
- Summary
- Hermia Boyd was a set designer, potter and glass painter.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1-Jan-00
- Age at death
- 69
Details
Latitude-21.43494345 Longitude125.0580478 Start Date1930-01-01 End Date2000-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Percival Lakes, WA, Australia
- Biography
- Born 'in the bush’ in the area near Percival Lakes c.1930, David Hall lived at Mulan. A Kukatja speaker, his traditional country was Kutarta, south-west of Balgo. He began painting for Warlayirti Artists in 1990 and painted Tingari and Water Dreamings. Like some other artists working out of Mulan, he used more areas of brushwork on the canvas and did not utilise dotting so much as other artists from the Balgo Hills area. He created unusual and subtle designs filled with his knowledge and concern for Men’s Law. He worked slowly and carefully, attaching great importance to his finished works. He was married to the late Ena Gimme Nungarrayi .
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1930
- Summary
- Kukatja artist who painted for Warlayirti Artists from Mulan (WA). His designs, usually featuring more brushwork than works from nearby Balgo, are imbued with the knowledge and power of Men's Law.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2000
- Age at death
- 70
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1930-01-01 End Date2000-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Harry Howard (1930-2000) was an architect and landscape architect who designed the sculpture garden at the National Gallery of Australia (with Barbara Buchanan and Roger Vidler) and the landscape setting of the adjacent High Court, Canberra. He graduated in architecture from the University of Sydney in 1953, worked briefly for Sydney Ancher, then transferred to Edwards Madigan Torzillo, where he remained for many years. He also completed a diploma of town and country planning at the University of Sydney in 1960. A modernist devoted to Gropius, Le Corbusier, Mies Van der Rohe and Harry Seidler, he was also drawn to left-wing socialist politics. His first commission, an abstract composition of two elegant, flat-roofed pavilions – a House for a Young Couple and a House for a Retired Couple – was built on a double lot in East Gordon and exhibited at the arts festival of the Olympic Games in Melbourne in 1956. He worked on the site design and landscape development of many schools during this period, both for the Public Works Department and parents & citizens groups. During the 1960s, he taught design part-time in the School of Architecture at the University of NSW. He was one of a highly talented group which included Rickard, Bill Lucas and Neville Gruzman, who were committed to creating an inspired response to the Sydney landscape. They created a unique work environment and social milieu at 7 Ridge Street, North Sydney, a building conceived by Howard and Rickard as a series of professional studios and designed by Ian McKay. At one time, 7 Ridge Street accommodated the offices of Seidler, Mackenzie, Rickard, Howard, Peter Myers and the studios of designer Gordon Andrews and photographer David Moore. Howard served on the NSW RAIA Council 1970-84 and on the Board of Architects during the 1970s. A foundation member of the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects, In association with Barbara Buchanan, he designed Sawmillers Reserve at McMahons Point, the landscape of the Film & Television School, Ryde, and the courtyards at NIDA. In 1996, he received the Australian Award, the highest accolade of the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects.Source—Weirick, James. 2000. Obituary in The Sydney Morning Herald, 7 October.James Weirick checked this information in January 2005.
Writers:
Davina Jackson
Date written:
2015
Last updated:
2015
- Born
- b. 1930
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2000
- Age at death
- 70
Details
Latitude47.4925 Longitude19.051389 Start Date1926-01-01 End Date2000-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Budapest, Hungary
- Biography
- Peter Kollar (1926-2000) was an Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of NSW. Born in Hungary, he arrived in Australia in 19XX and taught at the university from the 1950s. In 1957, he won fourth place in the Sydney Opera House design competition (the highest-placed Australian entrant) and protested against Jørn Utzon’s departure from the project. Kollar was known for fierce debates with design tutor Neville Gruzman. He wrote prolifically on architecture, the world’s great spiritual traditions and the principles and theory of design In a rare honour, the University of New South Wales was formally congratulated by theinternational assessors of his doctoral thesis for a body of work which they proclaimed as 'thegreatest work of its kind’. His students witnessed a profoundly spiritual yet solidlyfounded approach to architecture. Sources—Obituary in UNSW Faculty of the Built Environment newsletter,
Writers:
Davina Jackson
Date written:
2015
Last updated:
2015
- Born
- b. 1926
- Summary
- Dr Peter Kollar (1926-2000) was an associate professor of architecture at the University of New South Wales from 1957 to the 1970s. Domestic architecture by Kollar is known as well as an entry in the Sydney Opera House competition in partnership with Balthazar Korab.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-00
- Age at death
- 74
Details
Latitude-38.15 Longitude144.35 Start Date1924-01-01 End Date2000-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Geelong, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 December 1924
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2000
- Age at death
- 76
Details
Latitude-31.959105 Longitude118.0023126 Start Date1923-01-01 End Date2000-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Bruce Rock, WA, Australia
- Biography
- John Perceval was born on 1 February 1923 with the name Linwood Robert Steven South Bruce Rock in Western Australia. His father, Robert South, was a wheat farmer, a man well known for his hard work and violent temper. His parents’ marriage was short-lived. His mother, born Dorothy Dolton, left when the boy was only 18 months old, with his older sister unhappily stayed with their father until 1934 when their mother married William de Burgh Perceval in Melbourne. John Perceval took his stepfather’s name, and began to attend Trinity Grammar. At the age of 15 he suffered from polio, and spent a year in hospital. As a part of his recovery he began to paint.He came to know the artists associated with Melbourne’s newly established Contemporary Art Society, and through them joined the circle of artists and writers around John and Sunday Reed at Heide Park. Despite his withered leg John Perceval enlisted in the Army as his skills as a draughtsman could be used in the Cartographic Company. Here he met Arthur Boyd, and then the entire extended Boyd family at Murrumbeena. He married Arthur’s youngest sister, Mary Boyd, in 1944. With Arthur Boyd and Neil Douglas he worked at the Murrumbeena pottery, making decorated pots and bowls. His paintings of this period show a strong influence of Arthur Boyd’s work, with a joyeus brush stroke and an almost naive quality.The Perceval family lived at Williamstown, at the old naval port on the mouth of the Yarra and the working harbour became a part of his subject matter. His subject matter was sometimes metaphorical, but always based in elements of his life. The city of Melbourne became the background for a nativity scene, painted in a style that quoted Breughel. His children: Matthew, Tessa, Celia and Alice all appear as reoccurring elements in his art. No more is this more evident than in his series of ceramic angels, made between 1957 and 1962. While they certainly quoted Renaissance sculptural figures and Piero della Francesca’s paintings, the joie de vivre of these (sometimes) quite naughty figures owes more to his observations of his children – although one is modelled on the satirist Barry Humphries.In 1959, Perceval was persuaded by Bernard Smith to join with his brothers-in-law Arthur and David Boyd, John Brack, Robert Dickerson, Charles Blackman and Clifton Pugh to form the Antipodeans a celebration of the human figure, in opposition to the rise of abstract art. His own paintings however concentrated on landscapes, and increasingly he found more nourishment from Vincent Van Gogh than any other artist.Perceval’s bad memories, alcoholism and long undiagnosed psychiatric illness meant that life was less than easy for his family and his marriage ended unhappily. In 1965 he was hospitalised for alcoholism, and in 1977 he entered the Larundal psychiatric hospital, where he stayed until 1986.Perceval continued to paint for the rest of his life, but although he had some commercial success, these later works appear crude when placed next to his paintings of the 1940s and ’50s.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 1 February 1923
- Summary
- John Perceval had little formal training as an artist, but after he fell ill with polio at the age of 15 he concentrated on painting and drawing. He came to know the Boyd family and the Angry Penguins circle of Heide Park and they were the greatest influence on his developing style.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 15-Oct-00
- Age at death
- 77
Details
Latitude-34.6394513 Longitude148.025723 Start Date1923-01-01 End Date2000-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Cootamundra, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Painter and teacher, was born in Cootamundra, NSW, and educated at Canberra Grammar School, leaving in 1941 with high marks in art and history. Interested in Max Meldrum’s tonal painting theories, he moved to Melbourne and joined his school in 1942. He became an assistant teacher, running the classes when Meldrum was away. For 10 years he lived in the Meldrum home, where he was treated like a son. When Meldrum died, Inson moved to Sydney and opened a studio in Rowe Street in 1954. He held his first solo exhibition that year. One of his first students was Ivy Shore, winner of the Portia Geach art award and his life partner.
For 25 years Inson divided his time between teaching and travelling around Australia, painting and photographing city and rural scenes, portraits and still life and writing Australian history: The Restless Years and The Glorious Years (both Jacaranda Press). In 1980 he began painting foreign landscapes, interspersing his Australian trips with visits to Europe, Africa and the Middle East. He had 60 solo exhibitions in his lifetime, mainly in Brisbane and Sydney but also in Canberra and Adelaide. He was a frequent contributor to the Archibald, a finalist on several occasions in the Doug Moran Portrait Prize and winner of the Troy Roche Prize. Ivy died in 1999 and Inson died of a massive heart attack early in 2000, aged 77, having taken a class the day before his death.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1923
- Summary
- Holding 60 solo exhibitions in his lifetime, Inson divided his time between teaching and travelling around Australia and overseas to paint foreign landscapes.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2000
- Age at death
- 77
Details
Latitude-27.5610193 Longitude151.953351 Start Date1922-01-01 End Date2000-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Toowoomba, Qld., Australia
- Biography
- Verlie Just (née Tainton) was born in Toowoomba on 22 July 1922, the youngest daughter of George Richard Tainton, a respected journalist with The Courier-Mail, and his wife Gladys née Horn. Verlie attended All Hallows’ School in the heart of Brisbane. Although her father steered her towards a career in academia, she was determined to be an artist, deliberately failing exam questions to remain in the school’s arts stream. For several years, she took private painting lessons with William Bustard, and eventually, enrolled at Brisbane’s Central Technical College. Verlie studied full-time from 1938 to 1941, primarily under the tutelage of FJ Martyn Roberts and Cyril Gibbs. While there, she also met her future husband, Arnold William Theodore Just.
Initially, Verlie worked in embroidery and fashion design. During World War II, she enlisted as a draughtswoman in the Australian Women’s Army Service at Victoria Barracks, which enabled her to monitor Arnold’s whereabouts while he was deployed overseas. In 1942, Verlie learned that his unit was to pass through Brisbane. On 26 August that year, the couple wed at St John’s Cathedral. Two years later, while Arnold was on his second tour of Papua New Guinea, Verlie gave birth to their first daughter, Jeraldene. Arnold returned home three months after the war ended. In 1950, Verlie resumed her studies, enrolling in Melville Haysom’s classes at the Central Technical College. After giving birth to her second daughter Janene, however, she paused her career to raise her family.
In the 1960s, with Jeraldene and Janene nearing the end of their schooling, Verlie resumed her artistic practice. She drifted away from her earlier interests, having fallen in love with jewellery design. Over the years, Verlie had developed an interest in geology. She was fascinated by the potential of gemstones, and viewed jewellery as a means to unlock their beauty. At the time, instruction in jewellery-making was restricted to male trade apprentices, and as a result, Verlie taught herself the techniques involved in lapidary and silversmithing. While her favoured metal was sterling silver, she experimented with a variety of gemstones, many of which she found herself. She would often take the family on expeditions to fossicking areas such as Stanthorpe, the Gold Coast Hinterland, and Lightning Ridge, where they would pan in creeks and dig for stones.
In 1960, Verlie was invited to develop her practice at The Spit, the Sydney studio of Danish silversmith Helge Larsen. Larsen and his wife Darani Lewers were pioneers of contemporary jewellery and hollowware in Australia. Their influence was particularly felt in Brisbane through their 1962 and 1964 exhibitions at the Johnstone Gallery. Although Verlie ultimately rejected the minimalist approach employed by Larsen, the two stayed in touch for many years.
In 1969, Verlie embarked on a study tour of the United States, spending five months abroad in Honolulu, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, and Bangor. She also visited Philadelphia, where she attended a course in electroforming at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture (based at Temple University) with jewellery artist Stanley Lechtzin. The highlight of her trip, however, was time spent at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. Located on the coast of Maine, Haystack was an international hub for craftspeople, artisans, and designers. Verlie had received a six-week scholarship to the school, and while there, learnt from prominent metalsmiths Olaf Skoogfors and Robert Ebendorf. At Haystack, she was also introduced to Perspex, and moved into mobile-jewellery and wall-hangings. While the artist’s foray into plastics was promising, it was short-lived. When she returned home, Verlie resumed her use of natural materials.
Back in Brisbane, Verlie became involved with the Craft Association of Australia (CAA). The CAA was a non-profit organisation, affiliated with the World Crafts Council, that sought to promote the work of Australian craftspeople and designers. In 1970, Verlie helped to form the Queensland branch of the CAA at the invitation of Larsen, who had co-founded the New South Wales branch in 1964. She was elected as the first President of the Queensland branch (CAAQ), with EJ Weller and Kit Shannon as Vice Presidents. Under their leadership, the CAAQ established a fellowship, held several member exhibitions, maintained a directory of local craft events, and more.
In 1972, Verlie had a ‘falling out’ with the CAAQ. She took issue with its members, many of whom had falsely stated that Brisbane artist Hilda Pavlu, who exhibited under the pseudonym of Frances Wildt, had won the 1968 Benvenuto Cellini Competition in Germany, when in reality she had received a Highly Commended award. The press picked up and circulated this inaccuracy, which frustrated Verlie. She did not want the CAAQ to be seen to spread false claims, especially as it had received financial support from the Queensland Government’s Education and Cultural Activities Department in the form of a Cultural Activities New Ventures Fund. Verlie attempted to correct the situation but found that those involved were unreceptive to her efforts. Pavlu was another female jeweller in direct sales competition with Verlie, thus it is plausible to suggest that Verlie’s unwillingness to let the matter go was spurred by professional rivalry. In the end, stubbornly refusing to move on from the situation, Verlie not only resigned from the CAAQ, but also quit creating jewellery in protest.
After resigning as an artist, Verlie set her sights on a new goal: establishing her own gallery. In April 1973, she founded The Town Gallery. In the surrounding years, Brisbane had witnessed the closure of its major commercial galleries, including the Moreton Galleries in 1970, the Johnstone Gallery in 1972, and the Reid Gallery in 1975. Verlie sought to alleviate this loss with The Town Gallery, although she rejected the term ‘commercial gallery’ – she believed that the quality of an artist’s work was more important than its marketability. The opening of The Town Gallery also marked the success of Verlie’s notable campaign to exempt art galleries from the Government’s trading hour restrictions. Prior to this, galleries were unable to display arts and crafts for sale outside regular trading hours, as stipulated in the Factories and Shops Act 1960. This affected artists who relied on sales from exhibition openings, among other gallery events, which often occurred after hours. Verlie lobbied for seven years until finally, the legislation was amended.
Throughout its lifetime, The Town Gallery occupied several spaces in Brisbane: Queens Arcade Building (1973–85), Dunstan House (1986–90), MacArthur Chambers (1990–97), and Charlotte House (1997–2000). Although Verlie claimed to exhibit Australian artists of all styles, she held a particular interest in those inspired by European Modernism. Within her stable of artists, several presented explorations into abstraction, with the majority excelling in Modern landscape, genre, and portrait painting. Most notably, Verlie represented interstate artists Gary and Alan Baker, Judy Cassab, Graeme Inson, and Owen Piggott, and Brisbane artists Irene Amos, Henry Bartlett, and John Rigby. She also provided many emerging Queensland artists with exhibition profiles, including Veda Arrowsmith, Bev Budgen, Brian Hatch, Max Hurley, Shirley Miller, Mervyn Moriarty, and Phyllis Schneider. Additionally, Verlie played an important role in bringing Brisbane’s Modernist painter of the 1940s, Vincent Brown, back to critical attention. Apart from pottery by Carl McConnell however, Verlie rarely exhibited crafts media. It is likely her upset with the CAAQ contributed to this decision.
In 1979, Verlie expanded The Town Gallery to include the Japan Room, the first space in Australia to both exclusively and permanently exhibit ukiyo-e (Japanese woodblock prints). Verlie sought to bring the masters of the tradition – Hokusai, Hiroshige, Utamaro, Kuniyoshi, Yoshitoshi, Kunisada, and more – to the citizens of Brisbane. While she maintained several contacts in Japan, the majority of her prints came through South Australian dealers David Button and Geraldine Halls. For years, Verlie pushed for Queensland Art Gallery (QAG) to expand its collection of Japanese art. She wrote countless letters to the institution outlining her acquisition recommendations, and while her advice was not always taken, she made a definite impact. Between 1979 and 2000, approximately a third of the Japanese woodblock prints acquired by QAG were made available by Verlie. She also collaborated with the institution to curate two dedicated exhibitions of ukiyo-e: ‘Looking Eastwards: The Intricate Art of Japanese Prints’ (1989) and ‘Four Centuries of Ukiyo-e Prints’ (1997).
While directing The Town Gallery, which was renamed The Verlie Just Town Gallery in 1976, and eventually The Verlie Just Town Gallery and Japan Room in 1979, Verlie undertook many trips to Japan, the United States, and Europe to stay up to date with global art trends and forge relationships with international galleries, dealers, and collectors. During this time, she continued her involvement in the Brisbane arts community. In 1991, Verlie became a founding member of Brisbane’s Public and Private Gallery Directors Group, co-chaired by Philip Bacon and Marilyn Domenech. Although she exited the group after three meetings, she supported them in their bid to remedy the inadequate level of newspaper coverage of the visual arts in Queensland, in particular their mission to develop a Thursday arts page in The Courier-Mail, a matter she had been pursuing since the 1980s.
For her contributions to the arts, Verlie was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia on 8 June 1992. She had been nominated by her stable of artists and Sir Charles Gray Wanstall, the former Chief Justice of Queensland. On 10 January 2000, Verlie passed away. Arnold kept the gallery open for a limited time, so people could see the last show she had installed. Soon after, The Verlie Just Town Gallery and Japan Room closed its doors.
Adapted from: Elena Dias-Jayasinha, “The Verlie Just Town Gallery and Japan Room Archive,” Queensland History Journal 24, no. 11 (November 2021): 1045-56.
Writers:
Elena Dias-Jayasinha
Date written:
2021
Last updated:
2022
- Born
- b. 22 July 1922
- Summary
- Just, described as Queensland's first contemporary jeweller, established 'The Verlie Just Town Gallery and Japan Room' in 1973 in Brisbane, Queensland. She was one of the founders of the Queensland Craft Association. Her jewellery was exhibited widely.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 10-Jan-00
- Age at death
- 78
Details
Latitude-34.78029735 Longitude150.6966853 Start Date1922-01-01 End Date2000-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Berry, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Born in North Sydney in 1922, Roger McLay belongs to the first generation of celebrated designers (Gordon Andrews, Frances Burke, Alister Morrison, Grant Featherston and many others) who were taught their trade by the Australian technical colleges.
McLay’s design consultancy in Sydney ran a varied practice producing commercial furniture, interior design for such clients as the Sebel Townhouse, large commercial-scale lighting, heat-formed acrylic and glass as well as graphic design and packaging for corporate clients.
He trained initially at the National Art School in Darlinghurst from 1938-41 while serving an apprenticeship with John Sands in lithography. During the 1939-45 war, McLay enlisted in the RAAF in 1942 with service in North Africa and Europe, returning to the National Art School from 1945-47. Here he took classes with teachers such as William Dobell.
McLay said that he was won to industrial design when, en route to the RAAF in Europe in 1942, he stopped off in New York where he found industrial designer Raymond Loewy’s famous Studebaker motor car revolving on a lighted pedestal in the foyer of one of the city’s museums. “Fortunately for Australia,” McLay once said, “General Motors didn’t ask me to design the first Holden.”
In the postwar 1940s, like most designers of his era, he struggled to work independently. As a tenant of the New South Wales Maritime Services Board, McLay shared his Gloucester Street Studio with the late Alistair Morrison and Denis Gray. Like other young artists and designers in the area, they frequented the Andronicus Coffee Shop as well as the Newcastle Hotel in the Rocks.
Following a familiar path for young designers, McLay did his earliest freelance work for advertising agencies where he met the designer Douglas Annand who was also struggling for clients during this period. The post-war pool of talent was large but the commercial market for designers was very small.
McLay’s most celebrated work, the “Kone” chair was developed and sold from his Gloucester Street studio in 1948 and the word spread quickly amongst Sydney’s small community of Modernists. “The first customer to buy one of the chairs,” McLay once explained, “was a lady called Marion Hall Best who had a design shop at Woollahra. I think the next client was Grace Brothers and Beard Watsons.” The Kone chair won an Interior Design Society award in 1950 and demand increased further as mainstream retailers sought it. The Kone chair remains in production
This chair is a masterpiece of simplicity formed from a single sheet of plywood, twisted and fastened into the shape of a shortened cone. This conical shape was then inserted into a simple black steel base. In an interview about the creation of the laminated timber Kone, McLay explained that aircraft grade plywood intended for the DeHaviland-manufactured “Mosquito” aircraft was readily available after the war while most other raw materials were in very short supply.
In the mid-1950s (McLay was unsure of the date), he licensed the Kone chair to Descon Laminates where it was produced until 1960 when Descon ran into financial difficulties. McLay and his family went to England pursuing design work during this same period.
Roger McLay retired in 1987 after several years in a studio in Neutral Bay, a harbourside suburb in North Sydney.
Writers:
Michael Bogle
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2020
- Born
- b. 1922
- Summary
- Roger McLay began working in industrial design after 1947. McLay's most celebrated work, the "Kone" chair, was developed and sold from 1948. From the mid-1950s until 1960 McLay went to England pursuing design work. He designed commercial lighting, Sebel Townhouse interiors, Wahroonga Shire Council chambers, interiors for the Commonwealth Bank, the logo for AGC insurance and other works, often anonymous.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2000
- Age at death
- 78
Details
Latitude-26 Longitude121 Start Date1921-01-01 End Date2000-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Western Australia
- Biography
- cartoonist, painter, illustrator and sculptor, was born in WA. He spoke to the WA chapter of ABWAC in June 1997 as a former WA newspaper artist.
This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1921
- Summary
- Mid 20th century Western Australian cartoonist, painter, illustrator and sculptor. Aisbett was a member of the WA chapter of the Australian Black and White Artists Club and in 1997 he gave an address on his experiences as a former newspaper artist.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2000
- Age at death
- 79
Details
Latitude-33.8342887 Longitude151.2182049 Start Date1920-01-01 End Date2000-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Neutral Bay, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- painter, illustrator, cartoonist and writer, was born in Sydney on 22 August 1920. He studied art with Dattilo Rubbo. Although best known as a painter and illustrator of historical subjects, he had cartoons in Australia: National Journal and in Australia Week-end Book 1 (1942) during World War II, e.g. Shearer’s Cook .
This entry is stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography .
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 22 August 1920
- Summary
- Late 20th century Sydney painter, illustrator, cartoonist and writer. Cedric Flower studied art with Dattilo Rubbo.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 6-Aug-00
- Age at death
- 80
Details
Latitude-37.82013725 Longitude145.1500496 Start Date1918-01-01 End Date2000-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Blackburn, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 28 October 1918
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 17-Oct-00
- Age at death
- 82
Details
Latitude55.861111 Longitude-4.25 Start Date1916-01-01 End Date2000-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Glasgow, Scotland
- Biography
- Charles Wilton made his living as a ceramist. He studied ceramics at the Melbourne Technical College, then spent four years working with Eric Juckert in his studio in Caulfield before setting up his own studio in Croydon in 1940. 1958, he was one of the founding members of the Potters’ Cottage at Warrandyte.1970s – He established a studio at Phillip Island. Charles produced functional ceramics in earthenware and stoneware.
Charles served in the Air Force from 1942-1946.
Work incised 'Charles Wilton’ or 'C. Wilton’.
Obit – Ceramics Technical, no.23, Nov 2006-Apr 2007: 98-100. Gary Prince and Ken Lawrence
Writers:
7write6
Date written:
2022
Last updated:
2022
- Born
- b. 4 August 1916
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2000
- Age at death
- 84
Details
Latitude47 Longitude20 Start Date1915-01-01 End Date2000-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Hungary
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1915
- Summary
- Kolos was an architect and designer working in several partnerships during his career. Amongst his many commercial and domestic commissions, in 1959, he designed the American Coffee Roasting restaurant in King St, Sydney as well as Chris's Restaurant, Killara.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-00
- Age at death
- 85
Details
Latitude-27.467778 Longitude153.028056 Start Date1915-01-01 End Date2000-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Brisbane, Qld, Australia
- Biography
- Encyclopedia of Australian Science.[https://trove.nla.gov.au/people/484705?c=people, 2019]
Kathleen Rennie McArthur was a self taught botanical artist who recorded a full years blooming of wildflowers along the Sunshine Coast. The material was turned into her first book (1959, Jacaranda Press). McArthur exhibited and sold her artwork nationally. A keen conservationist, she co-founded the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland and was involved in many campaigns including pushing for preservation of what is now Cooloola National Park. The James Cook University of Northern Queensland awarded her an Honorary Doctorate for her contributions to botany and the environment.
Career position – publishedCareer position – Exhibited her work in CairnsCareer position – Vice-President of the Wildlife Preservation Society of QueenslandCareer position – Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland, Caloundra branch foundedCareer position – Exhibited her work in CanberraCareer position – publishedCareer position – publishedEducation – Doctor of Science (Hon DSc) received from James Cook University of Northern QueenslandView the full record at Encyclopedia of Australian Science
Writers:
Michael Bogle
Date written:
2019
Last updated:
2019
- Born
- b. 1 January 1915
- Summary
- McArthur taught herself to paint, specialising in wildflowers. Her knowledge of Queensland flora led her into nature preservation and political activism. She was a founding member of the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland (WPSQ), She is the author of a number of publications on nature and other topics.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1-Jan-00
- Age at death
- 85
Details
Latitude-27.467778 Longitude153.028056 Start Date1915-01-01 End Date2000-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Brisbane, Qld., Australia
- Biography
- commercial and mural artist, textile designer and photographer, was born in Brisbane and educated at Somerville House where she was taught art by Enid Dickson. Her father died when she was 15 and she moved to Melbourne with her mother. Encouraged by her mother (who had attended art classes at the Brisbane Technical College under Godfrey Rivers), Olive Ashworth spent a year studying at Melbourne’s Art Training Institute in 1933. Aged 17, she completed the first year of her course with one gold, two silver and two bronze medals. She then returned to Brisbane to work as a commercial artist, completing her course by correspondence. In Brisbane she ran Burns Philp’s art department until setting up on her own in 1945; 'Olive Ashworth Publicity Services’ lasted for over 20 years.
Ashworth had visited Lindeman Island for a holiday in 1939 but became aware of the Great Barrier Reef’s design potential only in the early 1950s, when she visited Heron Island and was commissioned to design a promotional brochure for the resort. Many of Queensland’s island resorts were being developed at this time and Ashworth was commissioned to design several of their earliest tourist brochures. As McKay points out, in the 1950s the Reef became as familiar to potential visitors through these as through the colour photographs of Frank Hurley or Noel Monkman.
Many of Ashworth’s most striking and original textile designs were based on sketches and photographs of the Reef that she made over the years from underwater observatories. She was a keen photographer, using a Hasselblad camera. Her first success in textile design came in 1951 when one of her Barrier Reef designs was runner-up in the first Grafton Award, offered by a British textile firm. In 1954 she was one of 10 prize-winning finalists in the Leroy-Alcorso prize for textile design, won by Douglas Annand . However, when made up as a dress fabric her design proved by far the more popular with purchasers; the following year the all-male judging panel was enlarged by the addition of two women judges.
Ashworth’s textile designs were included in exhibitions at the Queensland Art Gallery in 1982, at the Queensland Wildlife Artists Society in 1983-88, and in the Centre Gallery’s important bicentennial exhibition, 'Women Artists in Queensland, Past and Present’ (1988). REP: QM
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1915
- Summary
- Commercial artist, textile designer and photographer. Ashworth is best known for her textile designs that were based on sketches and photographs of the Great Barrier Reef she took from underwater observatories.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2000
- Age at death
- 85
Details
Latitude-46.4118465 Longitude168.3470632 Start Date1914-01-01 End Date2000-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Invercargill, New Zealand
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1914
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2000
- Age at death
- 86
Details
Latitude43 Longitude12 Start Date1913-01-01 End Date2000-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Italy
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1913
- Summary
- Claudio Alcorso was the founder of Modernage Fabrics, Silk and Textile Printers in Rushcutters Bay, Sydney. Australian and NZ artists and designers produced prints including Douglas Annand, Donald Drysdale, Jean Bellete, Avis Higgs (NZ), Justin O'Brien with 46 designs in total. Phyllis Shilitto, colour and design teacher at the Sydney Technical College also had an affiliation with Silk and Textile Printers.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2000
- Age at death
- 87
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1913-01-01 End Date2000-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- sculptor, was born in Sydney on 20 June 1913 and was educated at Bondi Public School. She joined the art classes of the English sculptor Rayner Hoff at East Sydney Technical College in 1928, aged fifteen, and subsequently became a prominent member of a successful and coherent group of college sculptors strongly influenced by Hoff, which dominated sculptural production in Sydney between the wars. She completed her Diploma of Art (Sculpture Honours) in 1933, then worked as a part-time teacher at the College in 1934-5 and assisted Hoff on a number of civic commissions, including the Anzac Memorial, Sydney. She exhibited with the NSW Society of Artists, where her work attracted widespread praise. In 1935 she won the NSW Travelling Scholarship – the first woman artist, and the first sculptor, to receive this award.
Tribe travelled to London and studied at the Royal Academy Schools, the City and Guilds School of Art, the Regent Street Polytechnic and St Martin’s School of Art over the next decade. During World War II she worked in the Ancient Monuments Department of the Ministry of Works recording stately homes and monuments. She also modelled a series of Royal Australian Air Force portrait busts. In about 1945 she and her husband, the architect John Singleman (her superior at the Inspectorate of Ancient Monuments), moved to Sheffield, Cornwall, where she set up a studio as well as teaching sculpture part-time at the Penzance School of Arts for 40 years (1948 to July 1988). Her husband (died 1961) studied under the renowned local potter Bernard Leach and set up his own practice.
Tribe exhibited widely in England and Australia and is represented in public and private collections in both countries. She was a member of the British Society of Portrait Sculptors, the Society of Women Artists, London, and a fellow of the Royal Society of British Sculptors. Retrospective exhibitions of her work were mounted in 1979 at the City Museum and Art Gallery, Hanley, Stoke-on-Trent (the first public gallery to purchase her work), and in 1981 at the Guilford House Gallery, Guilford. Recent exhibitions in Australia were held in 1986 (von Bertouch Gallery, Newcastle) and 1987 (Barry Stern, Sydney).
During her sixty-year career in England, Tribe, an eclectic artist who experimented widely with different media, continued to be preoccupied with the themes of human life-energy, sexuality and growth first seen in her sculpture of the 1930s in Sydney. Apart from a brief interest in abstraction in the 1950s, she also retained her commitment to figurative traditions. Teaching commitments and lack of money prevented a return visit to Australia until 1966, when her sister helped her financially to see Sydney and her family again. Everyone in the art world had forgotten her, and the plaster sculptures she had left in storage at East Sydney Technical College had disappeared (mosly never to reappear despite Tribe spending years searching for them, McDonald states). At about this time she became interested in early Thai sculpture and, through a series of coincidences, visited Thailand regularly betweem 1968 and 1995. She also began to return to Australia regularly, visiting other parts of the world en route to both countries. In 1990 she met the Sydney collector and art patron John Schaeffer who invited her to stay, introduced her to international dealers and acquired work for his home. In 1991 the Mall Galleries, London, showed 80 of her works in the exhibition 'Alice to Penzance’. The Society of Portrait Sculptors awarded her the Jean Masson Davidson medal in 1998 and in 1999 Patricia R. McDonald’s biography of Tribe, underwritten by Schaeffer, was launched at the AGNSW in association with Deborah Edwards’s exhibition This Vital Flesh. The Sculptures of Reyner Hoff and His School .
Barbara Tribe died on 21 October 2000, aged 87. She is buried beside her husband in the village of Paul, Cornwall. In her will she provided for the establishment of a charitable trust to encourage sculptors in Australia, with John Schaeffer as trustee.
Barbara Tribe, Rayner Hoff and other sculptors of the 'Hoff School’ were strongly influenced in the 1930s by vitalist principles concerning the importance of the creative/procreative forces in human existence as revealed primarily in the relationship between male and female. Under this influence, and drawing heavily from classical models and mythology, they created sculptures which were unprecedented in Australia in terms of their portrayal of explicit and active sexuality.
The subject of lovers, which remained a consistent theme, was marked in Tribe’s art by the role of equal activity she attributed to the female. Lovers (1936-37, Art Gallery of New South Wales), for example, is an exceptional image of joyous, equal participation and complementary sexuality, and images of active female eroticism proliferate in her sculpture of the 1930s. Her Bacchanalia (1933) portrays woman as an intensely active participant in the human rituals of sexual abandon. Such images (which may be aligned to contemporary social realities for women) were entirely removed from the work of Australian sculptors such as Eva Benson who dealt with the female nude largely under Edwardian tenets of the erotic.
Despite-in this case-having a model (Iris Platt) in common with Norman Lindsay, Tribe’s sculptures diverged radically from the images of boudoir eroticism which characterise her fellow vitalist-influenced artist at this time. The ambiguity between the sexually adventurous nature of her work and its creation by a twenty-year-old female sculptor in Sydney ultimately led to Tribe being awarded honorary masculinity, her sculpture being constantly assessed by contemporary critics in terms of its 'extraordinary virility’.
The image of woman as an active force in the male-female relationship was extended to Tribe’s sculptures of single females, where she was preoccupied with images involving independence and sexual control. Female sexuality and erotic power in action is conveyed in her Medusa , which emphasises the strength of a cosmic, sexualised impulse through the actions of the female in relation to sexual energy. In many 'Hoff School’ sculptures, including Marjorie Fletcher’s The Fijians and Jean Broome-Norton’s Abundance , this energy in the female becomes the 'procreative drive’. Tribe’s Medusa , however, is the antithesis of Eve, the mother and source of human life; this figure thrusting backwards, her legs spread, body arched and mouth open as the 'phallic force’ of the snake curls around her arms and thigh, represents the equally seductive and powerful (but destructive) forces of death.
Medusa, the youngest, most beautiful and only mortal of the three Gorgon sisters, was punished by Athena for meeting Poseidon in her temple by having her hair turned into snakes and becoming so hideous that men were turned to stone by gazing upon her. This Medusa, however, is no frightful monster but has been represented in her more proactive, pagan manifestation of snake goddess. The snakes that are her hair are arranged into a corona like a tiara, further emphasising the majesty of her destructive, evil beauty. In the light of this and other women’s work, it is not inappropriate to conjecture that the unprecedented emphasis on the active woman in 'Hoff School’ sculpture was due to the influence of Hoff’s female students, perhaps most notably Barbara Tribe.
Writers:
Edwards, Deborah
Note: (Heritage biography plus death details)
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 20 June 1913
- Summary
- Prominent member of group of college sculptors influenced by Rayner Hoff between the wars, known as the 'Hoff School'. Often revolving around the theme of lovers, her sculptures are noted for the potency of activity and participation by her female figures.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 21-Oct-00
- Age at death
- 87
Details
Latitude-34.4468606 Longitude147.5337584 Start Date1913-01-01 End Date2000-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Temora, New South Wales, Australia
- Biography
- painter, illustrator, comic strip artist and ballet costume designer, was born in Temora, NSW. The family moved to Sydney when she was a child. She had a brother, Jim, who survived her. After secondary education at Sydney Girls High School, she studied art at East Sydney Technical College then, aged 20, worked as a commercial artist. She eventually had her own studio and two assistants. In 1937 she married Paul Denny. They had a daughter, Christina, but the marriage broke u
In 1945 Fullarton began a career as an artist and writer of children’s books using Australian animals as her chief subject. Her first book, The Alphabet from A to Z , sold 50,000 copies. Then she did a book of nursery rhymes and A Day in the Bush , both again very successful. She drew Bim Bim in the sixpenny Rupert Rabbit comic book series of at least 11 eleven numbers and a special Christmas issue, published by Allied Authors and Artists from 1946 to 1949. (K. Urquart drew most of the comics in the books, however, including 'Rupert Rabbit’.) Her greatest success was the comic strip Frisky the Rabbit . First drawn for the Sydney Morning Herald in 1948, initially on a three-month trial, it became a lasting strip in the Sunday Herald 's comic strip supplement. She produced it from a studio in the Herald building. Frisky , a book of reprints of the strip, was published by Angus and Robertson in 1956. The NSW Education Department made Frisky into an educational film distributed to schools throughout NSW and other states. During the myxamatosis epidemic Fullerton caused some controversy in making Frisky contract the disease (not fatally), leading to a deluge of letters from young readers. Farmers (and the visiting biologist Dr Julius Huxley) were not amused.
A new weekly strip followed, The World of Animals . It was published in all Australian states and in Europe. Her comic strip Alic apparently also appeared in the Sunday Herald (Sydney) in the late 1940s [acc. Germaine]. She continued to illustrate children’s books: after Frisky came Wimpy, the pygmy possum and adaptations of the The Water Babies , Thumbelina , Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass , the last also being published in the Melbourne Age .
Always fascinated by ballet, Fullarton was inspired by the visits of the de Basil Company before WWII. She left for Europe with her daughter and while Christina danced Nan continued drawing, sending Frisky and The World of Animals back from London, Germany, Holland and France (all places incorporated into the Frisky strips). After retiring from this, she worked behind the scenes in a London ballet company formed by her daughter and her son-in-law, the dancer-choreographer Alexander Roy. She worked on programs and publicitiy and designed and made ballet costumes, including much-admired costumes for a production of Midsummer Night’s Dream .
Fullarton married again in 1970; her husband was an Italian-British restauranteur, Rene Bassett (d.1982). She suffered a stroke in 1998, which left her partly incapacitated, had a further attack early in 2000 and sank into a coma, dying in London soon afterwards {before May}.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1913
- Summary
- Mid 20th century Sydney and London painter, children's book illustrator, comic strip artist and ballet costume designer. Creator of Frisky the Rabbit.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2000
- Age at death
- 87
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1912-01-01 End Date2000-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- sculptor, jeweller, teacher and arts administrator, was born in Sydney on 6 November 1912 but received her initial art training in New Zealand (1926-28) under Julia Lynch. In the early 1930s she studied sculpture at East Sydney Technical College under Rayner Hoff and Lyndon Dadswell . In 1938 she became a foundation member of the Contemporary Art Society; the following year she was awarded her diploma in sculpture.
From 1939 to 1964 Aarons exhibited widely with many professional art societies in NSW and Victoria. In 1951 she became a foundation member of the Society of Sculptors and Associates, participated in radio programmes for the ABC and completed the playground sculpture for Phillip Park—apparently the first of its kind in Australia. In 1954 she commenced teaching sculpture at East Sydney but moved to Melbourne the following year, where she remained until moving to Canada in 1964.
In Melbourne, Aarons was a member of and adviser to the Education Department. She was instrumental in devising art curricula for Department of Education of Victoria & Tasmania, Head of Sculpture Department at Caulfield Technical College (now part of Monash University) training SAC students in sculpture & design, and instituted 'in-service training’ for teachers at summer school to upgrade art education knowledge. She belonged to the Art Teachers’ Association (vice-president in 1960-64), lectured and wrote on art education and acted as a teacher-demonstrator for the UNESCO conference at Canberra in 1963. That year some of her conceptual jewellery pieces were selected to represent Australia at the 1964 World Crafts Conference in New York, which she attended as an Australian delegate.
After touring Canada, Aarons attended a summer school at Columbia University, New York, as an observer, guest lecturer and artist in the print studio. Later that year she taught sculpture and design at the Central Technical School in Toronto. She has been artist in residence at five other international art schools in Canada and the United States. In 1965-71 she was allied arts editor for Architecture Canada , in which position she established a liaison office for artists and architects and published two catalogues of current information on artists for architects.
In 1966 Aarons completed a major commission for the Beth Emeth Synagogue at Downview, Toronto: a large series of stained-glass windows, two cast bronze Ark lights, the Ark doors and some furniture for the morning Chapel. Her large tapestry mural was added in 1969.
Aarons exhibited jewellery in the Canadian Pavilion at the 1967 Expo in Montreal. In 1969-72 she acted as a special consultant to the Art Gallery of Ontario and curated theme shows for regional galleries. In 1973 she received a senior Canada Council grant to curate the centenary show at the University of Ontario, 'Art for Architecture’ (1974). From 1976 until she resigned in 1984, she was both a founder and director of the Harborfront Art Gallery, Toronto. In 1983, as an Australian, she was awarded the Diplome d’Honneur by the Canadian Conference of the Arts. While living in Toronto, Aarons married fellow artist, Merton Chambers.
Aarons returned to Australia in 1985, to live in Queensland. She became an honorary consultant to Noosa Gallery and an honorary life member of the Gallery Society. In 1994 she was awarded the Order of Australia Medal. She was then writing a book on twentieth-century art in colonial countries from an artist’s perspective and preparing for a retrospective exhibition to be held at Sydney in 1995. Anita Aarons died in Brisbane on 3 January 2000.
Writers:
Veale, Sharon
Date written:
Last updated:
Source of info:
Blin, Rene (29 February 2008) 'Information sourced from'.
- Born
- b. 6 November 1912
- Summary
- Anita Aarons had a diverse career working as a jeweller, sculptor, art administrator, radio commentator, teacher and art editor for an architecture publication, while living in Australia, America and Canada. Her practice ranged from designing play equipment to stained glass windows and tapestry murals.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 3-Jan-00
- Age at death
- 88
Details
Latitude53.55 Longitude10 Start Date1909-01-01 End Date2000-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Hamburg, Germany
- Biography
- painter, was born in Hamburg, Germany, on 26 August 1909, second daughter of Australians Edward and Lina Hallenstein then visiting Europe. The family came to Victoria the following year and Lina grew up in Toorak, Melbourne, and in England and France. She worked as a translator and in a bookshop before marrying Baynham Bryans in 1931. They had a son, Edward (b.1932), before separating some years later. Moving to South Yarra in 1936, Lina met William Frater and decided with his help and encouragement to become a painter. Her first works were painted early in 1937 and Basil Burdett selected her Backyards, South Yarra (1937, Joseph Brown Gallery) in 1938 for the Herald Exhibition of Outstanding Pictures of 1937. Her work was included in Burdett’s article in Studio (1938) and in the exhibition, 'Art of Australia 1788-1941’, shown at MOMA (New York) in 1941. What is probably her best-known portrait, The Babe is Wise , was painted in 1940.
Bryans went to live in a converted coach-house at Darebin in the late 1930s, which developed into an informal artists’ colony. Ada May Plante , who had long been living there, continued in residence and Bryans subsequently purchased it. Bryans, Plante, Frater, Ian Fairweather (1945-47) and other artists had studios there over the years and it was a centre for a group of writers associated with the journal Meanjin . In 1948 Bryans had her first solo exhibition. It included Nude (1945, NGV) and Portrait of Nina Christesen (1947, p.c.), both painted at Darebin, which she sold later that year and moved to Harkaway, near Berwick. She took a few lessons from George Bell in 1948 and from Mary Cockburn Mercer in 1951. In 1953 she went to America, then to France where she studied for a few months at L’Ecole Libre in La Grande Chaumière and visited Mercer in the south of France. Back at Melbourne, she once more became prominent in the city’s artistic and cultural milieu.
Landscape painting was always important to Bryans. In 1964 she experimented with abstraction and the following year visited Central Australia and painted extremely colourful modernist paintings of the Australian bush. She was awarded the 1966 Crouch Prize for Embedded Rock (1964, BFAG). The Bush 1 was the only painting sold from her second solo exhibition, held at Georges Gallery in 1966 – purchased by the National Gallery of Victoria, which awarded her a retrospective in 1982. Nevertheless, as Forwood notes (2001), her portraits 'best reveal her contribution to Australian art’. Moreover, 'her seventy-three portraits of friends engaged in the world of art and letters form a pictorial biography of Bryans herself’. Her first portrait was of Australian artist Ambrose Hallen (1937). Among the last were three studies of Adrian Lawlor (1965-66)
Bryans was a member of the Independent Group. In 1991 she rejoined the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors, which she had first joined in 1940 and quit in 1966.
Writers:
Callaway, Anita
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 26 September 1909
- Summary
- A somewhat peripatetic artist whose wanderlust took her to Europe, America and Central Australia, Lina Bryans was noted for her landscapes and her abstract modernism.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 30-Sep-00
- Age at death
- 91
Details
Latitude51.507222 Longitude-0.1275 Start Date1908-01-01 End Date2000-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- London, England, UK
- Biography
- cartoonist, caricaturist and sculptor, was born in London on 13 June 1908 [according to Phillip Jones in Australian obituary [obit.], or on 16 April 1906, Sydney Morning Herald [ SMH ] obit.]. After a boarding school education – which he hated – he began a business career with a City of London firm of traders and bankers, who sent him to Japan when he was 19. There he became fascinated with calligraphy 'and spent more time observing artists at work than he did negotiating contracts and dealing with shipping and letters of credit. It was in Japan, aged 21, when he first published a caricature in a newspaper, Ashisha Shimbun’ (Jones).
He left the firm, went home briefly then came to Sydney in 1927, 'where he was entranced by the beauty of the women’ (Jones). He soon met and married one – Dorothy Mae Horsley – and it became necessary to earn a living. Jones states that 'he sent a sample caricature to The Bulletin’. Elsewhere (including Wallish) the story is more specific, stating that in 1929 when the Depression was enveloping Sydney he spotted a prominent politician laying a wreath at the foot of the Cenotaph in Martin Place, sketched a caricature on the back of an envelope and sent it to the Bulletin . This led to a cheque and a job as a caricaturist and political cartoonist.
At the Bulletin Frith, who had a 'perky pointed nose and a ready laugh like an exploding steam-engine’, was second-in-command on the art staff after Ted Scorfield , according to Douglas Stewart (28), though Ned Wallish’s obituary claims that 'within two years he became the principal caricaturist and co-art editor with Scorfield’. He remained at the Bulletin for 15 years. A Bulletin cartoon dated 1932, The Opening of the Bridge , shows Captain de Groot on his horse (ill. King, 124). Wartime Bulletin cartoons include: You Mustn’t Grumble! (on the Home Front); New Order Birthday Ceremony (with a naked Mussolini suckling a Nazi sausage dog Romulus and Remus style); “Stop muckin’ about an’ get on with the job!” (female tram conductor aloft holding onto a cord); “Whether we like it or not, Captain, we’re known as Shiny – er – Seats!” (two female army officers); “That Mr. Dobell? Are you requiring a model?” (distorted woman in 'Manpower’ office with officer on telephone) published 23 August 1944 (original ink drawing, National Library of Australia [NLA] R9039 reproduced Kerr, 1999).
Other Bulletin cartoons of 1937-38 and 1944 were notable. 148 original drawings and 262 caricatures by Frith done 1930-44 are in the Mitchell Library Bulletin collection, including lots of US film stars, Albert Namatjira (no.5) and D.H. Souter (nos 92-93). Frith noted in retirement that 'there was hardly an individual of any importance in the country or who came to the country that I didn’t meet for the purpose of drawing’ (quoted Jones). In December 1944 [1948 according to Jones – but this is wrong] Frith was appointed the first staff cartoonist on the Sydney Morning Herald . When he was invited to make the move, Norman Lindsay wrote to the Bulletin editor regretting the loss of his great friend and remarking that Frith had inspired many of Lindsay’s cartoons over the years. His letter was included in Frith’s 2001 retrospective (Old Parliament House, Canberra).
From then on cartoons were a regular feature of the SMH leader page, e.g. one featuring Chifley, Dedman, Ward, Calwell and fear of socialism, published 6 June 1945 (ill. Souter, 263). '“Cocky” Calwell (a parrot) appeared in numerous cartoons repeatedly screeching “CURSE THE PRESS”’ (both obits). Frith also did many cartoons of Ben Chifley who, according to Wallish, commented when he lost the battle to nationalise the banks that he could handle Menzies in the House and the huge advertisements of the banks in the press but had no answer to Frith’s cartoons.
'During his Bulletin years he developed the knack of modelling in plastercine portrait-cum-caricature heads of famous people, some of which he then cast in metal’ (Wallish). In 1936 he modelled the head of fellow Bulletin cartoonist G.K. Townshend , an expatriate Kiwi. His large bronze head of Chifley, completed 24 hours after Chifley died in 1951, is in the National Portrait Gallery [NPG]. Mostly he made small plasticine models, primarily to be photographed and published in the Bulletin (as caricatures). Apart from a few favourites he later had cast in bronze they were then destroyed. Surviving examples held in private collections and included in his retrospective included small busts of Doc Evatt and Sir Frank Beaurepaire.
NLA has his original cartoon Passports (R8778) dated 6 March 1949 and published in the Sun-Herald (Melbourne, acc. Telnet NLA Public Access catalog – but surely Sydney?). A Sydney Savage, elected in 1944, he drew a fat man in evening dress mounted on a kangaroo with a semi-naked blonde in blackface in its pouch for the club’s 'Corroboree Lubras Night’ 1946 (# ill. Ashton, 56) and a white pair making themselves up blackface for the 1944 Ladies’ Night Programme (Ashton # ill.124).
At the invitation of Sir Keith Murdoch, Frith left the SMH for the Melbourne Herald and Weekly Times in February {December according to Wallish} 1950. His cartoons then appeared there for 18 years (to 1969). Cartoons dated 1957 and 1958 from the Melbourne Herald – Positively no connection and El Matador – are ill. King, 170. NLA has 7 ink originals, including “I assure you this’ll hurt, Doc…” published 9 August 1957 and “ Back to your classrooms…” published 29 August 1957, plus caricatures of Edouard Borovansky (c.1957?) and H.V. Evatt (1957). 'Asked the secret of being a successful caricaturist and cartoonist, Frith replied: “Politicians. … Given faces like Jack Lang, Billy Hughes, Joe Lyons, Bob Menzies, Ben Chifley, Gorton, McMahon, Whitlam, Malcolm Fraser and Bob Hawk [sic], all one needs is a pencil and paper”’ (Wallish).
In 1972 Frith began modelling Toby Jugs for Bendigo Pottery. Included in his 2001 retrospective were jugs in the form of Ned Kelly (in armour), Kingsford Smith, Albert Namatjira (with boomerang handle), a unique terracotta Norman Lindsay (with a nude woman handle) never cast, PM R.G. Menzies, Don Bradman (terracotta in retrospective and cast version in NPG 2001, on loan from p.c), Henry Lawson, et al.
After Frith retired he did cartoons and picture stories for his grandchildren, featuring koalas, giraffes and other animals. Some were displayed in a special children’s section of his 2001 retrospective, 'From Grandpa’, with a child’s wooden desk he had painted with cartoon animals.
In May 1994 Shirley McKechnie interviewed Frith for the NLA’s Oral History Project (tape TRC 3056). Despite failing eyesight he drew almost until his death. A heavy smoker and 'fond of the occasional drink’, he died in Melbourne aged 94 ( SMH obit 12 October) or 92 (acc. Jones), on 21 September 2000. His wife, Dorothy Mae, predeceased him. He was survived by their children, Jacqueline (Mrs Jackie Milne) and Jeffrey, who sponsored the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts’ retrospective exhibition, a brush with politics: the life and work of John Frith , at Old Parliament House, Canberra in the second half of 2001.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. c.13 June 1908
- Summary
- Mid 20th century Sydney and Melbourne cartoonist, caricaturist and sculptor.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 21-Sep-00
- Age at death
- 92
Details
Latitude-30 Longitude135 Start Date1962-01-01 End Date1999-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- South Australia, SA, Australia
- Biography
- Naomi Dixon was a painter and ceramicist. She painted with synthetic polymer on rocks, metal, ceramics and board. Together with her husband Paul Dixon, she worked tirelessly lobbying the Marion City Council to preserve the wetlands opposite the Flinders Medical Centre which became known as Warriparinga (windy place by the river) on which the Living Kaurna Cultural Centre stands.
Dixon showcased her work in the exhibition Kaurna Nepo Porendi held at the City of Marion Council Chambers Gallery in May 1994. This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Allas, Tess
Date written:
2009
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 25 August 1962
- Summary
- Painter and ceramicist, Naomi Dixon was also an enviromentalist and lobbyist. Her work is held in the collection of the Flinders University Art Museum.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 24-May-99
- Age at death
- 37
Details
Latitude-37 Longitude144 Start Date1951-01-01 End Date1999-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Victoria
- Biography
- painter, born Victoria and essentially self-taught. Grandmother was an art teacher. Very art-historical in references, especially Turner, but also Friedrich, Durer, Samuel Palmer, Richard Dadd as well as Martens , Von Guerard and Piguenit . Friendly with Douglas Green, trained at NGV School and with George Bell . Also keen on music and a passionate believer in synaesthesia. Married Larissa Usenko. First solo exhibition in 1989 at Michael Wardell’s 13 Verity Street Gallery, Melbourne. Others in 1993, 1997, 1999.
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1951
- Summary
- Painter, born Victoria and essentially self-taught.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1999
- Age at death
- 48
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1951-01-01 End Date1999-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, VIC, Australia
- Biography
- Howard Arkley a painter, photographer and sculptor was born in Melbourne in 1951. A visit to the National Gallery of Victoria’s 1967 'Sidney Nolan Retrospective Exhibition, Paintings from 1937 to 1967’ inspired him to immediately take up painting. Arkley undertook his formal studies at Prahan College of Advanced Education and completed his Diploma of Art and Design in 1975. In this early period he utilised the airbrush as his principal working tool. His first solo exhibition was held at Tolarno Galleries in Melbourne in 1975. This exhibition was titled 'White Paintings’ and it featured Arkley’s abstract and monochrome works.
In 1977, Arkley was the recipient of the Alliance Française Art Fellowship, the Visual Arts Board residency in Paris and the Green Street Studio residency in New York. Whilst abroad, he developed his signature spontaneous and obsessive working style, returning to Australia with a new perspective on Australia’s national context. Arkley began to introduce colour and figuration, focusing on everyday suburban themes and iconography. Beginning with his collection of flyscreens, his work reflected notions of domesticity (feminism), mass production (popular culture), surface (minimalism), pattern, order and reproduction, using and reusing his collected bank of images and iconography. He was heavily involved in the local punk scene and in 1981 admitted its influence in his frenetic work titled Primitive, which, as the artist states, “set off my career” (Arkley in Crawford and Edgar, 2001, p. 48). His work took a new direction. The automatic nature of Primitive reflected his personal life; embedded with his collected and reused iconography it led him toward portraits and his tattooed 'Urban Tribalism’ series.
1983’s Suburban Interior marked Arkley’s entrance to the interior suburban space. The use of wallpaper as a surface for decoration and scenes of 'home life’ reflected his increasing interest in domestic themes and was followed by streetscapes, homes with gardens, high rise apartments and home décor which he saw as popular imagery to address. By 1988, all of Arkley’s work was focused on suburban themes. He made his professional and commercial breakthrough, reconfiguring Australian suburbs as landscapes. He returned to portraits in 1990 with Tolarno Galleries’ 'The Head Show’, which he saw as self portraits “wearing masks and hiding identities” (Trioli, 1990). Arkley also began his collaboration with Juan Davila in Blue Chip Instant Decorator. This successful partnership resulted in the merging of painting, installation and constructed furnishing and further developed Arkley’s style and confidence.
Mix 'n’ Match of 1992 was inspired by home decorating magazines Home Beautiful and Better Homes and Gardens . Arkley reduced his form to stylised images, paying increasing attention to details (pictures on walls, books on shelves). 'The Pointillist Suburb’ series followed in 1994 and he finally felt he had connected with his audience.
Tolarno Galleries’ ’20 Year Review’ (1995) and the 'Fabricated Room’ (1997) series preceded Arkley’s selection as Australia’s representative at the 48th Venice Biennale (1999). 'The Home Show’ had a critical and popular success resulting in offers of exhibitions in Paris and London.
Shortly after his returning to Melbourne from the Biennale Arkley died of a heroin overdose. Since his death Arkley’s work continues to be exhibited and is highly regarded as serious studies of Australian suburban landscape.
Writers:
Craig, Rebecca
Date written:
2010
Last updated:
2010
- Born
- b. 1951
- Summary
- Painter, photographer and sculptor who studied in Melbourne. Using the airbrush as his principal tool, Arkley was heavily influenced by punk culture, suburbia and domesticity. He also designed a suite of chairs "Muzak Mural Chair Tableau" in 1980-81. Arkley was the Australian representative at the 1999 Venice Biennale.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1999
- Age at death
- 48
Details
Latitude42.0415823 Longitude-87.8873916 Start Date1936-01-01 End Date1999-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Des Plaines, Illinois, USA
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 2 August 1936
- Summary
- Borkenhagen was an interior designer resident in Australia and active in in the 1960s. Sent to Sydney by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill to consult on the Qantas/Wentworth Hotel, she had established a Sydney practice by 1965. She designed the Summit Restaurant, Australia Square. She returned to California in 1980 opening her own interior design firm and later joined a company called Clement Chen and Associates, San Francisco.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 5-Aug-99
- Age at death
- 63
Details
Latitude-37.560833 Longitude143.8475 Start Date1936-01-01 End Date1999-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Ballarat, VIC, Australia
- Biography
- With a career spanning three decades, Davis was one of Australia’s pre-eminent artists, a sculptor who regularly exhibited in Australia and overseas, particularly Japan and the United States. Davis represented Australia at the 38th Biennale of Venice and the Indian Triennale in 1978, and the Osaka Triennale in 1992. His ongoing concern for landscape resulted in numerous site-specific installation works in Australia, Saudi Arabia, Germany, Britain, the United States, Japan and New Zealand. Significant commissions include an installation in the Australian Embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Davis’s work is represented in all Australian national and state galleries, most regional galleries, and in private and public collections in Australia and abroad. He was the recipient of various grants, overseas residencies and prestigious awards, including the Comalco Award in 1970 and the Blake Prize for Religious Art in 1993.Davis drew inspiration from the Australian bush, particularly the Mallee country, the Hattah Lakes area and the Murray River, the artist often returning to these areas to create ephemeral works in situ. Recurring motifs in his work include rivers and fish, often referred to by the artist as nomads/travellers. Davis deeply respected Aboriginal art and culture, successfully establishing various collaborative projects and exchanges with local aboriginal people. Influenced by the Arte Povera movement and eschewing then fashionable metal sculpture, Davis worked with delicate materials, painstakingly modelling eucalyptus twigs, string, paper, calico and bitumous paint. His work and his many years of lecturing have been highly influential to the current generation of installation artists and sculptors. Also evident in Davis’s work is his ongoing interest in Japanese forms and traditions, his first visit to Japan in the early 1980s resulted in an ongoing dialogue and relationship with that country and many of its significant artists. His contemplative solo practice was situated within the wider parameters of his exchanges and dialogues with cultures and locations, creating work rich in associations and vocabularies.The Estate of John Davis comprises a number of works spanning the career of the artist, as well as an extensive archive of written and visual documentation. The Estate provides comprehensive material for researchers, curators and students interested in the artist and Australian art from the 1970s to the late 1990s.
Writers:
Murray-Cree, Laura
Date written:
2006
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1936
- Summary
- With a career spanning three decades, Davis was one of Australia's pre-eminent artists, a sculptor who regularly exhibited in Australia and overseas, particularly Japan and the United States.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1999
- Age at death
- 63
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1922-01-01 End Date1999-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, Vic, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1922
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1999
- Age at death
- 77
Details
Latitude51 Longitude9 Start Date1920-01-01 End Date1999-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Germany
- Biography
- This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Date written:
Last updated:
- Born
- b. 1920
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1999
- Age at death
- 79
Details
Latitude-32.9186415 Longitude151.7487447 Start Date1920-01-01 End Date1999-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Hamilton, Newcastle, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1920
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1999
- Age at death
- 79
Details
Latitude-19.8516101 Longitude133.2303375 Start Date1919-01-01 End Date1999-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Napanangkajarra, NT, Australia
- Biography
- Born c. 1919 at Napanangkajarra near Yuendumu, Paddy Nelson’s country ran from Yumurrpa to Watikinpirri area, SW of Yuendumu through New Haven station. A Warlpiri speaker, Paddy was a senior ceremonial and religious leader in the Yuednumu community. He was one of the first Yuendumu men to paint with acrylics, and one of the senior men who painted the doors of the school in 1983. With Paddy SIMS, Larry SPENCER Jungarrayi and JIMIJA Jungarrayi, he worked on the 1985 Star Dreaming painting whose purchase by the Australian National Gallery from the Yuendumu artists’ first show in the eastern states, helped to launch the new painting enterprise in the local art world. His main site was Ngama, a Snake Dreaming place. He painted Yarla (Big Yam) and Ngarlajiyi (Small Yam), Warna (Snake), Ngapa (Water), Karrku (Mt Stanley ochre mines), Janganpa (Possum), Mukaki (Bush Plum), Karnta (Women’s) and Watijarra (Two Men) Dreamings. A prolific painter, distinctive for his fluid impulsive brushwork and subtly different renderings of his classic iconography, his work was shown in almost every exhibition of Warlukurlangu Artists from the mid ’80s onwards and in major touring exhibitions of Aboriginal art including Art and Aboriginality (Portsmouth Festival 1987, Sydney Opera House 1988 – Paddy Nelson’s painting appears on the cover of the catalogue) and Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles etc. 1989-90). In 1988, Paddy Nelson was one of five Warlpiri men from Yuendumu selected by the Power Gallery, Sydney University, to travel to Paris to create a ground painting installation at the exhibition Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in May 1989. Several of Paddy’s relatives, including his wife Daisy NELSON and her sons Michael Jagamara NELSON and Bronson Jakamarra NELSON, are also artists of reknown.
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1919
- Summary
- A senior ceremonial and religious leader in the Yuendumu community, Paddy Nelson had been at the forefront of the Warlukurlangu art movement since its inception and with other senior men painted the famous Yuendumu Doors of the school (now in the South Australian Museum) in 1983.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1999
- Age at death
- 80
Details
Latitude-42 Longitude147 Start Date1919-01-01 End Date1999-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Tasmania, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1919
- Summary
- Valerie MacSween was a northern Tasmanian maker of traditional shell necklaces.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- c.1999
- Age at death
- 80
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1918-01-01 End Date1999-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- painter, was born in Melbourne, daughter of the poet and playwright Rupert Atkinson and niece of the artist Helen Atkinson . She studied at George Bell 's Bourke Street School from 1934 until it closed in 1939:
I was only sixteen or seventeen and dreadfully self-conscious. My drawing, I rapidly realised, was appalling so I slogged away for about a year before touching painting.
... I missed an awful lot that went on, mainly because I found it impossible to work at the studio year in and year out. So I used to take two or three months each year off to re-charge as it were, mostly in Literature at a bookshop and library in Collins Street.
The great majority of Bell’s students were women (Yvonne was 'great chums’ with Frances Burke until Burke left to take up fabric design): but, Atkinson noted, 'never forget it was the boys in the back room who rated. And rightly.’ Yet although Bell was prejudiced in favour of the men, Atkinson was a favourite pupil. Exceptionally talented, she was also a striking woman with 'green eyes, red hair, creamy complexion, [and] a lovely personality’, recollected Joan Yonge, a fellow student, adding: 'She came in very elegantly – and always late. Bell would say indulgently, “You wait until the world’s warmed up before you step out don’t you?”’
Atkinson’s paintings of the late 1930s were mainly nudes ( Distorted Nude 1936-39), portraits ( To the Pure, All Things Are Pure n.d., Virgin and Cat 1938) and paintings of contemporary life ( The Tram Stop 1937), including a rather unflattering self portrait. Many have a similar subversive wit to The Life Class . However, when she left to be married in September 1939, Bell wiped his hands of her. After her marriage to Tony Daniell, she moved to Townsville (Qld) but later returned to Victoria, residing in Castlemaine. Many later works are of Australian bushranging or primitive rural life subjects. Later in her life she also held a number of solo exhibitions at the Avant Galleries, Melbourne. She also exhibited with the Victorian Arts Society and at the Art Gallery of WA. Paintings of 1974-76 are signed her 'Yvonne Daniell’. Her witty, all women, charcoal drawing The Cocktail Party n.d. was offered by Deutscher Menzies November 1998, lot.38 (ill.).
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1918
- Summary
- Painter and student of George Bell's. Melbourne-born Atkinson painted painted nudes, portraits and contemporary life scenes throughout the 1930s. Many later works are of Australian bushranging or primitive rural life subjects.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1999
- Age at death
- 81
Details
Latitude-34.9275 Longitude138.6 Start Date1917-01-01 End Date1999-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
- Biography
- painter, printmaker and draughtsman, was born in Adelaide on 25 May 1918 (acc. McCulloch; 21 May 1917 according to military records). He studied at the School of Fine Arts in North Adelaide under Millward Grey (1933-39) and was involved in the school’s journal, The Paint Pot . He also exhibited at the Royal South Australian Society of Arts while still a student, e.g. The Fisherman c.1937 (lithograph, private collection) was exhibited at the RSASA in July 1937 (ill. Carroll). In his first solo exhibition at the John Preece Gallery in 1938, Wigley showed drawings and lithographs, presumably of hunger-marchers and demonstrations – the subjects of his first drawings, according to Merewether (p.113).
Wigley moved to Melbourne soon after war was declared. There he exhibited with the Contemporary Art Society, met other artists and became close friends with Josl Bergner . Called up in 1941, he made models and maps with the Army Survey Corps for the next three years. He also continued to paint, exhibiting at the Kadimah Cultural Centre along with Bergner, O’Connor , Buzacott and Counihan and associating with the 'social realist’ group. He contributed three paintings to the Anti-Fascist Exhibition in 1942. Other works include The Unemployed and the Workers c.1940s, pencil, University of Melbourne (ill. Hanson, cat.268, and included by Rodney James in Global Arts Link’s Bluey and Curley exhibition in 2000 – as art – along with his oil painting Waiting 1946, p.c.).
Discharged in 1944, Wigley went to the Northern Territory with an old school friend, Ronald Berndt. [McCulloch states: Appointed official artist to the Elkin (sic) anthropological expedition into Central Australia after discharge from the army.] He returned with a case full of drawings, especially of Aboriginal people. Then he attended the National Gallery of Victoria School (1945-47) under the Army Rehabilitation Scheme (CRAST). In 1946 he had a show at Tye’s Gallery. He left for Paris with Bergner at the beginning of 1948, where they stayed with Bergner’s sister Ruth. He studied at the Académie Julian (1948-50) and under F. Léger. After the two had a show at Galerie Gentil Hommiere (Merewether), Wigley went to London and Bergner went to Israel (1951).
Wigley returned to Australia in 1954 [McCulloch says 1952; Concise says 1955] and again exhibited at Tye’s, this time with O’Connor and Counihan. He taught at South Melbourne Technical School. He went north again in 1956 (McCulloch says 1957), to Port Hedland, where he stayed in an Aboriginal Co-op formed by D.W. McLeod in which the inhabitants lived independently by mining and pearl-shell gathering. Again he produced a large body of sketches and watercolours, resulting in a sell-out exhibition at Melbourne’s Australian Galleries in 1959. Alan Boxer acquired Three [Aboriginal] men at night c.1958, tempera on board, in 1961, evidently from the Australian Galleries (Purves), Wigley’s usual dealers. He had paintings and drawings in an exhibition that went to Moscow in 1960.
Henceforth Wigley travelled between Port Hedland and Pilbara and Melbourne and Adelaide, working with Aborigines to set up printing facilities and design and illustrate school texts. A large retrospective was held at Melbourne’s Acland Street Galleries in 1981, including 'Aboriginal Study, Port Headland’, Overland 85 (October 1981), cover. For other exhibitions and commissions see McCulloch.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Olivia Bolton
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. c.21 May 1917
- Summary
- Mid 20th century Adelaide, Melbourne and regional Northern Territory and Western Australian based painter, political printmaker and draughtsman.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1999
- Age at death
- 82
Details
Latitude-36.840556 Longitude174.74 Start Date1917-01-01 End Date1999-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Auckland, New Zealand
- Biography
- Rosalie Gascoigne was an Australian Sculptor. She was born at Auckland, New Zealand, on 25 January 1917 in Auckland and died at Canberra, Australia, on 23 October 1999. Gascoigne grew up in New Zealand, however, in 1943 she moved to Stromlo in Canberra, Australia following her marriage to astronomer Ben Gascoigne.
Gascoigne’s father, Stanley King Walker, was an engineer and her mother, Marion Hamilton Metcalfe, was a secondary school teacher. Gascoigne was the middle child in her family and had an older sister, Daintry, and a younger brother, Douglas. Being a scholastic person was valued in the household and art was frowned upon. Gascoigne went to Auckland University and studied English, French, Latin, Greek and Mathematics from 1935-38, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts. In 1940 she completed a one-year course at Auckland Teacher Training College to become a secondary school teacher. Gascoigne had no formal artistic training, and it was only later in life she discovered her abilities. She experimented with the art of flower arranging in the late 1950s and developed a passion for gardening. Gascoigne then took classes at the Sogetsu School of Ikebana.
Gascoigne had three children named Martin, Thomas and Hester. Her eldest son, Martin, became involved in the art world, befriending curator James Mollison and later marrying writer and curator Mary Eagle. He thus played an important role in Gascoigne’s artistic career. In 1963 Gascoigne made a trip to Europe and in 1980 she made an art pilgrimage to New York. In 1982 she travelled to Italy for the Venice Biennale. Important contacts that influenced Gascoigne’s artistic development included Carl Plate, Norman Sparnon, James Mollison and Michael Taylor.
A work that highlights Gascoigne’s artmaking practice and the main themes she explored is Great Blond Paddocks. The work was acquired by the Art Gallery of New South Wales with funds from the Art Gallery of NSW society. Great Blond Paddocks consists of long, narrow, rectangular pieces of sawn wooden soft drink crates arranged on wood. The work captures the undulating, grassy plains and wheat fields of Canberra and its surrounding regions. In addition it shows the minimalist and abstract qualities of Gascoigne’s art.
Another work of Gascoigne’s is Crop 1 which was initially shown in an exhibition entitled ‘Rosalie Gascoigne: Material as Landscape.’ The show was first at the Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney in 1997 and was taken to the National Gallery, Canberra in 1998. Crop 1 consists of hundreds of dried salsify heads poking through a plane of galvanised chicken wire. They have been compressed, bound and arranged on a silver-grey sheet of galvanised iron. The work symbolises Australian agriculture as it highlights the separation and cultivation of the land. Texture is important in the work, as with Great Blond Paddocks it is evident that the materials have been shaped by their time in the natural environment.
A key exhibition was Gascoigne’s first solo exhibition at the Macquarie Galleries, Canberra as it was her first recognition by the art establishment. Gascoigne’s second solo exhibition in 1976 was important as at the age of 59 she was hailed by the critics as an exciting and new original artist. In 1982 she Gascoigne selected for the 40th Venice Biennale, becoming the first woman to represent Australia. In 1988 Gascoigne participated in the Australian Biennale where her work gained international recognition. Some of Gascoigne’s prizes include the John McCaughey Prize, the Order of Australia and the Grand Prize at the Cheju Pre-Biennale in Korea.
Gascoigne’s work is represented in public collections across Australia. Her work is also represented in public collections in New Zealand and the United States of America. Many of her pieces belong to private collections.
Writers:
emily_edgar
Date written:
2016
Last updated:
2016
- Born
- b. 1917
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1999
- Age at death
- 82
Details
Latitude-37.87731945 Longitude145.042234 Start Date1915-01-01 End Date1999-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Caulfield, Melbourne, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- painter, illustrator, cartoonist, printmaker and teacher, was born in Caulfield, Victoria. He studied at Melbourne Technical College (RMIT) in 1929-35. From 1936 he worked as a freelance illustrator and cartoonist for Melbourne weeklies; His ink cartoon Calvalcade of Billy 1940, is in La Trobe, State Library of Victoria, donated by the artist -with other works in 1988. He was an official war artist in the Royal Australian Air Force in 1944-45. As a teacher at RMIT after the war, he initiated the Melbourne Print Group in November 1951; it included Geoffrey Bardwell, assistant lecturer, and associates Christine Aldor, Fred Williams , etc. (see 'Melbourne Prints’ in McCulloch).
He designed Victoria’s Spa Health Resorts: Daylesford, Hepburn Springs c.1952 (National Gallery of Australia) for the Victoria Railways, Australia (NGA poster no. 273)
Freedman did a series of topographical 'Views of Melbourne’ for a book published in 1963. He was commissioned to paint a large mural of the history of aviation for the Australian War Memorial (1967-72), then was appointed state artist for Victoria in 1973, a position he apparently retained until his death in 1999. His first commission, a mural on the theme of transport for Spencer Street Station (removed for reconstruction of Southern Cross Station, 2004), was followed by a number of murals, including one on the theme of regional history for the new state offices at Geelong.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1915
- Summary
- Popular mid 20th century Melbourne painter, illustrator, cartoonist, printmaker and teacher. Freedman was commissioned to paint a large mural of the history of aviation for the Australian War Memorial (1967-72).
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1999
- Age at death
- 84
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1914-01-01 End Date1999-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- He was born in Melbourne, on 29 December 1914. His grandfather and namesake Albert Lee Tucker, MLA, was mayor of Fitzroy. By the time Albert was born his father, John Tucker, was working on railway maintenance. His mother Clara (née Davis) was aspirational, but with insufficient income the family found life difficult. Albert left school young and worked at subsistence jobs. By 1934 he was working at John Vickery’s commercial art studio in Collins Street and drawing freelance for women’s magazines. This brought him into contact with Melbourne’s creative artistic community, including the young modernist Sam Atyeo, and the conservative Sir John Longstaff. In 1933 he began attending evening classes at the Victorian Artists Society (VAS). Other evenings were spent at the old reading room of the State Library. He also haunted Gino Nibbi’s Leonardo Bookshop, and befriended the proprietor. Tucker exhibited for the first time at the VAS in 1933. A self portrait of 1937 attracted the attention of the Herald's art critic, Basil Burdett, and he left his full-time job. The same year he took some classes at the George Bell school but soon left,preferring to direct his own learning. Along with Bell and other discontented artists Tucker became a founding member of the Contemporary Art Society in 1938. In 1939 he bought a second hand camera, and it his photographs that so memorably records the life of the Angry Penguins circle in the 1940s.Through his friendship with Harry de Hartog and others he became involved in the Artists’ Branch of the Communist Party. From the late 1930s, Tucker’s art was increasingly influenced by Surrealism. His interest was endorsed by the art he saw in the 1939 Herald Exhibition of French and British Contemporary Art, which featured works by Dali, Ernst, de Chirico and Picasso.In 1938 he became romantically involved with Joy Hester, an art student from the National Gallery School who began attending Victorian Artists Society life drawing classes, and in 1939 they moved in together. Tucker and Hester married on 1 January 1941. By this time John and Sunday Reed were financially supporting Tucker’s career as well as befriending Hester and encouraging her art. At Heide they were joined by Sidney Nolan, whose ménage à trois with the Reeds was public knowledge.In 1942, after Japan entered the war Tucker enlisted in the medical corps. His status as an artist led to him making illustrations for the officers at the Wangaratta base and after a bout of pneumonia was medically discharged in October 1943. The sight of shell-shocked and profoundly injured soldiers newly returned from the front continued to haunt him for the rest of his life, and coloured the direction of his art.Tucker began to paint works based on his disgust at the sexual promiscuity of young girls in times of war, a concern that evolved into a savage critique of strong female sexuality.
Many of his paintings are dominated by a shape based on a full-lipped woman’s mouth, evolving into an agressive lipstick pink crescent, and this shape recurred for the rest of his painting life. After leaving the Army, Tucker worked for a while with Arthur Boyd at his pottery at Murrumbeena, but then resumed work on bq). Images of Modern Evilbq). , an emotionally searing response to young girls, American soldiers and the War. On 4 February 1945 Joy gave birth to their son Sweeney (although Sunday later claimed that Tucker may not have been the father).In early 1947 Tucker visited Japan, and saw the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, images that would always stay with him. He met with Japanese artists and painted portraits of American officers to raise money to buy cultured pearls for resale in Australia. On his return from Japan he was told that Joy had been diagnosed with Hodgkins Disease, and had two years to live. In his absence Joy had met the artist Gray Smith, and when she was told of her illness the marriage was over. Hester left Sweeney with Tucker who left the baby with the Reeds while he considered his future. He was eventually persuaded to allow them to adopt his son. It was a decision Tucker regretted for the rest of his life. He left Australia for England on 9 September 1947. Post-war London was uninspiring, but in Paris he was inspired by the work of Jean Dubuffet. In Paris he was also helped by Peter Bellew who was now working for UNESCO. Tucker visited other European cities, seeing as much art as he could. He was especially impressed with German Expressionism and in 1951 he travelled to Frankfurt-am-Main to join his new companion, Mary Dixon, an American he had met in Paris. The faction fights of the Communist Party in the 1940s and the activities of the Soviet Union had turned Tucker’s political perspective into one of anti-Communism. The landscape that now coloured his perceptions was that of bomb-blasted Germany. The next year they returned to Paris where they lived in a caravan Tucker had built, and later travelled to the south of France and Rome. In November 1953 John Reed withdrew the small stipend he had paid Tucker, causing him considerable financial difficulty. The news coincided with a visit from Sidney and Cynthia Nolan, who advised him of possibilities of the Venice Biennale, where Tucker exhibited in 1956. Nolan also showed Tucker his photographs of animals killed in the Australian drought, imagery that was to provide Tucker with new subject matter.In Rome he befriended the Italian artist Alberto Burri who introduced him to a new adhesive into which he could mix sand and dirt for his Nolan inspired work, completed in London. In 1958 Dixon visited California to see her mother, and took some of Tuckers’ work with her. The Museum of Modern Art in New York bought Lunar Landscape – the first purchase by a public collection. His next series, exhibited successfully in London, Explorers, made craggy despairing images of those explorers who died in the bush.In early 1960 he visited New York where he had successful exhibitions, was given the free use of a furnished apartment, and work was purchased by the Guggenheim. After a further successful London exhibition, he returned home to Australia and held a successful national touring exhibition. His first Melbourne studio was at 9 Collins Street, the same building as Tom Roberts. In 1961 he met Barbara Bilcock, who he married in 1964. They bought land at Hurstbridge and built a house and studio. He became a passionate conservationist, but fell out with his old friends by supporting the Americans and the Australian governments in their stance on the Vietnam War.In Melbourne he renewed contact with Sweeney, a brilliant but troubled young man who made art as well as running commercial art galleries, subsidised by his adoptive parents. In 1972 Sweeney Reed Gallery showed the entire series of Images of Modern Evil for the first time. It was a major critical success. Sweeney however could not reconcile the contradictions of his life and on 29 March 1979, in the middle of negotiations to sell Tucker’s early paintings to the National Gallery of Australia he committed suicide.Albert Tucker’s last series of paintings, Faces I have met, was a series of recollected portraits of friends and enemies. It was prompted in part by the revival of interest in his earlier work brought about by James Mollison’s advocacy of it, and academic researchers including Richard Haese and Janine Burke. He died of a heart attack at a private hospital where Barbara had taken him for tests.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 29 December 1914
- Summary
- Albert Tucker was one of the Angry Penguins group of artists who were at Heide in the 1940s. His art was shaped in part by the poverty he experienced and saw during the Great Depression and his experiences in the Army and Melbourne in World War II. He also worked to ensure the posthumous reputation of his first wife, Joy Hester.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 23-Oct-99
- Age at death
- 85
Details
Latitude-37.78744285 Longitude144.9290013 Start Date1909-01-01 End Date1999-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Newmarket, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- painter, printmaker, designer and commercial artist, was born in Newmarket, Melbourne, on 26 September 1909, youngest of the three children of David Haxton, a stationery salesman and a talented amateur painter of Scottish descent, and Isobel, née Durham. She came to Sydney with her family as an infant. After leaving school at fourteen, she spent a year studying drawing and sculpture full-time with Rayner Hoff. In 1924-28 she studied at East Sydney Technical College and from 1925 also worked commercially, first in a city factory decorating pokerwork vases and breadboards with kookaburras and waratahs, then as a 'fashion artist’ at David Jones’s department store illustrating advertisements {acc.Thomas}.
In 1929 she set up as a freelance designer and illustrator with four other advertising illustrators in a Bridge Street studio, continuing until 1931. She was also invited to join a sketch club run by Alison Rehfisch and George Duncan .
She went to London in 1932, as soon as she’d saved her fare, and worked full-time with J.Walter Thompson for three years. Then she remained on a retainer while also working for Harper’s Bazaar , Vogue and Strand Magazine . In the evenings she studied at the Grosvenor School under Iain McNab. She designed playing cards for the P&O Line amid other freelance commercial art commissions, and she also exhibited oil paintings in London (ROI 1937).
With the impending outbreak of World War II Haxton returned to Australia via the US and Mexico in 1939. In Mexico she became interested in architectural decoration.
After her return she became especially friendly with Tas (Russell) and Bonnie Drysdale . When the Drysdales moved to Albury in 1941, Haxton often worked in a nearby studio-barn with Tas and with Donald Friend who was stationed with the army at nearby Pukapunyal.
Back at Sydney she exhibited paintings {mainly at the Macquarie Galleries}. She began painting murals in restaurants and for the large stateroom of a visiting British aircraft carrier. She worked with Alistair Morrison on a vast mural for the entrance of the Great Hall at the Royal Easter Show c.1942. Her mural for Le Coq d’Or restaurant won the Sulman Prize in 1943. In 1944-45 she was director, stage manager and scene painter for a small company entertaining the troops in New Guinea.
During the war she also illustrated stories in Australia: National Journal and Australia Week-end Book . Vol. 1 (1942) of the latter contains her 'Mrs Tabbie’s Teaparty’ (a drawing quite unrelated to the accompanying poem, 'The Cat’); a fat lady eating eclairs in restaurant for 'Eclair’ by Jean Stanger; 'Georgie sat in the sun, shelling peas for lunch’ for 'Mail Day’ by Alison McDougall (p.102), and circus man yelling 'Ark’ beside lizards for Roger Welch’s 'Lizards Aloft’ (p.193) – the best of them. Most are signed 'Elaine’. She is also represented in vol.2 (1943), p.56; vol.3 (1944) has a small illustration; vol.4 (1945) decorations.
At the end of 1945 she went to New York where she later studied stage design at the summer school of the NY Theatre. She spent 8 months in London and several months touring Europe before returning to Australia in 1949. She spent the next 12 years in Australia mainly occupied with stage design but also involved in advertising, book illustration, painting, print-making and set and costume design for ballet and opera. (She also designed furnishing textiles for Marion Hall Best and Claudio Alcorso.) She travelled widely, notably as one of the members of the Australian Cultural Delegation visiting China in 1956.
In her later years she devoted most of her time to painting and printmaking. She studied the latter at Joyce Ewart 's Willoughby Art Centre in Sydneyin 1965, where she was taught various techniques by Elizabeth Rooney and became especially interested in etching. Her long-time interest in Japanese culture took her to Japan in 1961. In 1969 she spent three months at Hayter’s Atelier 17 in Paris, then revisited Japan later that year to study woodcut printing techniques in Kyoto. Her prints include Ju-Jitsu 1981 (2 figures in b/w, quite lively), TMAG edn 6/20 (#3532).
In 1986 she was awarded the AM 'particularly for printmaking’. After a long illness {dementia} – she was cared for by her niece and husband in Adelaide from 1989 – Haxton died in Adelaide on 6 July 1999, aged 89. She was predeceased by her husband, Brigadier Richard Foot, whose third wife she had become in 1954.
She is well represented in state and regional public collections throughout Australia. Didn’t approve of women’s art exhibitions; 'In 1982 she told Barbara Chapman, “I want to be judged by all my peers, not half of them”.
Writers:
Sayers, AndrewNote: Primary.
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
1992
- Born
- b. 26 September 1909
- Summary
- Painter, printmaker and designer, Haxton worked through the 1930s as a commercial artist in both Sydney and London. In 1943 she won the Sulman Prize and in 1986 was awarded an AM for printmaking.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 6-Jul-99
- Age at death
- 90
Details
Latitude-31.9559 Longitude115.8606 Start Date1907-01-01 End Date1999-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Perth, WA, Australia
- Biography
- Designer, architectural renderings, architect, landscape architect John Oldham , son of Charles Lancelot Oldham , son of James Oldham , and Susan Hoyle 'Dolly’ Russell , daughter of the Fremantle harbour master Commodore Charles Robert Tylden Russell , was born in Perth in 1907. His father was a noted architect and designer of the Esplanade Hotel in Fremantle, Fremantle Markets and many other buildings. His mother was an accomplished artist educated in England, France and Germany. The boy was encouraged to draw and paint from an early age. His father died when John was eleven years old and a boarder at Guildford Grammar School. In 1924 he was apprenticed to the practice his father had owned – by then Oldham Boas. Here he learnt perspective and became very good at rendering. In 1927 he exhibited with the West Australian Society of Arts. His exhibits were “Three Imaginative Designs”. They were not for sale. In 1928 he moved to work for Rodney Alsop who had won the competition to design the University of Western Australia. When the university was completed Oldham went to Melbourne under Alsop’s patronage to do a year of architecture at his atelier. Alsop encouraged his staff to be creative. When Olham returned from Melbourne at the end of the Great Depression of 1929-35 he turned his hand to poster design and with Harold Krantz opened 'Poster Studios’. He discovered he had a facility in this regard. His West Australian first posters were “displayed everywhere”. He and Harold embraced contemporary architecture and formed a partnership. In 1933 he exhibited watercolours Wheat Ships and After the Rain with the West Australian Society of Arts and Coal Hulks with the Perth Society of Artists.
In 1937 John married Ruby Gertrude (Ray) McClintock a radical thinker and journalist who was instrumental in him joining the Communist Party. He inherited some money and they moved to Sydney where he worked for the Communist Party and the architectural firm Stephenson and Turner and then the Commonwealth Department of the Interior. In Sydney in 1938 he was associate editor of the Communist Review.
John Oldham was part of a team for the Australian exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. He was the designer of the exhibit whilst Douglas Annand designed the brochure. This prefabricated display was set up in the Commonwealth of Nations Building and was highly commended by the judges. Oldham and his wife undertook a study tour to Canada and USA to attend the opening and had the opportunity to see works by, and meet many of the influential figures in the Modern Art movement as well as studying exhibition-display methods and modern architecture. They were very impressed with the social quality of Roosevelt’s 'New Deal’, which they saw in operation. Whilst they were on their way back to Australia war was declared and the Communist Party was made illegal. They threw all their literature and John’s work notes over the side of the ship to avoid future problems.
Ray became pregnant and the pair decided to return to Western Australia arriving in May 1940. John joined Harold Krantz Architects as a partner. The firm designed large blocks of modern flats and Oldham also did watercolour renditions for Oldham Boas and other architects.
Life was a little difficult. John was neglecting his architectural practice for work for the communist party making the partnership untenable and because of his left views former friends often snubbed him. The family were also under observation by a Special Bureau of the Criminal Investigation Bureau, which was monitoring Communist sympathisers. John Oldham was considered a leading communist in Western Australia, as he was the Chairman of the Budget Protest Committee, an organisation that was a front for the party at the time of its illegality. They also joined the Workers’ Art Guild, which was involved in theatre, and art education for working-class people. John became a committee member. The family moved to Sydney in 1941 just before restriction orders on them were to be implemented and where they worked actively for the Communist Party. In 1946 John also became President of the Studio of Realist Art founded by Roy Delgarno. Significantly they became enthusiastic gardeners at this time. During WWII Oldham worked for the Department of the Interior and became friendly with 'Nugget’ Coombs going on to work for his Department of Post-War Reconstruction. Oldham was Chairman of the Inter-Departmental Exhibitions Committee organising a number of displays. He was the Designer/Exhibition Director of the Australian display at the 1947 British Empire Exhibition held in Sydney.
By 1950 he worked for Van Dyke, builders of pre-fabricated houses, and later headed the architectural and town planning drawing office of the Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric Authority; designing construction towns, power stations and mobile housing. Ray had been researching English and American garden design and John became particularly interested in the work of F. L. Omstead, the designer of New York’s Central Park. Both, although committed to socialist ideology, became less interested in 'the party’ machine and channelled their energy into developing a new design discipline in Australia – called landscape architecture. John designed his first garden for their home at Baulkham Hills and discovered colonial gardens of the English School. In 1953 John finally had time to qualify as an architect in New South Wales. They returned to Western Australia in 1954 where John had been offered work by the architectural firm Oldham Boas and then had a nervous breakdown. He decided to specialize in landscape architecture and became a full-time landscape architect. In 1956 he worked for the Government Housing Commission designing the gardens for the Wandana Flats and undertook private commissions. In 1959 Oldham joined the Public Works Department with the proviso that he was allowed to undertake some private work. Most of his early work for the Public Works Department was on schools and hospitals. Projects included; the landscaping of nine major dams including Serpentine and Wellington Dams, the Regional Environment Plan for the Ord River Scheme, the Peel-Harvey Inlet Study and the landscaping of the new freeway system and Narrows Interchange – part of which was called Oldham Park after his death. Master planning for two national parks and the landscaping around the Parliament House precinct were also designed by him. He was the first Government landscape architect for Western Australia and the first appointed to a Government Department in Australia. Although his title at first was 'Garden Designer’ as landscape architecture was not a qualification available in Australia at this time. He received his first landscape architecture qualifications from England becoming a licentiate of the British Institute of Landscape Architects by 1959 and later became a fellow. He held a position with the Public Works Department throughout the iron ore and nickel booms until 1972 when he retired following a heart attack.
Oldham spent a lot of time studying and promoting the discipline of landscape architecture. He developed many international contacts and travelled widely attending conferences and giving lectures particularly after 1964 when he became a representative for Australia on the Grand Council of the International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA). Oldham and his wife were very active in conservation matters. One of his favourite quotes was “A city without its old buildings is like a man without a memory.” John and his wife were a team in everything they did and jointly wrote three books, Gardens in Time, Western Heritage and George Temple-Poole: Architect of the Golden Years. They had two children Patricia Susannah 'Tish’ and Jan Russell. Tish, who travelled to landscape design conferences with her father, also worked with him on project designs such as the Perth Foreshores competition in the 1990s and on two gardens he designed for her at Park Lane, Claremont and Rule Street, North Fremantle. Tish was a fashion designer, textile artist and public art practitioner. Jan was a cookery writer, demonstrator and illustrator with a regular column in the Sunday Times. John Oldham died in Perth in 1999 of a stroke. Oldham Park at the Narrows interchange was named in his honour in a ceremony in 2000.
Writers:
Erickson, Dorothy (Dr)
Date written:
2011
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1907
- Summary
- Oldham worked as an architect, artist, interior designer and landscape architect. Working for Stephenson & Turner in NSW, he later focussed on landscape architecture, developing a substantial reputation. Oldham was the first Government landscape architect for WA. Oldham and his journalist spouse Ray McClintock wrote three books on architecture and landscape.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1999
- Age at death
- 92
Details
Latitude-26 Longitude121 Start Date1906-01-01 End Date1999-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Western Australia
- Biography
- Embroiderer and weaver Norma Rolland was born in Western Australia the daughter of Robert Anthony Rolland, civil engineer and surveyor, and Norma Gertrude n_e Pearce. They lived on the corner of Ord and Walker Street in West Perth. Rolland was educated at Miss Dalziell’s Girls Grammar and Presbyterian Ladies’ College from 1912-23. In her circle ladies did not work so after school she joined the social roufnd of tennis parties, reading, and so on, helping run the large property. Rolland studied art with Bea Darbyshire at Henri Van Raalte’s school in Ventnor Avenue and used to help Bea with her prints, which she printed in the laundry. In 1925 Rolland enrolled in Needlework at Perth Technical School under Loui Benham where she obtained a credit pass. In 1926 her father became very ill and needed caring for even though they had a servant so she studied privately with Benham who lived nearby. In 1931, when her father died, Rolland went east for ten months to stay with relatives in Geelong and Sydney. She travelled with her mother in Europe in 1935-36 and studied at the Royal College of Needlework in London. When war broke out she joined the VAD. Rolland tried to enlist in the navy but instead was eventually selected for cypher work and worked in Fremantle for eighteen months until just before Singapore fell, after which Women’s Royal Australian Naval Service arrived from the east to take over. In 1945 when the end of war was in sight she went to Sydney and continued working in cypher until 1946. Visiting her friend Margaret Richmond, who was teaching weaving at Frensham school in Mittagong, she became interested and studied, dyeing, weaving and materials-preparation in Sydney for a few months. In 1946 Rolland was discharged from the civil service when the cypher work was over. She returned to Western Australia via Melbourne where she had further instruction in weaving. Rolland brought a thirty-six inch loom with her and woollen yarns and set up a studio where she wove tweeds, lampshades, bright-coloured woollen knee-rugs, vividly coloured linen tablemats, guest towels at various fabric lengths. She spun as well. Weaving was a fashionable studio practice for women, particularly during the forties, fifties and sixties. Cotton and linen were available in Western Australia. Between 1947 and 1953 Rolland exhibited in the King Edward Hotel with a number of weavers who worked in the ambit of interior designer, Maria Dent. Others included Astrid Colebatch, who had learnt in Sweden on a visit home to her family, Mrs Robinson who lived in Austen Street, Subiaco, Western Australia and wove rag rugs during the war and sold through a craft shop in London Court, Miss Blythe, and Dulcie Lamb. Rolland usually made for a year and then sold it at the exhibition. There were occasional orders. Her output included bright coloured wool knee-rugs (red and purple), linen tablemats in bright colours – particularly yellow, guest towels and lengths of tweed. These annual exhibitions provided enough work from commissions for year-round employment. However with an ill mother there was not the time to make the enterprise support her financially and so in 1954 Rolland joined the Red Cross where she taught weaving until 1966.
Writers:
Dr Dorothy Erickson
Date written:
2010
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1906
- Summary
- Embroiderer and weaver, Rolland set up a studio in Western Australian where she wove tweeds, lampshades, bright-coloured woollen knee-rugs, vividly coloured linen tablemats, guest towels and various fabric lengths.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1999
- Age at death
- 93
Details
Latitude-33.8471255 Longitude151.2115234 Start Date1906-01-01 End Date1999-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Milsons Point, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- cartoonist, comic strip and commercial artist, was born at Milson’s Point, Sydney (Miller’s Point, acc. Shiell ed.), son of a plumber who was killed in an accident in 1915; his younger brother Jim Russell was also a cartoonist. Their mother, Catherine Green, was a member of the NSW Legislative Council in 1931-32. Dan studied art with Julian Ashton and J.S. ('Wattie’) Watkins at night while working as a clerk. He was secretary of the Black and White Artists Guild 1928-29 and secretary of the re-formed Black and White Artists’ Club in 1937, while working as an advertising and commercial artist. He worked for Frank Johnson Publications during WWII and was a commercial artist in Sydney 1944-45, then went overseas in 1946 and studied cartoon techniques in the USA, Mexico and Canada. He produced adventure strips for Johnson for which he was paid 30/- a page. He usually managed 4-6 pages a week. They included Terry Lawson (rover scout), Val Blake – Ventriloquist (and detective), Wanda Dare (reporter) and Jimmy Dale (boxing champ). In 1952 he became a staff artist on Truth and the Daily Mirror and was involved in A.M. magazine. He was political cartoonist for the Adelaide Advertiser in 1953-55. From 1955 to 1964 he was general cartoonist for the Adelaide News and Sunday News .
A lifelong member of the Australian Black and White Artists’ Club, Dan Russell was president in 1977. He won a Silver Stanley for his contribution to black and white art in 1991 and was made a life member of the ABWAC the same year.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1906
- Summary
- Prolific newspaper and comic strip artist. A lifelong member of the Australian Black and White Artists' Club, Dan Russell was president in 1977.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1999
- Age at death
- 93
Details
Latitude-30.748889 Longitude121.465833 Start Date1905-01-01 End Date1999-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Kalgoorlie, WA, Australia
- Biography
- painter, illustrator and author, was born on 20 August 1905 on the goldfields at Kalgoorlie WA, her father, an architect and surveyor, and his newly-married wife being among the earliest pioneers in the town. They settled there from Adelaide with four children. The family later returned to Perth and Sheila spent most of an idyllic childhood near the bush. Due to financial insecurity, however, they moved house constantly before settling in Melbourne. After completing her schooling at Toorak College, Sheila studied briefly at the National Gallery School – her only formal art training (graduated from it according to Timms’s obit in AMA )- leaving to become a commercial artist.
She worked in London as a poster artist and illustrator of children’s books, painted at weekends and made children’s friezes and toys, which she exhibited in mixed and solo shows at Melbourne and Sydney in 1930-31. The National Gallery of Victoria purchased a drawing from her first exhibition and Eric Thake invited her to exhibit in a mixed show that included James Flett and Herbert McClintock . In 1931, with Australia in the midst of the Depression, she left for London. While looking for a job and sharing a bedsitter, she illustrated her first children’s book, Margaret Brown’s Black Tuppenny (1932). At a low ebb financially, she became the first woman to be employed by Shell Mex Advertising. But she refused full-time work in order to continue to illustrate her own children’s books.
In 1934, at the invitation of her New Zealand friends, the artist James Cook and his wife, Ruth, she went to Catalonia, shared a primitive apartment with them in Gerona and enjoyed her first chance to paint every day. Back in England, she married and settled in Northumberland where her husband operated an old watermill; her studio was an empty, straw-carpeted hen house. The Bowdens moved to the Cotswolds to escape the northern cold and Sheila primed and painted her canvases in an Elizabethan attic. During 1937 they exchanged places with a friend in London where she joined and exhibited with the Women’s International Club.
While exhibiting, Sheila wrote and illustrated children’s books. Little Gray 'Colo’: The Adventures of a Koala Bear was published in New York in 1939 (NLA copy acquired 1999). Two published by Hamish Hamilton were Pepito (from her Spanish sojourn) and John Appleby (from living in the old mill). Published at the outbreak of World War II, the entire edition of John Appleby was destroyed during a bombing raid over London. At the outbreak of war, Hawkins was employed at RAAF Headquarters. She also painted murals in the New Zealand Forces canteen, drew and painted the long-boats carrying coal (manned by women) and visited Scotland to draw the Australian Forestry Units.
After the war, she refused an offer from Hamish Hamilton to publish all her future books and instead continued as an illustrator of other authors’ texts in order to support herself and her daughter. She was well known for her humorous animal illustrations and worked for various publishers, including Penguin, Faber & Faber, Heinemann and Methuen. Animals of Australia , published under the new Puffin imprint in 1947, sold more than 50,000 copies. Between 1930 and 1960 she illustrated fifty children’s picture books and was the author of ten of them. In 1956 Wish and the Magic Nut , written by Peggy Barnard and illustrated by Hawkins, was chosen as Australian Picture Book of the Year. In 1962 Angus and Robertson published her own hand-lithographed book of cartoons, Australian Animals and Birds .
During the 1950s Hawkins had several solo exhibitions. On a visit to Australia with her daughter in 1954 she exhibited six war works at the Pylon Lookout for (or on behalf of) the NSW Forestry Commission. They were offered to the Australian War Memorial in 1956 but rejected as the Memorial already had two works. In 1969 she exhibited with the Chelsea Artists. During the 1970s she joined the Free Painters and Sculptors and participated in mixed exhibitions and several solo exhibitions at Loggia Gallery, London.
Hawkins continued to live in London and exhibit with a variety of galleries until 1993 when she showed with the Ridley Arts Society. She died in London on 10 January 1999.
Writers:
Wilkins, Lola
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
1992
- Born
- b. 20 August 1905
- Summary
- Mid 20th century painter, illustrator and author. War artist and children's book illustrator.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 10-Jan-99
- Age at death
- 94
Details
Latitude-36.3562509 Longitude146.3230914 Start Date1902-01-01 End Date1999-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Wangaratta, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 17 August 1902
- Summary
- Melbourne-trained tram conductor who worked as a painter, potter and designer. Farrell designed a pedestal chair with the seat formed from Perspex for Module and Company, Fairfield, Victoria, ca.1970. Company shifted from Bulleen to Fairfield and was in operation 1965-1992.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1999
- Age at death
- 97
Details
Latitude-37.7189715 Longitude145.1256231 Start Date1949-01-01 End Date1998-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Montmorency, VIC, Australia
- Biography
- sculptor, environmental artist, was born at Montmorency, a bush suburb on the outskirts of Melbourne. His boyhood at the creative community of Eltham taught him about metalwork and mud-brick construction, which encouraged him to think of a career in art. He was awarded a scholarship to the National Gallery School and at the end of his degree qualified as a high school art teacher. H worked first at the Diamond Creek Technical school before teaching at the altnernative Diamond Creek Community School.His talents as an artist were noticed early in his career as he was awarded the Eltham Art Prize in 1970 and in 1971 was included in a group exhibition at the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery. The same year he held his first solo exhibition at Pinacotheca and was invited to participate in Harald Szeemann’s selection of Australian art for John Kaldor. In 1973 he was included in both the Mildura Sculpturescape and the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ exhibition, Recent Australian Art.After the end of his first marriage to Sue Halprin he moved to north-eastern Victoria with his second wife, Rosemary Buchanan, and here he became as well known for his farming as for his art. In his later years he suffered from a crippling auto-immune disease. An obituary in the Sydney Morning Herald said “to him what mattered was expressing himself, turning a creative idea into reality.”
Writers:
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2013
Last updated:
2013
- Born
- b. 19 February 1949
- Summary
- Ross Grounds was one of the pioneers of environmentally aware art, using a playful understanding of the rhythms of nature, which he incorporated with a whimsical humour. His second career as a farmer, worked in harmony with his creative life.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1998
- Age at death
- 49
Details
Latitude-22.6219466 Longitude135.1941577 Start Date1938-01-01 End Date1998-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Dneiper, NT, Australia
- Biography
- Born c.1938 at the old sheep camp, Dneiper Station, Central Australia, Louis Pwerle was an Eastern Anmatyerre speaker whose country lies on the central-western area of Utopia Station, with significant areas also on neighbouring Mt Skinner station. As the eldest of his brothers (who include Cowboy Louie Pwerle ), he was 'boss’ of the stories for this area and an important ceremonial leader of the Eastern Anmatyerre, held in high esteem by the community. Known as a good stockman, Louis worked over the years for several stations across the north-east. Though he had been painting only since the end of the 1980s, his distinctive personal style, with its bold designs and optical intensity, won Louis considerable recognition both in Australia and overseas. In 1990 he had a solo exhibition at Utopia Art, Sydney and was, with Emily Kngwarreye , CAAMA/Utopia-artist-in-residence at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (Reference: Batty, P. and Sheridan, N., Utopia Artist in Residence Project [Holmes à Court Foundation, Perth, 1990]). He had a family outstation at Mosquito Bore (Lyentye) in the north-west of Utopia Aboriginal Land, and was married to Angelina Kngwarreye and Sarah Kngwarreye.
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1938
- Summary
- Louis Pwerle was an Eastern Anmatyerre artist, ceremonial leader, and 'boss' of stories for his country in the central-western area of Utopia station. His work is represented in major public and private collections.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- c.1998
- Age at death
- 60
Details
Latitude-33.829075 Longitude151.24409 Start Date1928-01-01 End Date1998-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Mosman, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1928
- Summary
- Von Willer trained with Lyndon Dadswell at East Sydney Technical College/National Art School with work in the 1949 ESTC Diploma Exhibition. He attended the Inaugural Sculpture Society General Meeting in 1951 and By 1963, he was teaching sculpture at ESTC while residing in Mosman. After 1970, he moved into kinetic works and music. In 1980, he was appointed Head Teacher of Art at Meadowbank TAFE.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-98
- Age at death
- 70
Details
Latitude-14.5194035 Longitude132.1869752 Start Date1926-01-01 End Date1998-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Rockhole, NT, Australia
- Biography
- Born c.1927 at Marnpi south west of Mt Rennie. According to Tindale’s records, the family group was camped near Putarti Spring, south west of Mt Liebig when encountered in 1932. When interviewed, Mick remembered as a little boy walking east to Haasts Bluff with his family to collect rations from the missionaries. For the next decade, the family stayed around the Haasts Bluff /Hermannsburg area. Mick was initiated at Areyonga. He subsequently worked as a stockman on various stations, including Tempe Downs and Areyonga. In 1971 he was serving on the Papunya Council and with fellow councilor Johnny Warangkula soon made his interest in painting known to art teacher Geoffrey Bardon. During those early years, Mick travelled to Sydney with Bardon for the making of the film Mick and the Moon about the artist and his work. Mick was one of a few Pintupi who stayed on in Papunya for some years after the 1981 mass exodus to establish the Pintupi township of Kintore on their homelands. Painting prolifically in this period of the early ’80s, he travelled to Sydney with Nosepeg Tjupurrula and Tutuma Tjapangati in 1981 for an independent exhibition mounted at Syd’s, Darlinghurst, Sydney in support of an Aboriginal controlled health service at Papunya. Later Mick joined his countrymen and women at Kintore, and set up an outstation at Nyunmanu to the south-east of the settlement. Later he lived at Njutulnya outstation with his second wife Elizabeth and their two young children. A senior man, Mick’s paintings covered many Dreamings, principally Kangaroo, Dingo, Water, and Bandicoot. His work increasingly explored new directions and remained fresh and exciting after decades of continuous output. In 1989 he travelled to Melbourne for an exhibition of Papunya Tula Artists at the National Gallery of Victoria. His painting Bandicoot Dreaming won the 1991 National Aboriginal Art Award. In 1991 he had his first solo exhibition at Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi Melbourne.
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Note: primary biographer
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1926
- Summary
- One of the founding members of Papunya Tula Artists and one of the most eminent and revered painters of the desert art movement.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1998
- Age at death
- 72
Details
Latitude-19.8516101 Longitude133.2303375 Start Date1926-01-01 End Date1998-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Kintore Range, NT, Australia
- Biography
- Rover Thomas was born at Gunawaggi, Well 33 on the Canning Stock Route. His mother, Ngakuyipa (Nita) was a Kukatja woman, the two fathers who brought him up were Lanikan Thomas and Sundown, both Wangkajunga men.When he was ten, he moved with his parents to Billuna Station in the Kimberley, where he began to work as a stockman. Here, sometime during World War II, he was initiated into traditional law. He later worked with a European fencing contractor before returning to Western Australia and the Bow River Station in the north-eastern Kimberley. He later worked at the Texas Downs Station and the Mabel Downs Station.In early 1975 he came to live with the Warmun community at Turkey Creek. At this time Aboriginal people had finally been awarded equal pay with white workers and as a result many station owners expelled them from their properties.In that year the Kurirr-Kurirr ceremony came to Rover Thomas in a dream, a series of visitations from a dead Kija Wula speaking woman, who told him of her travels over the land after her death. She had been critically injured in a road accident, and died as the Royal Flying Doctor Service flew her over the whirlpool Tawurrkurima/Jintiripul, the home of the Rainbow Snake. Thomas first made a series of song verses on these revelations, which became boards for dancers to hold in ceremonies. By the early 1980s Thomas began to paint larger interpretations of the dream of the old woman who told him of roads crossing, of past massacres and the Rainbow Serpent’s destruction of Darwin with the event known as Cyclone Tracy in December 1974.Thomas also painted of massacres of Aboriginal people in the Kimberley. These events were sufficiently recent for him to have heard the stories directly from survivors.In 1990 Rover Thomas and Trevor Nickolls became the first two Aboriginal artists to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale and in 1994 Roads Cross, a major survey of his work was exhibited at the National Gallery of Australia.
Writers:
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2022
Last updated:
2022
- Born
- b. c.1926
- Summary
- Rover Thomas, who painted the land and the massacres of people in the Kimberley, first came to prominence as the Dreamer of the Kurirr-Kurirr ceremony, which he subsequently painted. He and Trevor Nickolls were the first Australian Aboriginal artists to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale in 1991.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 11-Apr-98
- Age at death
- 72
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1925-01-01 End Date1998-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- Joan KerrPainter, printmaker and theatre set designer, was born in Melbourne on 3 November 1925. She worked in Melbourne and produced etchings, linocuts, lithographs, screenprints and woodcuts. The NGA has 74 prints dating from c.1948 ( Beach Box ) to 1991 (the computer-generated Still Life with Fruit ) – though most are of the 1960s, including the abstract colour screenprint, Portrait Group 1965. See also Eveline Syme .
Brash produced early figurative prints which became more abstract.
Emma MillsBarbara Nancy Brash was an Australian printmaker, painter and designer, who practiced between 1946 and 1997. Brash was born in Melbourne on the 3rd November 1925 to Alfred and Elsa Brasch. The Brasch family were a well-established presence within Melbourne society.
Barbara’s grandfather Marcus Brasch had originally emigrated from Prussia to the United Kingdom in 1848. He quickly established himself as a piano merchant, who traded his wares overseas to Australia and New Zealand. Marcus and his brother Woolf moved to Australia in 1866 to found Brasch Brothers and Salenger. The brothers went on to open the first Braschs store at 108 Elizabeth Street. The Brashs’ also had ties to the Australian Impressionist movement. Woolf Brasch’s first daughter Golda Figa Brasch married Louis Abrahams in 1888, who became a founding member of the Heidelberg School. One of Woolf’s sons Reuben Brasch established the Curlew Camp, visited by Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton between 1881 and 1882.
After the death of Marcus in 1894, his son Alfred inherited the family business. After the First World War, Alfred anglicised his surname to ensure his family’s assimilation into an increasingly xenophobic Australian society. Barbara and her brother Geoffrey went to primary school at St Margaret’s Melbourne. Barbara attended secondary school at the all-girls college St. Catherine’s. Geoffrey eventually inherited his father’s company in the 1970’s, introducing vinyl records, audio systems and later compact discs. Although Barbara produced several record labels for Brashs during the 1980’s, she was not an active participant in the business. Barbara lived at her family home in Toorak until her father’s death, where she presumably cared for her ageing parents. In 1963 at the age of 38, Brash lived briefly at in Toorak, before moving to her own home in Kooyong in 1967, where she lived for the remainder of her life.
Brash enrolled at the National Gallery School to study a Diploma of Art in 1946 at the age of 21. Brash was taught painting by Alan Sumner, the first Modernist instructor at the NGS, who is also known for his pioneering work as a screen printer. She went on to additionally enrol at the George Bell School, where she attended Friday afternoon classes on the principles of modernist painting. It was here that she met painter Dorothy Braund, who also simultaneously studied under Sumner at the Gallery School. During her time at the Bell School, Brash was also in contact with older artist Evelyn Syme, of whom she drew a portrait of. Brash also enrolled in Saturday morning etching classes run by Ben Crosskell at the Melbourne Technical College in 1946.
Brash left Australia to travel Europe with Braund, returning to Melbourne from London in 1951. On her return, Brash became involved with circle of artists based at the Melbourne Technical College called the Melbourne Printmakers Group or Freedman Group. Brash attended the Tuesday evening classes with a number of others, including Mary Macqueen, Lesbia Thorpe, Nancy Clifton, Charles Blackman and Kenneth Jack. Brash joined the Studio One Printmakers group in 1963, alongside Tate Adams, Janet Dawson, Grahame King, Hertha Kluge-Pott, Jan Senbergs and Fred Williams. Brash was also closely involved in the Print Council of Australia, acting as the treasurer in the 1970’s and early 80’s. In 1965 Barbara became a member of the Lyceum Club. She was originally sponsored by artists Constance Stokes and Anne Montgomery. After experiencing a lapse in productivity during the late 1980’s, Brash’s practice was reinvigorated in the 1990’s by digital media. Brash attended workshops run by notable digital printmaker Bashir Baraki to learn the Canon Laser Photocopy technique. In 1996, Brash published her first collaborative print portfolio, alongside Bashir Baraki and Jean Knox, titled The Image Makers.
Brash died in February 1998 at the age of 74. In her will, she left a considerable amount of her shares to animal welfare groups, including Wildlife in Secure Environment, The Animal Welfare League of Victoria, The Lost Dogs Home and Animal Hospital and The International Fund for Animal Welfare.
Brash’s work spans a variety of printmaking media and subject matter. Her early prints are largely linocuts or etchings, which are aesthetically within the Classical Modernist tradition. Her lifelong interest in environmental and animal subject matter can be observed in her early work. Brash adopted the screen-printing method during the 1960’s and 70’s. She began to produce more abstract prints, experimenting with textural effects like embossing. Her digital work in the 1990’s is particularly interesting; she began to engage with notably more political subject matter than her previous work. Brash’s 1997 Sludge series explores the theme of environmental damage. Brash was a deeply experimental artist, who embraced new technology and aesthetics throughout her career. Her masterful use of translucent and layered colour permeates her entire oeuvre.
Brash won the Sara Levi Scholarship from the NGS in 1947 and a further award for her final year painting Half Nude (1949). Brash was included in a number of important early modernist print exhibitions, including Studio One Prints ’63 and Australian Print Survey 1963/4. Brash’s early work toured the United States; she was included in Australian Prints Today at the Smithsonian Institution and The Philadelphia Print Club in 1966. In the 1970s, her prints toured South East Asia in Australian Prints; Poland, India and New York in Images; Japan in three different exhibitions, and the Western Pacific. Regionally, she was exhibited in Printmaking in Australia 1812-1972 at the Newcastle City Art Gallery, and Printmaking in Australia: Colonial to Contemporary at the Queensland Art Gallery. She has had three major solo exhibitions; in 1965 at the Australian Galleries, 1966 at the Design Arts Centre Brisbane, and 1989 at the Eastgate Gallery.
Brash’s work is represented in a number of major state and regional galleries. The most notable of which include; National Gallery of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Mornington Peninsula Regional Art Gallery, The Warrnambool Art Gallery, Wagga Wagga Art Gallery and The Ian Potter Museum of Art.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Emma Mills
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2019
- Born
- b. 3 November 1925
- Summary
- Twentieth-century Melbourne artist who has worked mostly in printmaking. The National Gallery of Australia holds over 70 of Brash's works including the c.1948 print 'Beach Box'.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 20-Feb-98
- Age at death
- 73
Details
Latitude-34.9066222 Longitude138.5699532 Start Date1919-01-01 End Date1998-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Hindmarsh, SA, Australia
- Biography
- cartoonist and painter, was born Frank Bennier [ sic ] in Hindmarsh, SA, a fourth generation Australian of Basque extraction whose family migrated to South Australia in 1843. He signed his work 'Benier’ and always wore a basque beret in honour of his heritage, although locally born and educated. His first cartoon appeared in the Adelaide Express & Journal in September 1934, when he was 14:
“…it was just a one-line gag sort of thing and I can’t remember the exact date – but I do remember I received the princely sum of 30 bob ($3) and blew the lot on lollies.” (Quoted obituary SMH 24 October 1998, 120)
His father, a bushman turned copper miner, disapproved of his son’s passion for drawing and sent him splitting fence posts and doing other manual labour on farms around the Mount Gambier area. After leaving school, he was employed as a copy boy on the Adelaide News and assigned to the processing department after telling his boss of his artistic ambitions. Finally, he graduated to the art department.
Benier rejoined the News as an artist after serving in military intelligence (a contradiction in terms, he joked) in the Middle East and New Guinea during WWII. In 1956 (acc. Australian obit, elsewhere 1957 and 1958) he moved to Sydney and worked in animation (Australian). He contributed to the Bulletin , original (ML Px *D452/92) paid 10 December 1958 showing a chap in a restaurant lassooing the salt with spaghetti: “To me, spaghetti without salt is nothing” – a very Mercier style of gag.
Mercier was Benier’s mentor when he joined the Sun in 1958. Benier’s big break came when Mercier’s suggestion that he fill in while Mercier was away on holidays was accepted, but he left in 1960. According to Wendy Stokes in the Sun-Herald 1971 (quoted in obit.), Benier loaded his second wife, Penny (now dead), their 'three children by previous marriages on both sides and one child of their own’ (apparently all boys) into the car and went to London. His comments on England in 1962 are quoted by Jensen, pp.11-12. He remained away for three years, then returned to the Sun as feature cartoonist in February 1966 [1965 acc. Australian obit.].
Frank Benier of the Sun won a Walkley Award for best cartoon of the year in 1967 (Bruce Begg won in the category of 'Press Artwork’ and John P. Petersen of Woman’s Day for illustration). His cartoons also appeared in the Sun-Herald , e.g. 'The Dingo and the Lizard’ (undated original AGWA 957/D377) and presumably the two 1960s and 1971 originals in ML (PXD 764). His obituary writer notes:
“His second stint on the paper wasn’t always easy, Bennier growing increasingly critical of its editor, the late Jack Tier, for trying to tell him what to draw.”
In 1973 Benier joined the Sun 's arch-rival the Daily Mirror , having been offered a raise of about 30% and less editorial control. A road cartoon (very like Rigby ), done for the Mirror , is in Hayllar & Sadler (111). He continued drawing cartoons for another decade, although by 1971 he considered himself 'first of all a painter’ (Wendy Stokes, Sun-Herald 1971). He specialised in hot outback landscapes. Even so, he did not regard cartooning as prostitution of his art, according to Stokes:
“The true guts of all art is observation. The cartoon is observation of current life – and it’s also the preparation for a painting. A lot of Basques are fishermen and shepherdesses. Few of them are artists. But I know it’s because of my Basque background that I have a nostalgia for the country, a closeness to the whole earth.
“This makes an artist partly international. You tend to drift towards farmers and peasants.”
In later years his cartoons included a miniscule bloke in a corner wearing a black beret. He smoked a pipe and was a great wine lover. After he retired to his home at Patonga Beach (NSW) in the 1980s, he continued as a member of the Black and White Artists’ Club until his death in 1998. He was survived by his third wife, Mary Lou, and three of his four sons: Nick, Steve and Kerry. Many original cartoons were already in the SLNSW Bulletin collection in 2000 (e.g. cricket and football gags c.1970) and he bequeathed the library another 2,250 or so.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 13 December 1919
- Summary
- Popular mid 20th century Adelaide, Sydney and London newspaper cartoonist and painter. Benier's first cartoon appeared in the Adelaide Express & Journal in September 1934 at the age of 14. Years later the cartoonist was unable to recall the specifics of that first paid gag, only that he spent his entire earnings from it on lollies.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1998
- Age at death
- 79
Details
Latitude-34.4816626 Longitude150.4177868 Start Date1912-01-01 End Date1998-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Bowral, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- designer and printer, was born in Bowral, NSW, officially on 11 February 1912 (although her birthday has always been celebrated on the 12th), youngest of the five children of Alistair Ronald Mackenzie of Ross, Scotland, a British army communications engineer who worked as a telegraph constructor in Melbourne and Western Australia, and Rosalind Isabel Agnes, née Walker, of Victoria. Her father was sixty-five and her mother forty-four when she was born; her two surviving sisters were more than twenty years her senior (the elder was Isabel Mackenzie ). She grew up at Bowral, Armidale, Glebe and Clovelly, visiting painting exhibitions at the Art Gallery of NSW, ballet, concerts, and plays at Her Majesty’s Theatre with her family.
After completing her schooling at SCEGGS Redlands, Cremorne, where Miss Hoare taught her English and Art, Nan enrolled at East Sydney Technical College in 1929 where her most memorable teacher was Phyllis Shillito. However, she was forced to discontinue her studies because of the Depression and thereafter learnt 'on the job’: first as a sign writer, then as a scarf and embroidery designer. On 4 March 1941, 'at the old stable’, 1 Vista Street, Mosman, she opened the business Annan Fabrics with her partner Annie Outlaw, née Simpson (1891-1991), an English secretary who had been awarded the OBE for her work with Prime Minister Lloyd George during the 1919 Peace Conference in Paris. Annie had come to Sydney with her artist husband, Arthur, soon after their marriage in September 1922; she was Hon. Sec. of the NSW Society of Arts and Crafts when she met Nan, who had begun designing textiles in her Mosman home in the 1930s, characteristically using strong colours, clear lines and a preferred use of Australian imagery.
Annie had £100 and Nan had researched the viability of 'rapid fast’ dyes from Fahmann Industries in Frankfurt, supplied through Abel Lemon of Harrington Street, Sydney, which led to them establishing a screen-printing business at Mosman – called Annan from their two names – and to set about acquiring basic equipment and the requisite practical skills. While an intimate knowledge of the mechanics of screen-printing and dye mixing was obviously necessary in order to produce well-printed colourfast fabrics, it was also fundamental to MacKenzie’s design philosophy, which held that good design was dependent on appropriateness and a thorough knowledge of the particular processes involved in making a finished article. Outlaw’s creative contribution to the business was in dye mixing, a highly skilled task that allowed no margin for error.
In spite of supply problems and various other difficulties, during the war years in particular, Mackenzie and Outlaw achieved a remarkably wide range of excellent colours and found that their bright fabrics sold readily. Being bold and colourful designs in colour-fast dyes on sturdy cotton, most fabrics such as Rock Carving c.1945 (Powerhouse) – inspired by the Aboriginal artistic tradition of carving or painting pictures on rock and images of Australian fauna that recur in Aboriginal art and mythology – were well suited for curtains or other domestic furnishings. Some were also made up into dresses, beachwear and ties.
Annan designs became an international success, exhibited in Australia House, London, and at Cairo in 1947; at the Australian Display Centre, New York, in 1952; and in the Ideal Houses Exhibition at Sydney Town Hall in 1953. Over the years Mackenzie and Outlaw received several offers to go into large-scale commercial production, but they preferred to retain independent control of the studio through concentrating on individual projects and commissioned lengths for large retail stores such as David Jones. Mackenzie and Outlaw, who could screen-print an average of thirty-six metres a day, produced a wide range of fabrics, the vast majority featuring Australian flora or Aboriginal motifs. Their many commissions included fabrics for the office of the High Commissioner of Pakistan, the 'Australia Room’ of the P & O liner Himalaya , the Qantas offices in London, Honolulu, New York and Djakarta, the overseas and TAA passenger terminals at Mascot and Essendon, the University of NSW, the Sydney P & O offices and curtains in the dining room of Parliament House, Sydney. Field Marshall Montgomery chose for his home the pink and ochre version of their Kangaroo Hunt , a design exhibited at Australia House, London; this was also selected by Lintas Advertising Agency.
In the face of a flood of cheap imported American prints in the postwar years, however, it became much more difficult to keep the business viable; Annan Fabrics became increasingly dependent on architects’ commissions for printed fabrics for both private and public interiors. Despite the superb quality of their work and their undoubted success, the business was never financially secure. Living from commission to commission, Mackenzie and Outlaw were just able to keep afloat until 1954 when they were forced into liquidation over the production of street decorations for the Royal Visit. Having been awarded the subcontract, they worked on nothing else for months and were unable to sustain the loss when the contractor declared himself bankrupt. The business folded in 1955. By then Annie’s husband had died and she had returned to her native London, where she died on 17 January 1991, aged ninety-nine. She was always 'great fun’ to work with, Nan recollects.
From 1960 until she retired in 1974, Nan taught textile printing in the Design and Crafts Diploma Course at East Sydney Technical College. On 8 June 1963, she married Andrew Kenneth Kirkwood. She was still living at Mosman in 1995.
Writers:
Lorenzo, Catherine DeSumner, Christina
staffcontributor
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 11 February 1912
- Summary
- Female fabric designer and printmaker who worked with Annie Outlaw in Sydney to establish colourful designs with Australian motifs for international markets during the 1940s and 1950s.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1998
- Age at death
- 86
Details
Latitude-33.3591223 Longitude116.1536169 Start Date1911-01-01 End Date1998-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Collie, WA, Australia
- Biography
- Mavis Lightly (nee Allen) was born in Collie on 2 December 1911, died on 12 December 1998 and is notable for having been an inaugural foundation member of the Busselton Society of Arts.
Mavis was the granddaughter of an engineer from the well-known Irish engineering firm, W.H. Allen. They provided engines from Belfast to mining companies in Queenstown, Tasmania, and Cue, Day Dawn and Collie in Western Australia.
Her father immigrated to Australia as a 16-year-old with his father, who in an ironic twist of fate died from snakebite soon after arrival.
Her father ended up in Collie selling engines and then ran a family garage in Busselton in the 1920s. Mavis was brought up in the family home behind the garage.
In an oral history interview recorded in 1985, Mrs Lightly recalls as a five-year old drawing a compelling picture of a Model-T Ford on the classroom blackboard which remained up for nearly a year.
At age 15 she was privately tutored by an English artist by the name of Baker. She left school then and as the eighth child by eight years she was looked after by other family members and not allowed to work.
This reflected the social and cultural norms at the time and the low expectations of women.
She married at 20, farming in the Vasse region and raising two children, Ian and Lynette.
In the recorded interview she describes her art practice as a pleasure and habit with no pressure to produce commercially sought after works. Like so many other women artists of the time she describes her art as “a casual hobby”.
After the Second World War, Mavis moved from the farm to Busselton becoming a serious painter and a student of Margaret Johnson. She used oil and with two small children had a passion for drawing on paper with charcoal being interested in all subjects – landscape, still life, and portraits.
“Margaret Johnson recognised I had some talent and took an interest in me,” Mavis told her social history interviewer in 1985.
Margaret G. Johnson, (1898 – 1967) was a Sri-Lankan born Australian portrait artist. Her father James Wood, was a Scotsman in Kadugannawa, Ceylon. She was one of seven children who all had an interest painting and drawing. At a young age her father immigrated to Western Australia and after completing her schooling in Perth was sent to the Glasgow School of Art at the tender age of fifteen, three years younger than the usual entrance age.
Margaret studied under Maurice Greiffenhagen and Professor McKeller, concentrating on painting and modelling. She completed her four-year course in three years and returned to Western Australia after the end of World War One and married.
As a portrait artist she specialised in portraiture painting especially watercolours but also had works in pencil, pastels and oil. Her portrait works are found in the National Gallery of Australia, Parliament House and at the Perth City Council. For example, her portrait of Prime Minister John Curtin hangs in the Art Gallery of Western Australia.
In 1934, her model for a portrait plaque of pioneering women’s activist and politician Edith Cowan was chosen from several local West Australian entries to be the choice for a memorial work on a clock tower in Kings Park, Perth honouring the trailblazer. The Edith Cowan bust is in high relief above a wreath of gum leaves and nuts cast in bronze and is visible today on the eastern face of the clock tower.
Ms Johnson was a member of the West Australian Society of Arts and taught Mavis Lightly at the Busselton Technical School.
Mavis had her first Art Exhibition in 1952 in the Country Women’s Association Hall, before the Busselton Arts Society was formed and every item was sold at prices ranging from five to 18 guineas.
This was followed by several other exhibitions.
“My early work can more than hold their own, even after art classes by Boissevain and Juniper and you develop your own style and my style has been retained largely due to that early influence of Margaret Johnston where I learnt the basics of distance, composition, colour, coordination and application, have your own colours but have your tonal values right,” she said.
Boissevain and Juniper are considered WA Art Royalty and their influence extends far beyond their extensive body of work because they also had longevity as art teachers.
For example, William 'Wim’ Boissevain (born 23 July 1927) was born Willem Geoffrey Boissevain in New York, son of Gideon Walrave 'Gi’ Boissevain who was in the Dutch diplomatic service.
With his roots in the Netherlands and international upbringing, he was drawn back to Europe and studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London and the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris.
Arriving in Australia in 1947 he became naturalised in 1949 and is well-known for his studio at Glen Forrest in the Darling Range near Perth.
Contrasting this Dutch heritage, Robert Litchfield Juniper, AM (7 January 1929 – 20 December 2012) had a broader art practice covering artist, art teacher, illustrator, painter, printmaker and sculptor and was born in the dusty light-filled wheat-belt town of Merredin in Western Australia.
Like Boissevain he was drawn to Europe and studied commercial art and industrial design at Beckenham School of Art in England and in a striking similarity was also a long-term resident in the Perth hills where he was involved with the Darlington Arts Festival.
The strong loyalty and admiration Mavis Lightly felt towards her female teachers and mentors like Johnson rather than men, demonstrates how early Australian women artists supported and nurtured each other.
In the first 'Art in the Park’, the longest running exhibition of its kind in Western Australia, held in Mitchell Park Busselton from the 19th to the 24th January 1960, Mavis Lightly had one oil and eight water colour works for sale, with her highest priced, an oil
called 'Winter Pattern’ selling for eight guineas, the second most expensive piece of art on offer.
Mavis Lightly won the $500 Tom Wardle Prize for oils at the 1968 Busselton Art Society Competition, reputed by Society Patron, Sir Claude Hotchin to be the richest art prize offered outside the Perth metropolitan area. Her entry, Still Life, oil on board, 370 × 475 mm is part of The Busselton Art Society collection, the largest private art collection in the South West of Western Australia.
“I also taught art, always all ladies,” Ms Lightly said. This reflects the economic necessity of women artists of the time supplementing the household income from other sources than pure art sales. History repeating itself, much like how Margaret Johnson had taught Mavis Lightly decades before.
White Camellias was purchased at a garage sale run by a charity group in 2017. The work is significant as it reflects the artists unique still life style and her depth of tonal colours.
The framing reflects the frugal nature of the period. A busy time as a farming mother raising toddlers, with a husband often away, and money more likely to be directed to other activities rather than framing.
“If it’s a complicated painting, I always have a simple frame,” she concludes in her oral history interview.
Retired stock and station agent and son, Ian Lightly gets a lump in his throat and tears in his eyes when he remembers how his mother’s artwork helped pay for his education.
Sales from his mother’s art practice helped fund expensive boarding school fees for Ian and his sister at Perth’s elite private schools, Hale and St Hilda’s, when cash flow from their Busselton farm was tight.
Writers:
ArtPhD
Date written:
2022
Last updated:
2022
- Born
- b. 2 December 1911
- Summary
- West Australian artist
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 12-Dec-98
- Age at death
- 87
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1911-01-01 End Date1998-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- Alastair Morrison collaborated with the László Moholy-Nagy on visual merchandising for Simpson’s Piccadilly store in London from 1935 to 1939. He later was appointed art director for Allied Iron Founders of London where he was responsible for the corporate identity as well as advertising. During his London career he was noted for his designs for Shell Oil Company, Gaumont British films, Whitney Straight airlines, Lund Humphries and the Dorchester Hotel. After World War II he worked both as designer and engineer for the De Havilland Aircraft Company. He was employed as a graphic designer for Rhine Castle Wines, Alberto Distillers, David Jones Art Gallery and the Contemporary Art Society.
Biographical summary from [Anon. Design Australia, 5/1969, p.56.]Mr. Alastair Morrison, 22 HeeleySt., Paddington, NSW, Born and educatedin Melbourne. 1935-1939: Workedand exhibited as Graphic Designer inLondon. 1945: Freelance Graphic Designerbased in Sydney. Past N.S.W. President,Contemporary Art Society and lndustrialDesign lnstitute of Australia. Chairman ofDecimal Currency Note Design Committee.As a “hobby”, inventor of “Strine”, and,under the pen-name of Afferbeck Lauder,wrote “Let Stalk Strine”, “Nose ToneUnturned”, and, recently, “Fraffly WellSpoken”
Writers:
John H Martin
Michael Bogle
Date written:
2015
Last updated:
2016
- Born
- b. 1 January 1911
- Summary
- Morrison was a typographer, graphic designer, industrial designer and author. He had a celebrated design career in London from 1936-1939, returning to Australia before the 1939-45 War. Working for the Reserve Bank of Australia, he also worked for P & O, Rhine Castle Wines and the National Trust of Australia. As a member, he also designed many catalogues for Sydney's Contemporary Art Society.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-98
- Age at death
- 87
Details
Latitude-25 Longitude133 Start Date1909-01-01 End Date1998-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1909
- Summary
- Crawford was a fashion designer and stylist. She apprenticed in retail with Mark Foys, later Myer, associate director Foys, travelled to USA, later ran a fashion agency "Mona Crawford International", Taylor Square, Sydney, NSW.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1-Jan-98
- Age at death
- 89
Details
Latitude-37 Longitude144 Start Date1909-01-01 End Date1998-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Victoria
- Biography
- Mattie Hodgson was born in 1909 into a family which encouraged girls creative endeavours. Her aunt, the artist Edith Ward, introduced her to photography. By 1924 the family had moved from Victoria to Perth in Western Australia, and it was here she was given her first camera. The next year she began to work as a receptionist and retoucher at Perth’s Ruskin Studios. Seven years later she declined an offer to take over the business as she was more interested in painting and drawing, which she was then studying at the Perth Technical School.
Writers:
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2020
Last updated:
2020
- Born
- b. 6 April 1909
- Summary
- Mattie Hodgson was a photographer retoucher, and colourist working in Perth and London from the mid-1920s to World War II,
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2-Nov-98
- Age at death
- 89
Details
Latitude-37.8244246 Longitude145.0317207 Start Date1908-01-01 End Date1998-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Hawthorn, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- Peter Hammon Lindsay, landscape painter, cartoonist and commercial artist, was born at 22 Falmouth Street, Hawthorn, Victoria on 6 April 1908. He was the only child of artist, Percy Lindsay and Jessie née Hammon. Peter H. Lindsay spent his early years in Melbourne, but just before the end of hostilities in 1918 his parents moved to Shirley Road, Roseville, a suburb on the northern fringes of Sydney. One of the earliest images made by the artist was a series of unusual photographs of his father (and occasionally his mother) modelling in dramatic poses in the back garden of their new Roseville home. This set of photographs (now in the collection of the National Library of Australia) seems to have been conceived as a visual aid for his father’s commercial illustrations. The early death of his mother to tuberculosis in 1924 left Peter spending the rest of his adolescence and early adulthood living with his eccentric father. Peter’s uncle, Sir Daryl Lindsay, writing in his 1965 memoir (The Leafy Tree), commented on the close bond between the pair: “When his wife died he and his son, Peter, lived on together on the North Shore. They were devoted to each other, went everywhere together, called each other Joe and were more like a couple of old bachelors than father and son.” According to the artist’s friend, Mollie Flaxman, Peter gravitated into the world of art because of the 'strong and steady influence’ of his father. He initially received artistic training from Percy and later more formally at the J.S. Watkins Art School, in Pitt Street, Sydney, an institution which specialised in training students in commercial art. By the late 1920s Peter had joined the staff of the Sydney printing firm Pratten Brothers where he worked as their art director for 38 years. From January 1929, Peter, then aged in his early twenties, began to contribute cartoons to the popular magazine, Aussie: The Cheerful Monthly. He contributed about 25 joke blocks for Aussie and also had 24 images published in the Bulletin. He also contributed several joke blocks to the Australian Women’s Weekly. In a 1992 letter to the cartoon historian, Vane Lindesay, Peter disclosed that he had once been involved with the Black and White Artists’ Club when it was revived by Jim Russell in the late 1930s. Peter’s cartooning approach was very similar to his father’s late style and it is possible that Peter occasionally 'ghosted’ for Percy in the Bulletin. A typical Peter H. Lindsay joke block (published in the January 1931 issue of Aussie) depicts an indignant man standing in a court witness box.“Justice! Justice! I demand justice” [says the prisoner thrusting his hand in the air]. The bald judge replies, “Silence! Do you forget that you are in a court of law?” In 1935 Peter and his father relocated from the family home in Roseville to rented accommodation in Milson’s Point, Sydney. In 1938 Peter married Edith Olga (Wendy) Woolfrey and the couple moved to their own place at 28 Hamden Street, North Sydney. In March 1942, Peter, now aged in his mid thirties, enlisted in the armed services. As an Australian Army soldier he served in New Guinea, Tarakan and Borneo. Although not employed as an official war artist, gunner Lindsay continued to pursue his art while on active service, and several of his works from this time have war themes. After the death of Percy in 1952, Peter became the principal champion of his father’s artistic reputation. He took an important role in the organisation of the Percy Lindsay survey exhibition at the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery (BFAG) in 1975, and according to the then BFAG director (and show curator), Ron Radford, Peter, was 'a very nice, quietly spoken man who was very well mannered’ and 'was a delight to deal with.’ Before and after his father’s 1975 exhibition, Peter made significant donations of Percy Lindsay artworks and ephemeral material to the Ballarat collection helping it become one of the largest depositories of Lindsay family artwork in the country. Peter painted mainly oils and watercolours, but also produced several prints, including one etching depicting a European townscape. From 1933 he began to occasionally exhibit his landscapes at the annual exhibitions of the Australian Watercolour Institute. He became an exhibiting member of the Royal Art Society [RAS] of New South Wales in 1950 and was later awarded a Fellowship (FRAS) by the RAS. Like Percy he produced mainly small landscapes although Peter’s later oils were higher in key than his father’s Barbizon influenced images. After his wife died in 1969, Peter lived for many years in Chatswood, Sydney. After retiring from Pratten Brothers in the early 1970s he spent many years travelling and painting around Australia and he is believed to have visited Europe. He occasionally visited his family’s work at Ballarat, sometimes in the company of his late life companion, Doreen Hubble, a former model to (Peter’s uncle) Norman Lindsay and Grace Crowley. A member of the well known Lindsay family of artists, Peter H. Lindsay is sometimes confused with his (non-art producing) journalist cousin, Peter Lindsay (1907-1998), who was the elder child of Sir Lionel Lindsay and Jean née Dyson. Peter H. Lindsay died (childless) at the age of 90, on Wednesday 19 August 1998. A short obituary in the Royal Art Society newsletter was written by his fellow artist Mollie Flaxman.
Writers:
Clifford-Smith, SilasNote:
Date written:
2007
Last updated:
2011
Status:
peer-reviewed
- Born
- b. 6 April 1908
- Summary
- A landscape painter, cartoonist and commercial artist, Peter Hammon Lindsay was the only child of artist Percy Lindsay (the eldest child of the prolific Lindsay family) and his wife Jessie Hammon. A contributor to Aussie magazine and the Bulletin, Peter H. was also a member of the Australian Watercolour Institute and the Royal Art Society.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 19-Aug-98
- Age at death
- 90
Details
Latitude-34.1803736 Longitude139.9863923 Start Date1959-01-01 End Date1997-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Waikerie, South Australia, Australia
- Biography
- artist and activist, known to her people, the Ngarrindjeri, as “Kurwingie”, was born at Waikerie, South Australia. Her father, Stan, was an outstanding indigenous footballer, her mother apparently an Irish Australian. After attending Mitcham Girls High School in Adelaide, Kerry, aged 16, travelled to Darwin and worked at Glen Helen near Hermannsburg as a chamber-maid. There she began drawing images of Namatjira country, which she sold to guests at the hotel. She then did basketwork and associated craftwork in Darwin, until motherhood and a desire to continue her studies led her back to Adelaide in 1984. An arsonist destroyed most of her art and led her to abandon her third and final year of study for a TAFE Associate Diploma in Fabric Design. By 1986, however, she was fully engaged in art again, and in that year won the South Australian Aboriginal Artist of the Year award.
In 1988 Giles spent some time as a trainee graphic artist with Co-Media and was invited (with Mitch Dunnett junior) to be Aboriginal Artist in Residence at Flinders University, where she produced her first limited editions of works on paper and curated her first exhibition, The Cutting Edge: new art from the Third and Fourth Worlds . In 1989 she worked on a major mural project at the Port Lincoln Aboriginal Organisation. Her art incorporated material about the Aboriginal struggle for land rights, deaths in custody, exploitation of the environment, and indigenous rights. These themes were developed at Tandanya in 1989-92 when she was a trainee exhibitions’ officer. She was particularly involved in East to West: Land in Papunya Tula painting (the 1990 Adelaide Festival exhibition), and in 1991 curated Two countries, one weave , an exhibition on the work of Maningrida and Ngarrindjeri weavers. A second residency at Flinders saw Giles develop a technique of marbling on fabric. She held her first solo show at Flinders Art Gallery, ooooh! I feel Good… .
1992 saw the production of a great range of silk paintings, linocuts, screenprints and etchings. She was one of three contributors to a Contemporary Art Centre of SA exhibition, Murrundi: three River Murray stories . In 1993 she held another solo exhibition, fab ART [et al. see Megaws]
Giles died suddenly on 21 July 1997. A retrospective was held at Flinders University Art Museum in August.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1959
- Summary
- Giles worked as an artist, activist and curator. She has many accolades to her name, including the South Australian Aboriginal Artist of the Year Award in 1986 and two Artist in Residencies at Flinder's University. A retrospective of her work was held in 1997, the year of her sudden death.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 21-Jul-97
- Age at death
- 38
Details
Latitude-19.8516101 Longitude133.2303375 Start Date1940-01-01 End Date1997-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Mayilnpa, NT, Australia
- Biography
- Born around Mayilnpa, just out of Alice Springs, c.1935 into a Luritja/Amnatyerre speaking family, George Bush was an associate of the original group of artists in Papunya in the early ’70s. At the time, he was living in Papunya working as a police tracker. For a time in the early ’80s he lived on a remote outstation in his wife’s country, but mainly divided his time between Papunya, where he painted for Papunya Tula Artists, and Alice Springs, where he occasionally painted for the Centre for Aboriginal Artists. His Dreamings were water snakes, spider, various plants and other types of bush tucker.
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Note: primary biographer
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1940
- Summary
- Luritja/Anmatyerre artist who was also a police tracke. He was an associate of the original group of painters in Papunya in the early 1970s and also painted for the Centre for Aboriginal Artists in Alice Springs.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1997
- Age at death
- 57
Details
Latitude51.507222 Longitude-0.1275 Start Date1939-01-01 End Date1997-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- London, England, UK
- Biography
- cartoonist, caricaturist, illustrator, writer and comic strip artist, was born in London on 13 April 1939. He sold his first cartoon to London’s Daily Sketch when aged 14. While doing National Service he worked on the British Army magazine Soldier as a cartoonist, press artist and art editor. Then he studied at Hornsey College of Art, graduating top of the school in 1963 (acc. obit.). He sold gags to Punch , Private Eye , the New Yorker (once) and, by syndication, to the Bulletin . An original cartoon dated 27 August 1967 (ML PXD 739) was drawn for the Sunday Telegraph , presumably after he moved to Australia. In Sydney, Buchanan took over from Rigby as feature cartoonist on the Daily Mirror in 1970-71; he was followed by Frank Benier .
Original Mirror caricatures by Buchanan are owned by the former premier of NSW Neville Wran, by Joan Sutherland and by the current Attorney-General of NSW. He then became chief graphic designer to the NSW Health Commission (1972-76), Creative Director, The Market Place (1976-80), partner with Mike Selby of Promotional Thinking (1980-84) then freelanced from 1984, including tutoring for the Australian College of Journalism’s cartooning course and regularly assisting at cartooning workshops conducted by the ABWAC at the Children’s Hospital. He illustrated numerous books with cartoons, including most of Peter Clyne’s Tax Avoidance books and some comic book titles from Avenue, Beaumont and Capricorn Books, but specialised in drawing comics in trade magazines, notably 'Polly the Pumper’ for the service station proprietors’ trade magazine, Australian Service Station . His best-known character was Captain Humungus who appeared in a strip in The Picture for years; a 1992 example featuring both the artist and the editor of the paper was reproduced in Inkspot 28, 19.
A longtime member of the Australian Black and White Artists’ Club, Cole Buchanan served on its committee from November 1990 (including being elected NSW Vice President). He was also on the committee of the Federation of European Cartoonists’ Organization. In 1983 he won the API Packaging Award. His work was included in the Stanley exhibitions from 1990 and he won a silver Stanley in 1995. He lived at Balmain until his death from cerebral lymphoma (diagnosed April 1995) on 7 May 1997, aged 58. He was survived by his widow, Penny, and their three sons, Josh, Giles and Sam.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 13 April 1939
- Summary
- Late 20th century Sydney newspaper cartoonist, writer and designer. Creator of 'Captain Humungus'
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 7-May-97
- Age at death
- 58
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1938-01-01 End Date1997-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
- Biography
- artist, held a print exhibition at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond, Vic, in 1970, including a Dada poster, 'Mub wonk the greeve bleue stonk art-art Glop’.
Did a drawing for Overland 56 (Spring 1973), back cover.
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Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1938
- Summary
- Significant late 20th century contemporary artist. One of the founders of the Annandale Imitation Realists of the early 1960s.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 9-Apr-97
- Age at death
- 59
Details
Latitude-32.9144444 Longitude151.7491667 Start Date1929-01-01 End Date1997-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Islington, Newcastle NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1929
- Summary
- Painter and sketcher who grew up in Carrington, Newcastle, and became one of the pioneers of the abstract expressionist movement in 1950s Sydney
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1997
- Age at death
- 68
Details
Latitude-38.15 Longitude144.35 Start Date1925-01-01 End Date1997-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Geelong, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- Joan Campbell MBE (1925-1997) was born in Geelong, Victoria, and spent her early years there before moving with her family to Western Australia in 1940. While recovering from the stillbirth of her third child, she took a hobby pottery class, and this led her to pursue pottery as a craft, building a wood-fire kiln in her Scarborough backyard with her father’s help, and teaching herself to fire it.
In 1959, she began work with Johannes de Blanken, a Dutch potter who had settled in WA. Later, she worked with Eileen Keys (1903-1992), who had resolved to use only locally available materials in her work. In 1966, the two experimented with the raku technique and this became Campbell’s preferred way of firing. Her pieces were mainly earthenware, some thrown and further manipulated, others handbuilt. She held her first solo exhibition at the Old Fire Station Gallery in 1969.
As the only potter in WA specialising in raku, and eager to discuss technical problems with a fellow practitioner, she contacted Paul Soldner, ‘the father of American raku’. He ended up organising an eye-opening information exchange tour for her to the United States in 1970. In 1971, prompted by Campbell, the Pottery Society of Australia invited Soldner to conduct a teaching tour of Australia. He visited Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth. Campbell herself conducted a three-day raku seminar in Melbourne in August of that year.
Now recognized nationally as an exponent of raku, she was selected with a group of other Australian potters to exhibit at the International Academy of Ceramics Exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London in 1972. She was surprised to find that she had been awarded the coveted Diploma of Art for her entry, a pot now in the V & A collection. As a titular member of the academy, she was invited to attend a symposium and made two hundred black and red ashtrays for Hammersley Mines to fund the trip. She revelled in overseas travel as a way of furthering her craft, and attended academy conferences into the 1990s.
Aided by her talent as a public speaker, she quickly assumed a larger persona. As well as appearing in a weekly television programme demonstrating and talking about pottery, she conducted workshops in country areas and set up pottery classes at the University of Western Australia for the Guild of Undergraduates. When the Western Australian Branch of the Crafts Association of Australia (later the Craft Association of Western Australia) was set up in 1968, she was elected secretary. She was a founding member of the Crafts Board of the Australia Council in 1973, and a member of the Australia Council from 1974 to 1977.
The MBE after her name was awarded in 1977, two years after she had moved her studio to an old sandstone building on Bathers Beach at Fremantle. She continued to develop and extend her own work there, and also began to take in trainees. By the twentieth birthday of the Bathers’ Beach workshop in 1995, forty-two people had spent an average of nine-twelve months each under her tutelage. Unlike other workshop owners of the time, Campbell did not use her trainees as assistants. They contributed to the financial and physical running of the workshop in exchange for professional development in raku firing and space to work on their own projects. Joint exhibitions helped to pay the bills.
Campbell’s preference for large-scale works encouraged public art commissions and these began to take up most of her time from the mid-1980s. While still loyal to clay and the pot form, she also found herself designing, making and erecting large murals, multimedia works incorporating steel, wood and glass, and complex environmental installations. She was preparing for an exhibition when she was diagnosed with cancer late in 1996. Former trainees and friends finished the work using glazes formulated by Greg Daly. She died on 5 March 1997, just weeks before the exhibition opened.
Writers:
Judith Pearce
Date written:
2013
Last updated:
2013
- Born
- b. 1925
- Summary
- Joan Campbell was a seminal figure in Australian and Western Australian ceramics. An early specialist in Raku, she created a substantial body of work, shared her knowledge at conferences and seminars, promoted Australian ceramics through memberships of national and international craft organisations and mentored a generation of potters at her workshop at Bathers Beach in Fremantle.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 5-Mar-97
- Age at death
- 72
Details
Latitude47 Longitude20 Start Date1923-01-01 End Date1997-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Hungary
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1923
- Summary
- Eidlitz was a graphic designer, working as an art director for USP Benson, Melbourne and working from his own studio. He received a Churchill Fellowship in 1965 and studied in the USA where he worked for NBC TV. He also visited the UK and Germany during his Fellowship. His work was exhibited widely.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-97
- Age at death
- 74
Details
Latitude-37.560833 Longitude143.8475 Start Date1921-01-01 End Date1997-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Ballarat, Vic, Australia
- Biography
- Born in Ballarat, Victoria in 1921, Wilkinson studied at the School of Art, Ballarat School of Mines to gain a Drawing Teacher’s Certificate. Prior to serving in the Royal Australian Navy on HMAS Westralia, he spent a few months as a temporary teacher in the pottery department of The Melbourne Technical College (later to become RMIT), a time that was to strongly influence his choice of career. During World War II The Royal Australian Navy (RAN) Historical Records Section commissioned Wilkinson, then a serving member of the RAN as a war artist, and examples of his work were subsequently presented to the Australian War Memorial. Prior to the end of WW II the artist created two works that clearly demonstrate his ability to model clay; Japanese Prisoner of War and Admiral Sir Guy Royle, both made in 1944. Illustrating the artist’s ability to develop the minutest details, these works are transformed from basic portrait studies to a universal commentary on the human spirit.
On returning to The Melbourne Technical College after the war, not only as a teacher but also as a student to complete his teaching qualifications, Wilkinson established a studio with a large kiln and foundry at his home in Black Rock. It is believed that Wilkinson was the only artist in Australia at the time who cast his own works ensuring complete control over the process and allowing him the flexibility to manipulate the medium; it was in his home studio and foundry that the artist produced many of the works in this exhibition.Wilkinson was clearly adept at mastering the uncompromising physical realities of the clay but a ceramicist must also be able to understand the unpredictable and often mysterious process of firing. His ability to understand the chemical processes that occurred enabled him to master the kiln and from there he began to experiment with metal casting.
Having learned traditional technical skills in ceramics and casting, Wilkinson was well equipped to produce a body of work that was meticulous in its craftsmanship. However, in this case the artist’s attitude toward sculpture is directed toward the process; the process of how he works and how he thinks in relation to the materials. It is not based on a desire to mystify the viewer, but rather a desire to transform the mundane into something quite extraordinary. In an artist statement for an unknown exhibition he wrote, “I believe that only through craftsmanship and a perfect understanding of materials and the principles of Art is it possible to achieve true self-expression.”
In works such as Blue Rider, 1953, the oversized, highly stylized figure dwarfs the horse she rides side saddle. Her arms are over long, her legs truncated and yet the overall impression is of a work of elegant simplicity. Blue Rider was included in the exhibition at the Arts Festival of the Olympic Games, Melbourne, in 1956. Previously the Olympic Charter prescribed that a Fine Arts Competition must be held during the Olympic Games. In 1955 the International Olympic Committee decided that an Arts Festival was more appropriate and in 1956 the first of these was held in Melbourne as part of the official Olympic Games programme. The importance of the inclusion of this work in an exhibition that also included notable ceramicists Ivan McMeekin, Klytie Pate and Peter Rushforth along with heavyweight painters such as Arthur Boyd, John Brack, Louis Buvelot, Charles Conder, Frederick McCubbin and Tom Roberts gives context to Wilkinson’s place within the art world of the time. Wilkinson also exhibited regularly with the Victorian Sculptors’ Society from the early 1950s alongside Inge King, Lenton Parr, Julius Kane and other members of the Centre Five who broke away from the Society in 1961. He remained a close friend of Lenton Parr and would often spend Sunday mornings at his home with both Parr and fellow artist Roger Kemp.
At this time clay was Wilkinson’s preferred medium to create both sculptural and utilitarian objects, the latter however often showing a sculptural quality as evidenced in Pot, which was included in the exhibition Australian and New Zealand Pottery organised by the National Gallery of Victoria to tour State galleries from 1963 to 1964. In an article on the exhibition in The Australian, 22 August, 1964, Elwyn Lynn evocatively describes this work as “… a blackish, sculpturesque pot with protruding gun muzzles – like a new weaponry awaiting victory garlands.”
With a long and successful career teaching at RMIT from 1946 when he was appointed Assistant Pottery Instructor through to his position as Senior Lecturer of Ceramics from which he retired in 1985, Wilkinson saw many of his students develop successful careers in the arts. Peter Rushforth, one of Australia’s most revered ceramic artists, was not only a contemporary of Wilkinson’s but also his student in the early years of his teaching career. And while students such as Rushforth continued to develop their skills with clay at a time when others began to look to follow overseas movements, Wilkinson chose to look to other mediums.
Wilkinson was experimenting with casting a variety of metals in the early 60s using electroplated copper (Whistling Man, 1962) and later in the 1970s with aluminium. Working alongside close friend and artist, Harold Freedman, on a commission for Melbourne’s new international airport, Tullamarine, Wilkinson created semi-abstract flying shapes in cast aluminium to complement the nine panels painted by Freedman depicting the evolution of flight. Later he was to develop a theme of ‘survival and disintegration’ with a series of sand cast signposts as well as other abstract works which showed a new conceptual development in his work. Along with the use of contemporary materials and methods Wilkinson also explored the possibilities of using plastics in sculpture.
It is with the medium of bronze that the artist most fully realised his considerable talent for modelling. There is a palpable human presence in Wilkinson’s bronze sculptures, the striking specificity of their form repaying the artist’s investment of time and labour. His sense of humour is apparent in works such as Self portrait as jester (date unknown) and The Rotter (date unknown) both first modelled in wax and then cast ‘cire perdu’ in his studio workshop. In other untitled figurative works it is possible to see references to Giacometti and Brancusi and even a touch of “Boterismo”, while the wall sculptures Christus Rex and St Francis recall a modernist take on a medieval religious sculptural tradition. Wilkinson also meticulously modelled a series of elegant (undated) horses and unicorns; these quite eccentric but timeless animals demonstrated the artist’s desire and ability to achieve a formal perfection.
Described as a “somewhat self-effacing artist at a time when egocentricity is probably a better proposition” in an unidentified 1960s newspaper, the artist is clearly portrayed as being unassuming both in his work and in his desire to make art. Whether working in clay, cement fondu, bronze or fibreglass relief, it is clear that his work is always about a process, not about potential sales or public recognition. The result is a strange, paradoxical oeuvre. At its heart stands a devotion to art making and yet the modesty of the artist’s ambition saw him exist outside the art world.
Allan Jeffery Beeson Wilkinson1921 – 1997The Melbourne Technical College/ RMIT1946-66 Instructor of Pottery1967-68 Senior Lecturer of Pottery1969-74 Lecturer of Pottery1975 Senior Lecturer of Pottery1976-1985 Senior Lecturer of Ceramics
List of exhibitions1948 _Pottery exhibition _at The Wattle Tea Rooms, Ballarat1956 The Arts Festival of the Olympic Games, Melbourne1958 Retrospect, Five Years, Victorian Sculptors Society1959 Brighton High School exhibition 1961 Nine Melbourne Sculptors, Argus Gallery, Melbourne1962 Four Arts in Australia, touring exhibition to South East Asia1963 Jeffery Wilkinson and Andor Meszaros, Argus Gallery, Melbourne1964 Australian and New Zealand Pottery, touring exhibition by National Gallery of Victoria1967 Jeffery Wilkinson, solo exhibition at Leveson Street Gallery, North Melbourne1970 Captain Cook Bicentennial Sculpture Award, Melbourne1990 Solo exhibition, Victorian Sculptors Society1993 VAS Artist of the Year, Victorian Sculptors Society1994 _St Vincent’s Hospital _Exhibition1997 Solo exhibition, St Vincent’s Hospital2000 Melbourne 1956, National Gallery of Victoria2000 Solo exhibition, Kirwan’s Bridge Winery2013 Jeffery Wilkinson:Untitled, The Gallery @ BACC
Commissions and PrizesC 1948 Empire War Medal 1939-45 PrizeC 1964 Christus Rex St John’s Anglican Church, Wodonga1970 The Alcoa Citizenship Award, Corroboree, Newcomb High School1970 Christus Rex St Aidan’s Anglican Church, Box Hill1970 The History of Flight, Tullamarine Airport with Harold FreedmanC 1970 Victorian Amateur Athletics Association Annual Award
Writers:
Skater12
duggim
Michael Bogle
Date written:
2013
Last updated:
2017
- Born
- b. 1921
- Summary
- While Wilkinson is best known as a potter and teacher at Melbourne Technical College, he also worked in metal sculpture and designed timber furniture in an Arts and Crafts style. Employed as an Official War Artist in the 1939-45 War, his work was included in the 1956 Olympic Games Arts Festival.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1997
- Age at death
- 76
Details
Latitude-33.5628557 Longitude148.6610118 Start Date1917-01-01 End Date1997-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Canowindra, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Elwyn Augustus (Jack) Lynn was born on 6 November 1917 at Canowindra, New South Wales the son Leonora (née Johns) and William James Lynn, a labourer. When the boy was two his father obtained work as an assistant fitter on the NSW railways and the family moved to Junee. He attended primary school at Junee and high school at Wagga Wagga where he completed his Leaving Certificate.He was subsequently awarded a Teaching Scholarship to the University of Sydney. While his major was in English, he also studied philosophy and came under the influence of the philosopher John Anderson. He was introduced to art as a part of his Diploma of Education at Sydney Teachers College, and subsequently became involved in the NSW branch of the Contemporary Art Society and in 1954 became its secretary. The society put out a newsletter, the CAS Broadsheet, which Lynn made the most influential publication of its day on Australian art. He arranged for air mail subscriptions of major international art journals, so that throughout the 1950s local artists were told of the activities of New York, Paris and other centres. In 1963 he was elected President of the Contemporary Art Society.Throughout the 1950s his own painting began to move towards abstraction. His love of language and the physical shape of letters sometimes led to titles that were word games and sometimes he included fragments of letters in paintings. He was awarded the Blake Prize in 1957 for Betrayal which was seen at the time as a radical abstract painting. In 1963 Lynn succeeded Robert Hughes as art critic for the tabloid Sunday Mirror. He was subsequently appointed an art critic for new publication, The Australian, but soon moved to the Bulletin. He returned as senior art critic for the Weekend Australian in 1983, a position he relinquished in 1995. His interest ideas of freedom led him to join the CIA influenced Australian Association for Cultural Freedom. He subsequently became associate editor, and then editor of their publication, Quadrant.In 1956 he married Lily Luise Walter, who had spent much of her girlhood in Weimar in Nazi Germany, where her father had managed to conceal knowledge of her Jewish ancestry from both herself and the authorities. In 1958 he took long service leave to travel with Lily to Europe, to get a sense of the culture that had shaped Australia’s European emigrés. At the Venice Biennale he was exposed to the rich textures of “matter painting”, which had a profound influence on his own work. His texture based works led to him being included in the 1961 Whitechapel Exhibition of Recent Australian Painting. In 1968, while he was teaching English and history at Cleveland Boys High, Bernard Smith, the Power Professor at the University of Sydney, suggested he apply for the position of curator at the Power Collection. In the following years he enriched the collection with innovative purchases of works by Josef Beuys, Enrico Baj, Marcel Duchamp, all at the height of their fame, as well as works by artists at the beginning of their careers, including Ed Keinholz and Sean Scully. There was an assumption at the time that Australian artists could not belong in a contemporary collection. While he could not buy their work, it could be given. As a result, the Power Collection soon boasted of works donated by Sidney Nolan.Lynn’s association with Quadrant led him into conflict with his colleagues, many of whom were vocal opponents of the war in Vietnam. As a result his years at the University of Sydney were not especially happy ones. In these years he forged closer personal relations with the Alexander Mackie College of Advanced Education (later the College of Fine Arts, UNSW, which later named a room in his honour. He was awarded an AM in 1975. In 1976 he was appointed Chair of the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council. This time coincided with an economic recession and a subsequent significant reduction in arts funding. As a result he advocated for more funds to be directed to contemporary art.Despite his failing health, including poor eyesight, Lynn continued to paint until shortly before he died. Unlike sone artists whose work declines with their health, Lynn’s vigorous last works look as though they were painted by an artist in his prime.
Writers:
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2021
Last updated:
2021
- Born
- b. 16 November 1917
- Summary
- Artist, critic and cultural warrior Elwyn (Jack) Lynn was one of the most influential figures in mid-twentieth century Australian art. In the 1950s as his own painting became progressively more abstract, he educated his colleagues via his editorship of the Contemporary Art Society Bulletin. He was the first Curator of the Power Collection at the University of Sydney
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 22-Jan-97
- Age at death
- 80
Details
Latitude-27.467778 Longitude153.028056 Start Date1916-01-01 End Date1997-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Brisbane, Qld., Australia
- Biography
- painter, printmaker and pianist, was born in Brisbane on 13 May 1916 and educated at the Brisbane Girls’ Grammar School. Ella Robinson’s formal art training began with an apprenticeship to Morden & Bentley, a local commercial art firm, in about 1934. In 1935 she moved to Sydney and studied art and music concurrently, attending the National Art School at East Sydney Technical College in 1936-39 and the Sydney Conservatorium of Music in 1936-40. In 1940 she returned to Brisbane and held an exhibition of paintings and drawings with Vera Cottew and Muriel Foote ( Shaw ) from which the Queensland National Art Gallery purchased Ella’s self portrait. Over the following years, she exhibited her paintings and prints regularly, often through the Royal Queensland Art Society. Her series of linocuts, Interpretations of Music by Moussorgsky (1942), was purchased by the Queensland Gallery from the 1942 annual exhibition of the Royal Art Society of Queensland in Brisbane. (The National Gallery of Australia has another copy, purchased 1989.) Gnomus 1941 (6.2 × 11.5 cm, inscr. l.r. 'Gnomus’, l.r. 'Ella J. Robinson/1941’) is the first print in the 1941-2 series inspired to illustrate Pictures at an Exhibition , a suite by the Russian composer Modeste Moussorgsky (1839-81) who himself had been inspired by a memorial exhibition of watercolours and drawings by his friend Victor Hartmann (1834-73). She owned a copy of Moussorgsky’s score (Art Gallery of Western Australia) with the following preface:
'It is a serie [sic] of ten pieces, each bearing the name of a picture, the impression of which the composer has tried to translate into music. The Prelude and Interludes, each entitled PROMENADE, consist of one theme with variations which conveys the idea of the composer strolling amongst the pictures.’
A list of the ten pieces and a description of each image follows. The subjects fall into three categories: images such as Tuileries: Children Quarrelling at Play and The Market Place at Limoges inspired by Hartmann’s travels, images derived from traditional Russian folklore such as Hut of the Baba-Yaga (a witch in Russian mythology) and architectural studies and general sketches. Hartmann was one of the most important architectural figures within the 'Balakirev’ circle which, through the use of techniques and images from peasant handcrafts, folk song and legend and the traditions of medieval Russia, sought to establish a 'Slavonic renaissance’. Many of his drawings included in his 1874 memorial exhibition incorporated such traditional references. Fry, however, had not seen any reproductions of Hartmann’s paintings. Wishing to make a visual interpretation of the music she was playing at the time, she based her designs solely on the brief descriptions given in Moussorgsky’s score. That for Gnomus is 'a drawing representing a dwarf, who totters with faltering steps on his little legs’. Her dwarf is walking down a long dark corridor. Spot-lit in an open doorway, he hesitates, perhaps startled, and as if unsure whether to continue along the corridor or change direction towards the light source. This unknown element creates a foreboding atmosphere and implies a malevolent presence. Whether the source of this malevolence is the dwarf or something unseen by all except the dwarf is not clear. Strongly cast shadows play a major part in this image, indeed, in more than half of the ten images in the series. Used to suggest the presence of a figure or force just beyond the picture frame, this gives them a personal, darkly atmospheric continuity.
Fry’s images were unusual in the context of Australian printmaking at the time, normally characterised by the decorative work of artists such as Margaret Preston and Thea Proctor . There is, however, a visual and thematic link between these dark images and the distinctly Australian brand of Surrealism that emerged, in part, as a reaction to the horrors of World War II. A similar tone is evident in some of the works of artists like Russell Drysdale , Peter Purves-Smith and James Cant , whose dark and foreboding images were personal expressions of the pervasive uncertainty and fear of the era. Redolent with cultural references, Ella Fry’s prints are primarily highly individualistic expressions that represent a culmination of her personal interest in music and art. Informed by contemporary social issues, they can also be read against the broader backdrop of Australian art during World War II.
In 1943-45 Ella Robinson taught music and art at the Tamworth Church of England Girls School. Her musical career was also maintained. In addition to frequent piano recitals and solo performances she produced radio broadcasts for the ABC until 1948. In 1945 she married Melville Fry. Two years later, they moved to Perth where her dual career continued under the name of Ella Fry. Her involvement in the visual arts expanded in 1956 when she was appointed to the Board of Trustees of the Art Gallery of Western Australia. She was Vice-Chair of the Board from 1970 and Chair in 1976-86. In 1983 she was awarded the CBE. Ella Fry died on 17 May 1997 – in Brisbane according to Butler (although she was still living in Perth when contacted re Heritage in 1995). She is represented in the National Gallery of Australia, Queensland Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of Western Australia, as well as in numerous university, regional and private collections.
Writers:
Grant, Kirsty
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 13 May 1916
- Summary
- Ella Fry was painter, teacher, printmaker and pianist whose prints had a dark, almost surrealist quality reflecting the uncertain times in which she lived. She lived a full life as an artist, musician and producer for the ABC.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 17-May-97
- Age at death
- 81
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1916-01-01 End Date1997-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
- Biography
- painter, was born in Sydney on 16 November 1916 and lived at Rose Bay and Burwood. Her parents came from Clayton near Bradford, Yorkshire, migrating to Australia during World War I. She attended Rose Bay, Darlinghurst and Paddington primary schools and Burwood High but left school at sixteen, without her Leaving Certificate, and enrolled in Commercial Art at East Sydney Technical College where she studied drawing, life drawing, oil painting, watercolour and lettering with Frank Medworth , Douglas Dundas , Herbert Badham , William Dobell , Arthur Murch , Charles Meere and others. Notable fellow students included Lorna Nimmo , Rosaleen Norton and James Gleeson . Norton modelled for one of Robertshaw’s paintings as well as many of Meere’s. In 1937 she completed her art course and, with the encouragement of Meere, decided to compete for the 1938 Travelling Art Scholarship. Meere offered to train her in figure painting and she became his apprentice. Working in his two-roomed commercial art studio at 24 Bond Street, Robertshaw executed the first of her eight major neoclassical figure paintings (e.g. Picnic 1938, see Sotheby’s catalogue Nov 1998, lot 11). Meere’s best-known work, Australian Beach Pattern (1940, AGNSW), was her training ground and – in the tradition of the student following the master – she meticulously painted a feminised version. Robertshaw learnt her craft so well that her paintings of this period have frequently been mistaken for Meere’s.
She entered the scholarship four times (1938-44) until ineligible due to age restrictions. By 1944 her traditional, conservative approach had been eclipsed by 'the revolution in modern art’ and the judges awarded the prize to the more 'contemporary’ work of Anne Wienholt . Freed from the constraints of the scholarship and feeling oppressed by Meere and his painting style, Robertshaw decided to leave the studio and wean herself from his influence. She started up her own commercial art studio in a room in the same building, but it was a difficult and lonely time. Clients were hard to find. She decided to work freelance for the industrial advertiser L.B. Rennie. In 1944, aged thirty, with a secure income and the encouragement of her friend Fred Esch, a journalist, she moved away from home and rented a room in the Esch home in Mosman, where she remained for three years before returning home to Burwood. She continued industrial drawing at Rennie’s for the rest of her working life.
The self portrait, Standing Nude (1944), was her last figure painting and symbolised a final break from Meere. Returning to her original passion for watercolour landscapes and flower paintings, she exhibited these with the Society of Artists, the Royal Art Society and the Australian Watercolour Institute. On her retirement, Robertshaw purchased a small house in the Blue Mountains where she continued to live until her death on 10 May 1997. The importance of her neoclassical figure painting was not recognised until 1988, but now these rare examples in her oeuvre are keenly sought by museums and private collectors.
Writers:
Slutzkin, Linda
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 16 November 1916
- Summary
- Painter of neoclassical figure paintings and landscapes, Robertshaw knew lean times as a commercial artist, exhibited with the Society of Artists, the Royal Art Society and the Australian Watercolour Institute, and retired to live in the Blue Mountains.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 10-May-97
- Age at death
- 81
Details
Latitude-37.8576088 Longitude145.0350666 Start Date1916-01-01 End Date1997-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Malvern, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- cartoonist, was born in Malvern in suburban Melbourne. In the 1930s he lived in Sydney studying at ESTC and drawing freelance cartoons and comic strips for the Bulletin and Smith’s Weekly . His first cartoons were published in the Bulletin , eg. “You bin wrong all this time, Mum. It wuz a crow, not a goanna” (Dave fishing an object out of the water tank) 1936 (ill. Lindesay 1994, 15), or – better because the style of drawing is more original) – pathetic cow cockie, “Looks like somebody’s bought the next block, Ma” 31 March 1937. The first meeting of the reformed Black and White Sketch Club – which had collapsed with Cec. Hartt 's death in 1930 – was held in Arthur Horner’s Sydney studio on 8 September 1937. Vane Lindesay reports that the room was so small the artists present had to crawl over each other to sketch the model hired for the night.
After serving as a captain in the AIF’s military history section during World War II – where he was in charge of Privates Donald Friend and Sali Herman – Horner arrived in London in 1947 [1946 acc. Senyard; left in 1946 acc. Atkinson, p.53]. There he studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. He drew for Lilliput and the Leader , produced political cartoons for the Tribune and worked on the News Chronicle (1950-60) where his masterpiece 'Colonel Pewter’ began in 1952. After the paper folded, he moved to the Daily Mail , then in 1964 joined the Guardian where Colonel Pewter, which he took with him, continued until 1970; it was syndicated to the Age from 1962 to September 1970. He wrote as well as illustrated all 54 stories in the Pewter series. He also contributed cartoons to the New Statesman (he was political cartoonist for it in 1966-71 according to Atkinson), Punch , Private Eye and The Times . He was a close friend of Vicky, the great post-war London cartoonist.
Horner returned to Melbourne in 1976 where he contributed to the Age . In 1977 her drew a new 'Colonel Pewter’ strip to celebrate the Centenary Test titled The Pukka Ashes (ill. Lindesay 1979, 326), but then dropped it despite public enthusiasm. As he explained in a letter to the Age :
“As for the question of [permanent] revival I was equally sorry to let old readers down but once off the treadmill of a daily strip the act of climbing back on again was more than this weak flesh could undertake and in any case I feel a good wheeze runs its course and shouldn’t be pushed any further” (quoted Lindesay 1979, 82).
Instead, he began a weekly satire showing the angel 'Uriel’ bewildered by Australian institutions, manners and customs (1976-79: one original SLV). Lindesay (1979, 83) called it 'positively brilliant satire’ and 'the finest feature being drawn for the Press in this country in recent times’. He also did theatre drawings (e.g. Japanese kabuki theatre) and occasional political cartoons for the Age (eg. 14 June 1986, ill. Senyard), like he had previously done for the New Statesman . David Swain reported he had scored the originals of 'Horner’s social history series “Our Lot” [done] for The Age ' for the NMA in an article on the NMA collection in the Bulletin (11 November 1988, p.110) illustrated with Horner’s brilliant gag of a young woman examining the work of an exhausted cartoonist (self-portrait?), who says: “It’ll get by the Editor and make the readers laugh – but what about a student doing his PhD a hundred years from now?”
In 1979 he was among the eleven cartoonists included in the Age 'Black and White’ 125th anniversary exhibition at the Age Gallery, 250 Spencer Street – staff cartoons and photographs – along with Leunig, Nicholson, Petty, Spooner, Tandberg, Tanner, et al (reviewed by Mary Eagle, Age 5 October 1979). He had a solo exhibition at the Age gallery in the 1970s.
Horner was married to the cartoonist and illustrator Vic Cowdroy , who predeceased him. The then lived in retirement in Melbourne until his death on 25 January 1997. Two daughters – Jane Sullivan (an Age journalist) and Julia Houghton – stepdaughter Diane Romney and his two brothers, Frank and Jack Horner, survived him.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 10 May 1916
- Summary
- Mid 20th century Melbourne, Sydney and London newspaper cartoonist.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 25-Jan-97
- Age at death
- 81
Details
Latitude53.9015775 Longitude-0.3827242 Start Date1914-01-01 End Date1997-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Hull, Yorkshire, England, UK
- Biography
- Jack Koskie, painter, printmaker, teacher and graphic designer, was born in Hull, Yorkshire in 1914. At the age of sixteen he embarked upon his first sea voyage in an Iceland-bound trawler; the sea later proved to be an important theme in this artist’s oeuvre. In around 1930, while Koskie was a student at the Hull College of the Arts, he was awarded a scholarship to study art in Rotterdam and Paris. In the next stage of his travels, Koskie emigrated to Australia in 1939 where he continued his artistic training at East Sydney Tech and later at Hobart Tech.
During the Second World War, Koskie served in the Merchant Navy and then with the Australian Army Engineers as a camouflage designer. Upon his discharge, he travelled around Australia with “brush and pen” in hand, exploring his adopted homeland and studying the scenery it had to offer. In what was to be a rich and varied career, Koskie first settled in Sydney and worked as a publisher’s designer and illustrator for many of Australia’s leading publications such as Invisible Press, The Sydney Morning Herald, Women’s Weekly, as well as the Commonwealth Office of Education in Sydney and Tasmanian Government Printer. Later moving to Tasmania, he served as the Head of the Department of Graphic Design and Print Making at the Hobart Technical College. This was followed by his position as lecturer in Printmaking at the Gordon Institute of Technology, Geelong, his tenure of office as the senior art master at Mount Scopus College near Melbourne, Victoria, and his time as Lecturer in Printmaking at Deakin University, where he finished his teaching career in 1979.
Whilst serving in the various teaching positions just mentioned, Koskie had continued his own artistic practice in painting (oils and watercolours) and printmaking (for example lithography). A key work in his career was the illustrated publication Ships that Shaped Australia (Sydney: A & R, 1987). The result of years of extensive research, this book contained images of ships, painted by Koskie that had played a key role in the history of Australia. With an eye for detail and historical accuracy, Koskie attempted to ascertain the weather on the day a ship entered the harbour for the first time, including wind direction. In some cases, such as Kangaroo Point in Brisbane, the artist visited the harbour in question to capture the light and landscape for his scenery. Koskie received a range of commissions owing to his unique knowledge as a marine specialist, including the Story of Ships for the NSW Department of Education; Golden Fleece, Captain Cook Centenary Calendar; illustrated shipping features for The Sydney Morning Herald and Reveille, R.S.L. magazine; and a painting for the Geelong Historical Society’s Matthew Flinders celebrations.
Throughout his career, Koskie, exhibited with several major art societies, including the Victorian Artists Society and the Art Society of Tasmania. He further participated in a wide range of group exhibitions including the Lord Mayors Art Prize (Melbourne), ACTA Marine Paintings Prize and the St Kilda Arts Festival. His first solo show was held at Coombe Down Galleries in Newtown Victoria in 1971, where he exhibited landscape paintings of Geelong and nearby locations, as well as scenes from his time in New South Wales and Tasmania. A comprehensive retrospective showcase of his work was held at Sandridge Gallery, Port Melbourne in October 1998.
Furthermore, Koskie received several awards during his career including the Ben Uri Art Prize (1963), Cato Art Prize for his oil painting Figure at the Pier (1970), Carlyon Graham Art Prize for his painting Low Tide Queenscliff (1969), Roland Prize (1970), Applied Chemical Prize (1975) and the Lord Mayors Art Prize, (Melbourne City Council) (1980). Adding to his accomplishments, Koskie was a member of the Journalist Club of New South Wales, the Victorian Artist Society and he was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (London).
Following a unique and diverse artistic career in Australia, Jack Koskie passed away in 1997.
The art of Jack Koskie is represented in several prominent public Australian collections including the Australian War Memorial, Canberra; Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart; Government House, Hobart and Broken Hill Art Gallery, as well as private collections in the UK, USA and Australia.
Writers:
Staff Writer
ecwubben
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 1914
- Summary
- Koskie was a representational painter and graphic designer. He was the chief designer of the Commonwealth Office of Education (Sydney) Sydney and the Tasmanian Government Printer. He became a published author and illustrator in 1987.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1997
- Age at death
- 83
Details
Latitude45.6496485 Longitude13.7772781 Start Date1913-01-01 End Date1997-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Trieste, Italy
- Biography
- Stanislaus Rapotec, painter, was born in Trieste, Italy, on 4 October 1913. In 1918 he and his parents relocated to Yugoslavia. He later studied economics and art history at Zagreb University (c.1933-39) where he was an active member of student life, being involved in student unions and serving as the secretary-general of the interuniversity union of Yugoslav students. After completing his studies, Rapotec began his first job at the National Bank of Yugoslavia in Split, Dalmatia.
During the Second World War Rapotec served with the Allied forces in Europe and the Middle East (1941-48) for which he received a captain’s commission and assisted migration to a Commonwealth country of his choice. He arrived in Adelaide, South Australia, in 1948 and resumed his study of economics, as well as his interest in painting. Rapotec’s first solo exhibition was held at John Martin Gallery, Adelaide in 1952.
In 1955 Rapotec travelled to Sydney and continued his artistic practice in a studio on Phillip Street. He later settled in Victoria Street, where at one stage he shared a house with other notable artists including John Passmore, Bob Hughes, Leonard Hessing and John Olsen. These artists occupied studios in Rapotec’s house for a short period of time around 1960. Sali Herman and Russell Drysdale were other prominent artists also living in the area. In an interview with James Gleeson, Rapotec commented upon the invigorating artistic milieu that arose with all these artists in close proximity to one another, thereby supporting the exchange of ideas.
Rapotec was a leading exponent of abstract expressionism, which he adopted with resounding conviction after moving to Sydney. In the early 1960s he was seen as one of Australia’s most radical painters, producing original compositions with sweeping, gestural brushstrokes that reflected a meditative, subconscious and spontaneous response to mark-making. After the late 1950s he switched exclusively to painting in acrylics. He painted directly on hardboard without referring to preparatory sketches, in the process maintaining the spontaneity and vigour of his work. Fellow Sydney artist Judy Cassab painted his portrait for the Archibald prize in 1960, for which she won the coveted art prize, with the work being purchased by the AGNSW in the following year.
In 1961 he got married and also achieved his first major success in open competitions when he won the Blake prize. Meditating on Good Friday, a large abstract-expressionist composition, was the prize-winning work. He continued to exhibit regularly at the annual Blake Prize from 1954 to 1963 and also contributed to the annual Contemporary Art Society shows in Adelaide and Sydney during the 1950s. Significant international group exhibitions in which Rapotec participated included ‘Australian Paintings,’ San Francisco (1959), the Sao Paolo Biennale, Brazil (1961) and the Exhibition of Australian Paintings at the Tate Gallery, London in 1963. Between 1952 and 1984 Rapotec also had 24 solo exhibitions both nationally and internationally, including the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, in 1975.
In 1973, Rapotec’s painting Corpus Christi in Seville was hung in room number 53 of the Vatican, which was beneath the altar of the Sistine Chapel. His work was one of a collection of works in the Vatican Gallery of Modern Religious Art, which was opened by Pope Paul VI that year.
Following the death of his wife in 1976, Rapotec spent more time travelling and painting in Europe. On 26 January 1989, he received the prestigious honour of becoming a Member of the Order of Australia for Service to the Arts. He suffered a stroke in 1995 from which he never fully recovered and died in Sydney on 9 December 1997.
Included amongst the numerous awards Rapotec received during his artistic career were the Grand Prize, Daily Mirror-Waratah (1961), the Daily Mirror-Waratah Prize for Drawings (1962) and the Royal Sydney Show, Woolworth Prize (1963).
The art of Stanislaus Rapotec is represented in several Australian public collections including the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne; Baillieu Library Print Collection, The University of Melbourne and the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane. His work is also held in the Art Gallery of Wellington, New Zealand, as well as private collections in Australia, New Zealand, USA and England.
Writers:
ecwubben
Date written:
2011
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 1913
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1997
- Age at death
- 84
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1909-01-01 End Date1997-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- painter and graphic artist, was born in Sydney on 18 January 1909, third daughter of Francis Alfred Alison Russell, a barrister, and Lillian, née Salter, who had studied art with Mary Stoddard . Elsa gained her intermediate certificate at Abbotsleigh School. She studied drawing for a year at East Sydney Technical College but was unable to continue for financial reasons. She attended Dattilo Rubbo 's painting and drawing classes on a casual basis in 1932-34; fellow students included Alison Rehfisch and Donald Friend . She recalls that Rubbo provided 'a welcome European influence in the Sydney art scene’.
World War II changed her life. As a member of the Women’s Australian Auxiliary Air Force in 1942-45, Russell worked as a driver at Uranquinty, a Service Flying Training School about twenty-four kilometres south of Wagga Wagga. In addition, she refuelled aircraft and issued petrol. She also made time to sketch fellow WAAAFs and draw caricatures of officers at the base. In 1946-47, under the Commonwealth Rehabilitation Training Scheme, she returned to East Sydney Tech. and studied life drawing under Godfrey Miller.
Elsa always had the ability to capture movement and life. A chance meeting with Phillip Wirth of Wirth’s Circus in 1950 inspired her to sketch the performers and the horses going through their paces in the early morning. She spent the following year drawing and painting the Borovansky Ballet Company, also in Sydney. These works were shown in 1951 in the foyers of His Majesty’s Theatres in Sydney and Melbourne in an exhibition shared with Dora Jarret and Piers Bourke. Her first solo exhibition opened at David Jones Art Gallery in 1952; Character from a Ballet and The Fowlyard were selected by the Contemporary Art Society for their annual interstate exhibition. In 1955 she travelled overseas and made a series of paintings of the Cirque de Medrano, Paris, and the Mills of Olympia Circus, London. She survived by teaching English and by selling her art through Galerie Herve. These drawings are vital and brisk and the paintings employ bold colour.
Family commitments drew Russell back to Sydney in 1956. She attended a sketch club in Cremona Court, Phillip Street, where her sister Audrey, a watercolourist, and Sheila McDonald had studios. For a short time Elsa ran a taxi-truck service transporting art for friends. In 1960 she drew and painted the Luisillo Spanish Dance Troupe in Sydney and made posters for them. She captured the excitement of the track in her painting At the Races that won the Tumut Art Prize in 1961. During the 1970s she exhibited with her sister Audrey at the Barefoot Gallery, Avalon. In 1986-87 she participated in the Australian Watercolour Institute’s annual exhibition; the Woolloomooloo Gallery held a retrospective of her work in 1989 and Artarmon Galleries held what proved to be a “tribute” exhibition from her family and friends in December 1997.
Although art was central to Elsa Russell’s life, she had a passion for music and played the piano as a child. She made regular trips from her Turramurra home to sketch in the bush and some of her later work dealt with the protection of native fauna, on which topic she designed posters. Russell had laughing, brown eyes and even when her hair was white remained as lively and lucid as she must have been when young. Her Anglican faith remained strong until her death on 25 November 1997. Artarmon Galleries gave her a retrospective exhibition, held 11-20 December 1997.
Writers:
Littley, Samantha
Note: Heritage biography.
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 18 January 1909
- Summary
- Russell, a painter and graphic artist had laughing, brown eyes and even when her hair was white remained lively and lucid. She was drawn to ballet and circus troupes, studying their performers both in Australia and abroad, often using her graphic skills to produce posters for them.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 25-Nov-97
- Age at death
- 88
Details
Latitude-33.960707 Longitude151.1003611 Start Date1908-01-01 End Date1997-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Hurstville, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1908
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- Jun-97
- Age at death
- 89
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1906-01-01 End Date1997-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- painter, printmaker and art teacher, was born in Sydney on 23 January 1906, daughter of Robert F. Irvine, and Florence J. née Herborn. Her father was an artist and a bibliophile who commisioned bookplates from Sydney Long and knew Julian Ashton. Ysobel was educated at the Presbyterian Ladies College and, in the 1920s, attended Julian Ashton’s Sydney Art School where she contributed to the art students’ magazine, Undergrowth . In the late 1920s she studied design with Thea Proctor , then became a voluntary worker with the 'Children’s Library Movement and Leisure Time Classes’ teaching art to students after school hours. This work was later abandoned to allow Irvine to nurse her ailing mother, who died in 1939. Most of Ysobel Irvine’s prints were produced during her years at Sydney Art School, including cover designs for Art in Australia (September 1927 and December 1928). She returned to study teaching in about 1945, studying painting with Roland Wakelin. She taught 'Design and Colour Theory’ at the Double Bay Design School (where she had been Wakelin’s pupil) and at other times at Abbotsleigh and Frensham (when Ainsworth was overseas) in 1959-61.
From 1964 to 1975 she taught drawing and creative painting at the Workshop Art Centre, Willoughby (NSW), where she was described as a sweet person and a very sensitive and encouraging teacher whose classes were always extremely popular.
Writers:
Johnson, Heather
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 23 January 1906
- Summary
- Painter, printmaker, designer and art teacher, born in Sydney on 23 January 1906. Her designs appeared on the cover of Art and Australia in the late 1920s.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1997
- Age at death
- 91
Details
Latitude-33.8772 Longitude151.1049 Start Date1905-01-01 End Date1997-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Burwood, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Architect, Sydney.
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1905
- Summary
- Winsome Hall Andrew was a Sydney architect. She was born in 1905 and died in 1997.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1997
- Age at death
- 92
Details
Latitude-40.1375859 Longitude175.6608381 Start Date1905-01-01 End Date1997-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Cheltenham, New Zealand
- Biography
- The career of Frederick Halford Coventry (1905-1997) epitomises the concept of art in industry, and industry in art. A muralist, painter, printmaker, glass artist, poster designer and book-illustrator, he attracted recognition in the fine and commercial art sectors for the decorative linearity of his work. Born in Cheltenham, New Zealand, in 1905, Coventry grew up in Tokomaru Bay. After enrolling for a brief time at Elam School of Art in Auckland in 1922, he studied under Harry Linley Richardson at Wellington Technical College from 1922 until 1926. The impact Richardson had on Coventry was immense, leading to his life-long commitment to viewing art as an integral part of everyday life. Much of Coventry’s study was done at night-school while supporting himself by working as a draughtsman by day. The emergence of Coventry’s highly individual style was encouraged by Julian Ashton at the Sydney School of Art where Coventry enrolled in 1926. The work which first brought Coventry to public attention was his Self-Portrait, pencil drawing (1927). Notable for its cinematic modernity and meticulous attention to detail, the drawing featured in the Society of Artists’ “Special Exhibition” at the David Jones Art Gallery in Sydney in May of 1929. In 1929, Coventry relocated to London to study engraving under Iain Macnab, developing a far from traditional approach to the medium. Impressed by his work, Malcolm Salaman published Coventry’s engraving Apples & Birds of Paradise in The Studio. Several of his engravings also featured in the “Exhibition of Modern Prints” at the Twenty One Gallery, London, in December 1929. Praise from the art critic for The Times led to Coventry holding a solo exhibition of his drawings and engravings at the Twenty One Gallery in February, 1930. The Contemporary Arts Society purchased Temporary Staircase, an engraving of scaffolding at a building site, for the British Museum Print Room. Assigning as much energy to his commercial art as his fine art, Coventry had a client list resembling a trade directory. His clients included: the Australian Broadcasting Commission, Australian National Travel Association, British Petroleum Ltd, British Home Office, British Imperial Airways, British Post Office, The Daily Telegraph, Egyptian State Railways, London Transport, New Zealand Shipping Co Ltd, Shell Mex, Southern Railways, Union Steam Ship Co of New Zealand and the Wellington Wool Manufacturing Co Ltd. Examples of his advertising art appeared in The Studio, Commercial Art, Modern Publicity and Advertising Word. His poster for Southern Railways, Winter Sunshine Holidays In Southern England, featured in the “British Art in Industry Exhibition”, London (1935). Coventry was also invited to travel to Egypt to design posters for the Egyptian Government’s Railways and Tourist Departments and the Orient Line. James Gleeson noted that William Dobell occupied Coventry’s Bayswater studio-flat while he was in Egypt, and on his return they shared it for a time, making sketches of London street scenes from the windows. (Dobell’s portrait of Coventry is now in the Art Gallery of New South Wales collection). The rapidly expanding travel market also provided Coventry with interior design commissions. He was among leading artists selected by Edward Brian O’Rorke to work on the interior of RMS Orcades I, a luxury steamship launched in 1937. Coventry designed an etched glass scheme for the 1st class café. In 1939, the New Zealand government commissioned Coventry to paint four murals for the “Centennial Exhibition”. These were the antithesis of Coventry’s usually innovative graphic style, suggesting he felt constrained by the terms of the commission. Returning to London, he became a camouflage officer for the British Air Ministry during World War II, responsible for designing camouflage schemes for military installations. He also managed to maintain his artistic career despite difficulties such as having his engraving plates destroyed during the blitz in 1940. He exhibited paintings and drawings at the Royal Academy, and the War Artists Advisory Committee purchased his oil painting, Dummy Figures used in Training (1942), for the Imperial War Museum. A member of the Society of Industrial Designers, Coventry’s commitment to art and industry led to him joining the Art Workers Guild in 1945, the Society of Industrial Artists in 1946, and being elected a member of the Society of Mural Painters in 1947. A year later he received one of his most important liner commissions, the creation of murals for the Cunard’s luxury liner RMS Caronia II. The Art Deco simplicity of these murals was evident in Horses Released from Work (1948). Consisting of twelve carved and gilded gesso panels on polished veneer, it was installed above the entrance to the 1st class lounge. Other liners for which he created painted murals and etched glass designs include the New Zealand Shipping Company’s M.V Rangitiki (1947), M.V. Rangitoto (1949) and Ruahine (1951) and for the P&O line, the Himalaya (1949). The staging of an exhibition of Coventry’s mural decorations, paintings and engravings at New Zealand House, London, in May 1950, provided an ideal opportunity to showcase many of these works. In 1951, Coventry began teaching perspective and life drawing at the Chelsea School of Art. Never content to confine himself to just one artform, he was by now experimenting with techniques for ornamenting large sheets of architectural glass. He registered a patent for sand-blasting, engraving, etching, colouring and moulding glass in 1955 (GB787758). Demand for his services as a glass designer grew to such an extent that he resigned from Chelsea School of Art in 1958 to concentrate on this aspect of his art. The most significant of his glass commissions was the design of fourteen windows for the Plymouth Guildhall to replace those destroyed during a German bombing raid. Depicting scenes from the history of the Plymouth, this commission began in 1958 and took 25 years to complete. Coventry also undertook several commissions in London during this period, including a mural for Queensland House; a large tile mosaic entitled The Labours of Hercules for the exterior wall of the Central Office of Information; stained glass windows for St Alphage House and the Masonic Lodge in Hendon; an etched and engraved armorial plaque for a city guild; and murals for the Scarsdale Arms Public House, Kensington. This represents only a sample of his commercial undertakings, many of which are still to be fully documented. Examples of his murals and etched glass designs featured in the “Art on the Liners” exhibition at Southampton Art Gallery in 1986. Coventry died in London in 1997. Works by Adelaide-born painter Fred Coventry (1913-1995), are sometimes misattributed to Frederick Halford Coventry.
Writers:
Dr Gail Ross
Note:
Date written:
2008
Last updated:
2011
Status:
peer-reviewed
- Born
- b. 19 January 1905
- Summary
- A painter, muralist, stained glass artist, glass painter & etcher, printmaker, poster-designer, art teacher, book-illustrator and designer, Frederick Halford Coventry's art practice encompassed both the fine art and commercial art sectors.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 10-Feb-97
- Age at death
- 92
Details
Latitude-31.2282721 Longitude119.327784 Start Date1964-01-01 End Date1996-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Southern Cross, WA, Australia
- Biography
- Mitch Dunnett Jnr was a painter, printer and photographer and a descendant of the of Wirangu people of South Australia and the Noongar of Western Australia. He was born in 1964 at Southern Cross in the Western Goldfields of Western Australia and grew up in Ceduna in South Australia. In a telephone conversation with the author in March 2009, his father Mitch Dunnett Snr said that his son left Ceduna in the 1980s and moved to Adelaide to finish his high school studies. He studied for a while before finding himself running foul with the law, ending up in Adelaide Gaol. In 1988, whilst still an inmate he painted his seminal piece Take the Pressure Down which referenced the death in custody of fellow inmate Kingsley Dixon, a 19 year old Aboriginal man who was found dead in his cell at Adelaide Gaol in July 1987. The work was acquired by the South Australian Museum.In the 1988 exhibition, A Changing Relationship: Aboriginal Themes in Australian Art c. 1938 – 1988 , curators Catherine De Lorenzo and Dinah Dysart included a photograph taken by Polly Sumner of Dunnett titled, Mitch Dunnett, Adelaide Jail, 1987 after he witnessed the death of Dixon.In 1988, after release from prison Dunnett was given a residency at the Flinders University Art Museum. He also began working at Co-Media in Adelaide where he produced his offset lithographic posters, two of which, Survival in solidarity and Keeping our culture, telling our stories were acquired by the Art Gallery of South Australia.Dunnett was included in Queensland Art Gallery’s Balance 1990 exhibition with his work Death of the Tasmanian Devil 1988 . This synthetic polymer paint on canvas painting depicts the moon as an aggressor strangling the life out of a Tasmanian Devil. “The moon”, he says, in his artist statement in the accompanying catalogue is “symbolising the White settlers causing the extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines. After all, the White men have now taken over the moon by landing on it.” When describing the animals depicted in this painting Dunnett says that working at Co-Media taught him to be “polite with animals” and to make them “look polite and kind and not violent”. The story of the 'Death of the Tasmanian Devil’ was a Dreaming story told to Dunnett by his father. In the story the moon and the devil fight spilling blood across the land. This blood becomes the ochres found around the West Coast of South Australia. Yellow ochre from the blood of the moon and red ochre from the blood of the devil. Dunnett worked with Kerry Giles who also had an association with Flinders University Art Museum (where Giles had two residencies). Together they staged a joint photographic exhibition Pages of History at the South Australian Museum in April 1993.In 1996 he enrolled at Tauondi Aboriginal Community College in Port Adelaide studying art under the tutelage of photographer, Nici Cumpston . This college began life in 1973 and was originally known as 'The Aboriginal Community College’. It has been located at many different premises but is now in Port Adelaide.His works are in the collections of the Art Gallery of South Australia, Flinders University Art Museum, and the South Australian Museum.Mitch Dunnett died in Adelaide in 1996 due to complications arising from renal failure.
Writers:
Allas, Tess
Date written:
2009
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1964
- Summary
- South Australian painter who had a residency in the Flinders University Art Museum in the 1980s and was included in Queensland Art Gallery's 'Balance 1990' exhibition.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1996
- Age at death
- 32
Details
Latitude-35.115 Longitude147.3677778 Start Date1955-01-01 End Date1996-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Wagga Wagga, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. July 1955
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- Feb-96
- Age at death
- 41
Details
Latitude43.7329581 Longitude7.2499384 Start Date1951-01-01 End Date1996-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Philipines
- Biography
- Artist, was included in the Tin Sheds exhibition, “Dead Gay Artists”, 1-23 February 2002.
This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1951
- Summary
- Artist, exhibited at Tin Sheds exhibition, University of Sydney, 2002.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1996
- Age at death
- 45
Details
Latitude51.77046785 Longitude0.464669774 Start Date1936-01-01 End Date1996-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Essex, England, UK
- Biography
- Even though her works have now entered public collections Pat Larter is better known as the subject of many of her husband’s best known paintings. Patricia Florence Holmes was born at Leytonstone in Essax, the daughter of Leslie Holmes, a decorator, and his wife, Pansy. Her father died of tuberculosis when she was four, and her mother supplemented her income by fostering children. The family lived at Canvey Island at the mouth of the Thames Estuary.On leaving school at 15, she took a position as office junior at Perfect Lambert & Co, a London marine surveying company. Here she met the trainee marine surveyor, Richard Larter, who took great pleasure in introducing her to cinema and other creative pleasures. He was staying with her family at Canvey Island on 1 February 1953 when a storm from the North Sea broke the sea wall, completely submerging the island, killing 58 people. On 18 February they married. Pat worked a number of jobs, including as a salesperson and demonstrator for surgical goods, a barmaid and a photographic and artist’s model until the birth of their first child, Lorraine. As Richard developed his art, with a close awareness of British Pop art, especially Eduardo Paolozzi, she became his model, the first subject for most of his art. Richard trained to become a high school art teacher and in 1962 the family, which now included three children, emigrated to Australia. After initially living in a Housing Commission estate at Bradfield Park, they bought a block of land with a small cottage at Luddenham south-west of Sydney. It was here that Richard painted the works that brought him national fame, and Pat continued to be his main subject, although by 1967 they had five children.From 1966 onwards they began to experiment with sound recordings. In 1969 they bought a super-eight camera and began to experiment with films, usually based on Pat and her comic, sexually explicit, performances. Some of these took place in front of somewhat shocked audiences at Sydney’s Sculpture Centre.In 1974 Richard was appointed visiting lecturer at Elam School of Art in Auckland. Pat joined him in performances in front of the students. When t Terry Reid, organised the Inch Exhibition, as an International Mail art event, she submitted a work in her own name and was awarded the Sandy Shaw Prize by Cees Francke. After they returned to Australia at the end of the year, the persona “Dick & Pat Larter” gradually became active in Mail Art, but in reality Pat was the driving force.In 1975 Pat made her first solo film, Men, a robust critique of sexism.In 1982, Richard, Pat and their youngest daughter Eliza, moved to a large two storey house in rural Yass where Pat relished the comfort after the spartan life of Luddenham, and especially the ready supply of hot water. She was now so prominent in Mail Art circles that in 1986 she was honoured with a retrospective of her mail art at the Artists’ Union in Tokyo. However in the following years she turned towards other art forms. After initially experimenting with laser prints she turned to painting, in part inspired by an exhibition of works of Aboriginal women from Utopia, who had also turned to paint in their maturity. Her first solo exhibition took place at Legge Gallery in 1992 and then in March 1996 she and Richard were both included in the Adelaide Biennial. She was however not well. On 20 September she was admitted to hospital in Canberra, where she died on 6 October 1996.The films made by the Larters were celebrated at the Melbourne Super Eight Festival of that year.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2019
- Born
- b. 8 July 1936
- Summary
- For most of her life Pat Larter was regarded as a muse, the subject of much of her husband, Richard Larter's, art. In reality she was often the instigator of the sexually confronting performances he filmed. By the mid-1970s she began to emerge as an artist in her own right, becoming a major figure in International Mail Art. Later she turn to painting and mixed media work. Her career was cut short by her untimely death.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 14-Oct-96
- Age at death
- 60
Details
Latitude-21.69788725 Longitude125.6327353 Start Date1930-01-01 End Date1996-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Tobin Lake, WA, Australia
- Biography
- Born 'in the bush’ around the Tobin Lake area c.1930, the artist was a Kukatja/Wangkatjunka speaker, whose traditional country was in the area surrounding the northern Canning Stock Route. Muntja was the 'boss’ woman for the Wangkatjunta mob at Balgo – both by the force of her personality and her knowledge of Women’s Law. She worked closely with anthropologists at various times and was a recognised authority at many gatherings. She had been painting her Tingari and Dingo Dreamings since 1986 in works which display her authority in matters of the Law. Her husband, John Mosquito , is also an artist of note. She sold her work through Warlayirti Artists.
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1930
- Summary
- Kukatja/Wangkatjunka speaker and "boss woman" for the Wangkatjunka mob at Balgo (WA), her paintings reflect her authority in relation to matters of Law. She was married to leading Warlayirti artist, John Mosquito.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1996
- Age at death
- 66
Details
Latitude-42 Longitude147 Start Date1926-01-01 End Date1996-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Tasmania
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 10 October 1926
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 19-Sep-96
- Age at death
- 70
Details
Latitude-34.188889 Longitude142.158333 Start Date1921-01-01 End Date1996-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Mildura, VIC, Australia
- Biography
- Potter Heather McSwain was born April 20, 1921 in Mildura, Victoria. She studied at a junior Technical School before enrolling at Swinburne Technical College for four years from 1938 to 1941 and undertaking part time studies at the National Gallery School in Melbourne. She undertook a Commercial Art course typical of the period that included commercial art, design, and fine art subjects such drawing, painting and ceramic modelling. During the War in the Pacific, from 1942-1945, she spent four years at the Planning Department, Department of Aircraft Production, Fishermen’s Bend Victoria. When peace was declared she worked as a freelance Display Artist in Victoria before moving in 1952 with her friend Marjorie Loats to Western Australia to work as a commercial artists for Art Photos process engravers. Commissions undertaken at the time included murals for the War Memorial Library of Adelaide Boys High School in 1958, an Empire and Commonwealth Games Poster in 1962 and a ceramic sculpture for the Therry Awards (National Catholic Schools’ Drama Awards) in 1963. Other commissions during her career included an altarpiece for a Mt Pleasant church and private textile and stained glass commissions. She had taken up potting as a hobby. Her kiln was built by a technician from Brisbane and Wunderlich. As was typical of the time in Western Australia she dug her clays herself and adapted them to suit her needs. Teaching at the University’s Summer School brought her to the notice of a number of people and she was persuaded to join the staff of the Fremantle Technical School, at this time the centre of artistic endeavour in the crafts. She was probably also enrolled for classes with art critic Charles Hamilton who refereed her for a teaching position in 1961 referring to her as a capable and progressive student. McSwain never married and lived with her designer partner Marjorie Loats in a house they designed and partially built at 25 River Parade Salter Point. The house was adorned with murals, stained glass and textiles by McSwain. Flying parrots, pomegranates, lilies, leaves and thistles in bright secondary colours were painted on the walls. In 1959 at the newly opened Skinner Galleries in Perth McSwain, Ida Ott Nielsen and Marie Miller shared an exhibition. Miller’s weaving, Ott Neilsen’s screen printing and McSwain’s ceramics were displayed in the new purpose-built gallery run by the enterprising Rose Skinner. Miller was the President of the Women’s Society of Fine Arts and Crafts who made a living as a weaver selling all round Australia, Ott-Nilsen had worked in Den Permanente- the Design Centre in Copenhagen before accompanying her husband the builder of the Narrows Bridge to Perth for a few years. The exhibition was impressive and attracted considerable attention. McSwain arranged the work as a series of landscaped tableaux incorporating foliage and other props. Photographs taken by Leif Ott Nilsen record a stylish exhibition. Reporter Jane Scott in an article on the show was at pains to indicate that whilst the women may have started their careers as leisure time hobbyists the three had thriving studio businesses. Ott Nilsen’s six designs for fabric lengths were each printed in two sample colour-ways. One, based on the native castor oil plant, was particularly striking. The wall hangings Spanish Bull and Siamese Cat were printed in runs of twelve. The eye-catching Spanish Bull, catalogue item 14, cost four guineas. McSwain’s graphic and striking pots were exhibited as well as her ceramic sculptures. The slab-built work had a distinctly Scandinavian look popular at the time. She worked basically in terra cotta, applying matt black and white and turquoise alkaline glazes. These she used on pieces such as the Diamond Check jar. Other pots were scored and decorated with strongly geometric black lines and dots. Her oeuvre included bowls, tea sets, jars of all sizes, coffee pots, vases, candlesticks and small table sculptures of figures and animals. Attenuated Siamese cats and elongated and geometrically stylised figures predominated in the sculptures. McSwain was aware of international trends and historic work but as an artist/designer-potter strove for individuality. Her interests lay with strong form and medieval heraldry. The devices emblazoned on the tents of nobles fascinated her. These medieval structures used to define person, place and possession were utilized in her work. The faces of her figures were transformed into shield-shaped masks, the mask dominating the body. Although consciously an artist-potter she did not just decorate the pots but conceived the shape and decoration as a whole entity. The coiled pot no. 110, Covered Jar with Head incorporated these principles. It is now in the collection of the Art Gallery of Western Australia. In 1969 she was awarded her Teachers’ Training Certificate from the Technical Division of the West Australian Education Department and could be eligible for a permanent appointment. This enabled her to travel and she visited Japan and later Spain and South America. In the 1970s she attended workshops with the many international visitors the Craft Council movement brought to Australia. These included Englishmen Michael Cardew and Harry Davis and the American Paul Soldner. She also attended workshops with Australian Ivan McMeekin. At this stage she was exhibiting at the Waterways Studio. In the 1974 International Bendigo Pottery Award she exhibited two storage jars. One had figures on the lid. It was forty-eight centimetres high and was priced at $100. The other with a dark glazed lid was twenty-eight centimetres high and priced at $70. Her later work was inclined to be more bulbous and conventional without the graphic adornment except in the case of plump female figurines. McSwain continued to teach ceramics at the Fremantle Technical College until about 1988 and was a popular and well-respected teacher. On her retirement she spent time sailing in her yacht on the Swan River. A considerable number of her students set up as studio potters. One group banded together to market their work as the Kiln Shelf Potters. McSwain was also involved in the formation of the South of the River Potters Club. She died in April 1996 and the Art Gallery of Western Australia purchased a collection of work from her estate. RED SECTIONS
Writers:
Dr Dorothy Erickson
Date written:
2010
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 20 April 1921
- Summary
- Heather McSwain was a potter. She was aware of international trends and historic work but as an artist/designer-potter strove for individuality.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- Apr-96
- Age at death
- 75
Details
Latitude-33.960707 Longitude151.1003611 Start Date1917-01-01 End Date1996-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Hurstville, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Justin O’Brien, born 2 August 1917, was the third of the the five surviving children of the produce merchant Maurice O’Brien and his Irish-born wife, Teresa Mary Sherin. At the time, Hurstville, south of Sydney, was a semi-rural small town. In this devoutly religious family, life was dominated by the parish Catholic Church.When he was six he stayed with relatives in Elizabeth Bay where his aunt Louise gave him art materials. While at school at Christian Brothers Waverley he took private lessons with Edward M. Smith, and at the age of 14 he left school to study with Smith full time. By the time he was 18 O’Brien was teaching art in Catholic schools, while developing his own practice. He exhibited in the Archibald Prize in 1937, 1938 and 1939. His work attracted the interest of the Sydney Morning Herald’s Art Critic, Peter Bellew, and Peter Dodd, an art teacher. They encouraged him to join the fledgling Contemporary Art Society and the religious painting group, the Fra Angelico Guild.
Much of O’Brien’s artistic development is indebted to his experiences in Europe. His experiences abroad began in 1940 during WWII as part of the Australia Army Medical Corps. First in Palestine and then in German-occupied Greece, where he nursed seriously injured soldiers. Although a majority of his war-time artwork was completed in a prisoner-of-war camp in Torun, Poland, it was in Greece that he witnessed a sight that greatly impacted his artistic style: a mass grave of Greek civilian victims of famine. This experience overwhelmed young O’Brien who, upon his return to Australia, introduced symbolism into his painting to express what he saw in ' the Greek Burial’ (c1945) by employing a bright, simple palate with stylized figures and landscape.
O’Brien’s return from war saw great support from private patrons and Macquarie Galleries, at which he exhibited repeatedly throughout his career. Just as important were the friendships he developed at this time, leading him to exhibit with The Sydney Group, artists who were later mocked by Robert Hughes as the “Charm School”. By 1946 he was living at Meriloola, the grand but slightly decrepit boarding house run by “Chica” Lowe which was the haunt of many actors, dancers and artists; including Donald Friend, Mary Edwards, and Loudon Sainthill.1946 also saw him appointed art master at nearby Cranbrook School, a position he held intermittently until his final departure for Europe at the end of 1966. Many of the boys became models for his paintings. Most importantly, his influence as teacher and mentor led to some of his students becoming professional artists, including Brian Dunlop, John Montefiore, Martin Sharp Owen Tooth and Peter Kingston.
Over his lifetime of painting, O’Brien’s art embraces and readdresses several motifs including moonlit figures, male bathers, Mediterranean landscapes, and religious scenes. Despite his great admiration of Cezanne, Raphael, Pierro della Francesca, El Greco and the Sienese painter Duccio, his style and use of colour has been attributed as being Symbolist and Fauvist. The intense but unconventional use of religious iconography in his art led O’Brien to be awarded the inaugural Blake Prize for religious art in 1951.In 1954 O’Brien renounced the Catholicism of his youth, but s spiritual element remained in his art.
From 1948 until 1965 O’Brien paid several extended visits to Greece and Italy. At the end of 1966 he resigned from Cranbrook and in early 1967 resettled in Italy. The following year he was commissioned to create a mosaic for the Basilica of the Annunciation at Nazareth. Egidio Scardamaglia, one of his pupils posed for the angel. In Rome Scardamaglia with his wife and daughters became O’Brien’s new family.
His later works reflect the sun-drenched tranquility of his new life. He continued to exhibit in Sydney, at Macquarie Galleries, until his death. In 1982 the art historian Anthony Bradley, who he had taught at Cranbrook, wrote a monograph on his art. In 1987, the year he turned 70, he was honoured with retrospective exhibitions at the National Gallery of Victoria and the S.H. Ervin Gallery in Sydney. He was awarded an AM in 1992.His last years were troubled by bone cancer, and he died in Rome on 17 January 1996
Writers:
Skupien, Karolina
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2008
Last updated:
2022
- Born
- b. 2 August 1917
- Summary
- Justin O'Brien was known at first for his Byzantine influenced paintings of Christian iconography and later for sun drenched studies of Mediterranean landscapes. He was also the most influential art master at Cranbrook school where his pupils included the young Martin Sharp and Peter Kingston.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 17-Jan-96
- Age at death
- 79
Details
Latitude-37.8576088 Longitude145.0350666 Start Date1917-01-01 End Date1996-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Malvern, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
- Biography
- Douglas Baulch, painter, was born 24 May 1917. He was the youngest of three children of Ernest Stanley Baulch and Annie Baulch who resided at 28 Edsall Street, Malvern, Victoria. His father departed for the front on HMAT A20 Hororata on 23 November 1916 and returned to Australia on 26 September 1917, incapacitated due to war injuries. He died several years later. This caused financial and emotional hardship for Douglas which made him more empathetic than most. As a young man he survived off the War pension and with the assistance of his mother and elder sisters, Doris and Gloria. They recognised Douglas’ artistic talent and he commenced formal art studies at Swinburne University (formally Prahran Technical College) in 1931. He graduated in 1934, after which he maintained a friendship with other students and artists such as Sir William Dargie and Sidney Nolan.
Douglas’ style was typical of a blended impressionism and realism, which was not in vogue at the time, due to the burgeoning abstract movement. Douglas refused to participate in this movement, which he felt generally represented those artists who did not have the ability to produce work of the impressionist-realist style exemplified at the time by artists such as David Davies, Jane Price, William Nicholas Rowell, Clara Southern and Arthur Streeton of the Heidelberg School. Douglas greatly admired these artists: he viewed their works regularly and met with some of them on occasion. Douglas felt the true image and feeling of a subject could not be portrayed without complete respect of the genuine environment and context, and, as a result, he executed almost all of his work en plein-air and in an impressionist-realist style.
To supplement his income and to support his mother and sisters he worked as a commercial artist at Troedel and Cooper Pty Ltd. between 1936 and 1938, and then as an artist with the fashion and society photographer Athol Smith until 1940. He completed his post-graduate studies in Fine Art in 1940. At this time Douglas exhibited extensively at the Victoria Artists’ Society, despite the theft of several of his works at one stage. With the outbreak of World War II, he joined the Air Force. In 1944 he managed to get a short break from the war effort and returned briefly to Melbourne to marry the love of his life, Lyla Foster, on 24 February 1944. He then returned to northern Australia due to continued pressure by the Japanese in the Pacific.
At the end of the war Douglas returned to his home at 6 Leopold Street, Glen Iris. His son Jeff was soon born there in 1946. In the following years Douglas’ paintings were expressive of his sense of optimism, which was responsive to the positive atmosphere of the post-war boom and the prosperity of the Menzies era, and his enjoyment of family life. For the next six years he was occupied with landscape and portrait painting and the emotional and financial demands of starting a family. By 1951 he was supporting his wife and children, Jeff, Graeme and Madeleine. He worked as a commercial artist to supplement his income. In 1952 he moved to East Doncaster. Douglas regarded it as an area more suited to growing families and appreciated its proximity to the Yarra Valley regions of Warrandyte and Templestowe. Like the artists of the Heidelberg School, he found the scenery there captivatingly beautiful, and these locales are heavily represented in many of his works.
Douglas exhibited at numerous locations and kept his studio running full time. His family continued to grow with the birth of Michael, Francesca, Paul, Kevin and Lisa, so that ultimately it totalled 8 children. Due to his love of his family it was not uncommon for these children to be depicted in some of his landscape scenes and portraits.
In 1965 Douglas took a sabbatical to Dampier in Western Australia, the same time that the Dampier Port was being established. He was captivated by the harsh beauty and emotion of the region as is displayed in his works of King Bay, Cape Leveque, Burrup Peninsula, Hearson’s Cove and Bullarra. Douglas enjoyed the area and climate so much that he wanted to relocate to the Dampier area, however due to family commitments this was not possible. His paintings of the region are unique because many of the locations that he captured no longer exist, as the area has since been replaced by one of Australia’s largest liquid natural gas developments.
Returning to the Yarra Valley Douglas continually explored the surrounding areas around Warrandyte, Templestowe, Donvale, Park Orchards and Kangaroo Ground, capturing the ambiance of these unique landscapes. In 1964 he exhibited at Victoria Government House for the Queen’s visit. He also held many exhibitions at locations around Melbourne, and participated in shows at various state libraries, universities and financial institutions, as well as prizes such as the Archibald. His works are currently held in a number of private collections around the world in the UK, US, Belgium, Paris and Hong Kong.
Later in life Douglas continued his artistic work while also working as a teacher. He taught from his studio in East Doncaster, on television, at various TAFEs and at Monash University. He also illustrated the poetry book Beside My Hearth. His style did change later in life, as he moved towards more vividly colourful expressions of the natural landscape. This shift was reflective of his greater sense of freedom in life and the fact that the heavy responsibility of supporting a large family had now lifted, as his children had matured and were pursuing their own lives.
Most of Douglas’ works were fresh and optimistic, however on some occasions unexpected family stresses are noticeable. For example, his self portrait in the late 1970s exhibits the stress caused by the prolonged illness and premature death of his son Michael.
In the 1990s Douglas fell ill with cancer. He was hospitalised for a year and died at the age of 78.
Writers:
DouglasBaulch
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 24 May 1917
- Summary
- Douglas Baulch, painter, worked en plein-air in a blended impressionist and realist style. He exhibited at the Victorian Artists' Society and painted in the Yarra Valley and Dampier in Western Australia. He passed away in 1996.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 23-Feb-96
- Age at death
- 79
Details
Latitude-31.5021772 Longitude150.6804062 Start Date1916-01-01 End Date1996-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Quirindi, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Mary Margaret Abbott was born in Quirindi in rural NSW in 1916. She was first educated at Quirindi Intermediate High School before moving to Sydney to study art. In 1932 she enrolled in Sydney Commercial School in Bathurst Street, where she was taught by Miss Maude Russell. In 1935 she continued her studies while becoming a pupil-teacher at the school.The following year she began to study art at the Julian Ashton Art School, but after one term travelled to London. Here she worked as a jewellery designer for Ciro Pearls while studying at the Chiswick Polytechnical College.In the summer she visited Paris and the collections of the Hague in Amsterdam.On her return to Sydney she continued her studies at Julian Ashton while working as a fashion designer for Spencers, as well as undertaking freelance illustration work.In 1941, as a part of the concerted national war effort, she joined the Australian Women’s Land Army, working on farms close to Sydney so that she could continue her studies at Ashton’s on Saturday afternoons.In 1943 she was one of the finalists in the New South Wales’ Travelling Art Scholarship. Although she was unsuccessful, her work was sufficiently impressive for Ashton’s to employ her as an assistant teacher the following year.Her salaried employment ended when she married Grantley Darcy Roberts in 1947, but she continued to work as an illustrator.
Mary Abbott Roberts had begun to paint portraits in the late 1930s, and in the 1950s this was the medium she focussed on. In 1954 she exhibited in the Archibald Prize for the first time. She was all successful in being selected for the exhibition in 1955 and in 1956.
In 1958 her husband was injured in a car accident and was transferred to Bathurst Technical College. Mary and their daughter Christine joined him the following year. She became active in the Bathurst Society of Music and Arts and also exhibited with local art groups in Orange and Cowra. She was also involved in restoration work for the Bathurst Historical Society and painted three large murals for the Acropole Restaurant in Bathurst. In 1960 she began teaching at Bathurst Technical College. Later she taught at Marsden Girls’ School and from 1965 to 1974 also taught at Orange Technical College.As with many women of her generation Mary Abbott Roberts’ work was little recognised for most of her working life. Her work came to the attention of feminist art historians Jude Adams, Barbara Hall and Jennifer Barber when she successfully exhibited in the 1975 Portia Geach Memorial Award. In 1977 her portrait drawing of Mona McDonnell was included in Project 21: Women’s images of women at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, an exhibition that emphasised the relative neglect of this particular generation of women artists.
In the introduction to her 1985 retrospective exhibition at the Bathurst Regional Art Gallery she wrote:“most certainly an artist requires inspiration and emotion, but basic qualities of composition, drawing and painting, should be the students first consideration, later developing versatility and flexibility.”
Writers:
Joanna Mendelssohn
CRoberts
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2018
- Born
- b. c.8 November 1916
- Summary
- Mary Abbott Roberts, who also exhibited under her maiden name of Mary Abbott, was born in Quirindi in rural New South Wales and studied in Sydney at the Sydney Commercial Arts School and the Julian Ashton Art School. She was best known as an academic portrait painter and regularly exhibited in the Archibald Prize throughout the 1950s.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- c.2 February 1996
- Age at death
- 80
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1912-01-01 End Date1996-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1912
- Summary
- Foster was a painter, printmaker and textile artist. She studied at East /Sydney Technical College (diploma 1934), later in England 1950-51. Her work was widely exhibited in NSW regional galleries and other states .
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1-Jan-96
- Age at death
- 84
Details
Latitude-19.8516101 Longitude133.2303375 Start Date1910-01-01 End Date1996-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Alhalkere, NT, Australia
- Biography
- Born c.1910 at Alhalkere (Soakage Bore) Utopia Station, Emily is an Eastern Anmatyerre speaker and senior artist at Utopia. Her Country is Alhalkere and her Dreamings include Sand Goanna, Wild Orange, and Emu. Emily first saw white people as a young girl aged about nine. She worked in her younger days as a stockhand on pastoral properties in this area (see The Art of Utopia, M. Boulter) at a time when Aboriginal women on the stations were usually only employed as domestics – suggesting the forceful independence of her personality. Emily was the adopted daughter of Jacob Jones, a very important lawman in the Alyawarre community, and a leader in the women’s ceremonial business at Utopia.
From the time she painted her first canvas for A Summer Project 1988-9 , the work of Emily Kame Kngwarreye has received widespread acclaim and recognition. Emily found in acrylics and canvas a medium more suited to the bold immediacy of her style than the more laborious production processes of batik, in which she had been working for the preceding decade and exhibiting with the Utopia women in exhibitions in Australia and abroad since 1977. Her technique is highly individual with under-drawings covered by layers of dots. Her pleasure in working as an artist is reflected in her powerful colours and her energetic and expressive compositions. In 1990, Emily’s work was shown in two highly successful solo shows in Sydney, as well as the Art Gallery of NSW’s Abstraction show. Later that year she participated in the CAAMA/Utopia artists-in-residence program at the ICA, Perth. (Reference: Batty, P. & Sheridan, N., Utopia Artist in Residence Project [Holmes à Court Foundation, Perth, 1990]). Several more solo shows have followed: Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi, Melbourne (1990, 1991) and Utopia Art, Sydney (1991, 1992). Her work was rapidly acquired by major public and private collections in Australia and overseas and is keenly sought after by other buyers. In three years, she has been represented in 48 group exhibitions around Australia and the world, including Ireland – A Picture Story , Royal Hibernian Gallery, Dublin; Russia – Aboriginal Paintings from the Desert , Union Gallery, Moscow, 1991 and touring St Petersburg, Ukraine, Minsk Byelorussia, Riga Latvia; USA – Contemporary Aboriginal Art , Harvard University and touring USA and Australia; Japan – Aboriginal Art from Australia , National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, 1992 and Crossroads Toward a New Reality , National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto and Tokyo etc.
She is the most lauded painter of the Utopia art movement to date, and one of the best known of the desert artists, painting with an undiminished energy which belies her years. In 1992 she was awarded an Australian Artists Creative Fellowship. In 1993 she exhibited in the Joan and Peter Clemenger Triennial Exhibition of Contemporary Australian Art at the National Gallery of Victoria and featured in Aratjara – Art of the First Australians , touring Dusseldorf, London and other European Galleries.
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1910
- Summary
- One of the best known desert artists and a senior woman in Utopia (NT), Kngwarreye's work is distinctive for its expressive abstract style. The recipient of awards such as the Australian Artists Creative Fellowship (1992), her work is recognised internationally and is included in major public and private collections in Australia and overseas.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1996
- Age at death
- 86
Details
Latitude-19.8516101 Longitude133.2303375 Start Date1910-01-01 End Date1996-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Watikipinrri, NT, Australia
- Biography
- Born c.1910 at Watikipinrri, west of Central Mt Wedge (Kerrinyarra), for which Mick was the senior custodian. Mick had worked as a stockman at Glen Helen and Narwietooma stations in his younger days. His knowledge and authority in the ritual sphere made him one of the most important of Papunya Tula’s artists to his fellow painters. Mick shared with Tom Onion the custodianship of the Honey Ant design of the original mural painted on the Papunya school wall. He was a prolific painter, stopping only when his eyesight and health failed him in the early 1990s. By this time he had passed his skills and his love of painting on to younger artists including Maxie Tjampitjinpa and Don Tjungarrayi . Mick’s country stretched across the Papunya, Mt Wedge, Mt Liebig region covering the Sugar Ant (Warumpi), Water, Yam (Yarla), Snake (Yarripirri) and Woman Dreamings which the artist usually painted. His usual place of residence was Papunya, though towards the end of his long life he spent time in Alice Springs for medical treatment. His work was exhibited in the Asia Society’s Dreamings show which toured North America in 1988-9. He was the first Western Desert artist to be purchased by the National Gallery of Australia.
Writers:
Johnson, VivienNote: Primary biographer
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1910
- Summary
- One of the founders and most important artists painting for Papunya Tula over its first two decades because of his ritual authority and encyclopedic knowledge of stories and designs.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1996
- Age at death
- 86
Details
Latitude-27.467778 Longitude153.028056 Start Date1908-01-01 End Date1996-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Brisbane, Qld, Australia
- Biography
- Marjory Rayment Clark was born in Brisbane on 12 May 1908, the only child Alexander Wilson Mackenzie Clark and Phoebe Irons Rayment. She was educated at the Brisbane Girls Grammar School and later enrolled at the Central Technical College to study with L. J. Harvey c.1926. Subsequently she enrolled in the Domestic Science section of the College about 1931 and received her diploma in 1933. She exhibited pottery at the annual exhibitions of the Arts and Crafts Society of Queensland 1928-34. In 1933 a reviewer noted a “custard apple vase” which is possibly the work which was included in the “L. J. Harvey & his School” exhibition at the Queensland Art Gallery in 1983. She also exhibited pottery (and chip carving) at the Royal National Agricultural and Industrial Association 1928-34 and was awarded numerous prizes. She also exhibited pottery with Society of Arts and Crafts of New South Wales in 1928 and 1929.
She taught at the South Brisbane Intermediate School (where she had a display of her own work at a school exhibition) and at the Brisbane Opportunity School. She was later appointed teacher of domestic science subjects at the Gympie Technical College where examples of her pottery and chip carving were exhibited in annual displays of work. She had acquired a small kiln from Agnes Barker (qv) and produced pottery until her marriage to Royston Chapman on 7 December 1940. Agnes Barker recalled that the picture shelf of her family home in Marooka was massed with examples of her work. Her children Marjory and Christine were born in 1943 and 1946 respectively.
Subsequently she prepared a cookery column for The Sunday Mail under the name of Suzette Newspaper and ran a catering firm “The Golden Pyramid”. She died in Brisbane on 10 December 1996.
Research Curator, Queensland Heritage, Queensland Art Gallery
Writers:
Cooke, Glenn R.
Note: Research Curator, Queensland Heritage, Queensland Art Gallery
Date written:
2003
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 12 May 1908
- Summary
- Marjory Clark was one of the most accomplished and prolific of the Harvey School potters. A graduate of the Central Technical College, Clark exhibited her wares for a number of years and also worked as a teacher.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 10-Dec-96
- Age at death
- 88
Details
Latitude-31.95 Longitude141.466667 Start Date1908-01-01 End Date1996-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Broken Hill, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- costume designer and art teacher, was born at Broken Hill in December 1908, daughter of William James Thomas, an engineer, and Ethel, née Henderson. After attending Broken Hill High School, then boarding at Adelaide Presbyterian Girls’ College, she won a scholarship to the SA School of Arts and Crafts. Thelma, an associate member of the Society of Arts, was one of the first five teachers appointed to introduce art into South Australian high schools, teaching at both the School of Arts and Crafts and Adelaide High School. Thelma was deeply involved with the experimental Ab-Intra Studio Theatre in Adelaide, as both costume designer and performer.
Granted a year’s leave of absence from the Education Department, she spent 1934 in Melbourne studying with George Bell and working for Pierre Fornari. Fornari was costume designer for J.C. Williamson’s big musicals; he also had a salon in Collins Street.
As Fornari couldn’t draw it was my job to put his ideas and designs down on paper, not always an easy task. I did the sketches of the Cyril Ritchards-Madge Elliott production of “Roberta”. I learnt a great deal from him, both in actual designing and also in the appreciation of a necessary high standard of workmanship in the making of costumes.
Thelma also did some costume designing on her own behalf for productions at the Garrick and Tivoli theatres and for Melbourne’s centenary Pageant of Nations at the Town Hall. She returned to Adelaide and to teaching in 1935. The following year she was 'lent by the Education Department’ to design the costumes for the official celebrations of South Australia’s centenary. One of these events was the performance of Colonel Light, the Founder , the prize-winning play by Max Afford, whom Thelma was later to marry.
Thelma was invited to Sydney in 1937 in order to commence work on the 1938 Sydney sesquicentenary celebrations, thereby completing a hat-trick of such commissions: Melbourne (1934), Adelaide (1936) and Sydney (1938). The Sydney celebrations – the most lavish of all -took place on 26 January 1938.
In April 1938, Thelma Thomas married Max Afford at St Michael’s, Vaucluse. Both led busy professional lives in Sydney. Max wrote plays for radio and theatre and, later, screenplays; Thelma designed costumes for the Minerva Theatre (e.g. Maeterlinck’s The Blue Bird 1940), Doris Fitton’s Independent Theatre (e.g. The Insect Play 1941), Ken Hall’s Cinesound Films (e.g. Mr Chedworth Steps Out 1939) and for Charles and Elsa Chauvel ( The Sons of Matthew 1947). As well, she designed period costumes for J.C. Williamson’s, was the resident designer for the Minerva Theatre until 1950, and wrote articles for the daily papers and weekly magazines on fashion and theatrical design. She designed the costumes for the very first live dramatic production on Australian television in 1957. In the 1960s Thelma turned again to teaching, being senior art mistress at Queenwood, a private girls’ school at Mosman, until she retired in 1978.
Thelma Afford’s costume designs are held by the Mortlock Library (SA), the Fryer Library (QU), the National Film and Sound Archive (ACT) and the Mitchell Library (NSW). Some of her designs for the 1938 Sydney sesquicentenary procession were exhibited at the Mitchell Library in 1990.
Writers:
Callaway, Anita
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. December 1908
- Summary
- Costume designer, performer, actor and fashion journalist with a practice from Broken Hill, Adelaide, Sydney and Melbourne. She also designed costumes for early Australian TV drama. She later became the senior art mistress at Queenwood, a private girls' school, Mosman NSW. She is to considered to have introduced art subjects into South Australian schools.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1996
- Age at death
- 88
Details
Latitude-42.880556 Longitude147.325 Start Date1908-01-01 End Date1996-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Hobart, Tas., Australia
- Biography
- painter, printmaker, theatrical designer and art teacher, was born on 29 November 1908 in Hobart, Tasmania. She studied art at the Hobart Technical College in 1924-27 with Lucien Dechaineux and Mildred Lovett then taught there, graduating in 'Art Graphic’ in 1930 and 'Art Plastic’ in 1932. She went to Sydney in 1932 and studied at Julian Ashton 's Sydney Art School with Adelaide Perry and Thea Proctor . Both had a profound influence on her, as is evident in her linocuts of 1933. Kingston returned to Hobart in late 1933 and resumed teaching at the college. She graduated in 'Art Applied’ in 1934 and exhibited with the Art Society of Tasmania (1929-35) before departing for study in London in 1937. There she studied stage design at the Slade School under Vladimir Polunin (the Diaghilev Company’s designer in 1937-40) and life drawing and painting at the Westminster School of Art under Bernard Meninsky and Mark Gertler. She also studied fabric design and printing at the Central School of Art and Craft. According to Butler, Kingston won the Betty Malcolm scholarship for stage and decorative painting from the University of London in 1939.
Her 1939 London Christmas card, Happy Christmas (Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery [TMAG], National Gallery of Australia [NGA]), decorated with an identity card, ration book and a gas mask with a blimp in sky, was later annotated by the artist:
1939 was the only Christmas that, when I went out, I had to carry the things pictured, except the “blimp”, it was tethered outside the back fence of where I had a “bed sitter” in Adelaide Road, Chalk Farm./ Identity cards were a good thing in 1939./ The National Gallery Canberra has a print of this.
She made ballet costumes for Sadler’s Wells before returning to Sydney in 1940 on board the Strathmore . Her shipboard drawings (TMAG box 35) include a musical evening concert scene; her linocut, Ship’s Ventilator , was purchased by the AGNSW from Bloomfield Galleries in 1975.
Back at Sydney, Amie Kingston worked as a display artist for Farmers department store (1940-44) and exhibited (mainly flowers and views) with the Contemporary Art Society (1940-46), the Society of Artists (1940-47) and the Macquarie Galleries (1940-55, 1957-61). She worked extensively in theatrical design, not only making designs for the Helen Kirsova Ballet Company but also for the Sydney Conservatorium Opera School. Between 1941 and 1946 she designed 11 productions for the School, sometimes painting the scenery as well as preparing the designs. In 1948-53 she taught art at the Double Bay Design School with Dora Sweetapple and Muriel Medworth . Kingston married cartoonist Thomas Arthur Challen in 1942. She continued to teach art to children and adults for decades, retiring from teaching in 1976, then living at Elanora Heights under her married name of Challen [Challan [ sic ] acc. NGA website] until 1995. She died on 13 January 1996.
On 8 July 1941, the first season of the Kirsova Ballet opened at Sydney’s Conservatorium of Music. This debut represented the beginnings of a local, Australia-based professional ballet theatre in Sydney. Helene Kirsova, who formed the company, first visited Australia as the prima ballerina of the Monte Carlo Russian Ballet in 1936. She came with a substantial reputation, having danced with major European companies and having worked with such master choreographers as Massine and Fokine. The Kirsova Ballet was relatively short-lived in comparison with the first Melbourne professional company, established at almost the same time by Edouard Borovansky. The Kirsova Ballet ended its life as a professional company in May 1944. However, despite the brevity of its existence Kirsova’s company has an important place as the first company to extend its hand to a band of Sydney artists who aspired to ballet design. Among them were three women: Elaine Haxton , Alice Danciger and Amie Kingston. The Kirsova Ballet was a superb opportunity for Kingston, who …designed three ballets for Kirsova- Harlequin , Hansel and Gretel and Peter and the Wolf -the last being in preparation at the demise of the company. Kirsova is reported as having envisaged the ballet to Prokofieff’s music as having a 'Disney feeling’ and Kingston’s set design has a touch of Disney about it. It is flat and brightly coloured, with the decorative qualities associated with the Sydney style of the late 1940s; Kenneth Wilkinson described these qualities in 1945 as 'the natural grace and gaiety of youth’. Kingston’s work was not confined to ballet design, but Kirsova offered her a rare opportunity to work in the medium, which was her first love.
Writers:
Sayers, Andrew
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
1992
- Born
- b. 29 November 1908
- Summary
- Mid 20th century painter, printmaker, theatrical designer and art teacher. Amy Kingston worked prolifically in Australia and the UK, designing for the stage, the ballet and working as an art teacher.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 13-Jan-96
- Age at death
- 88
Details
Latitude-37.7667 Longitude144.9628 Start Date1905-01-01 End Date1996-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Brunswick, Melbourne, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 5 April 1905
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 9-Oct-96
- Age at death
- 91
Details
Latitude51.507222 Longitude-0.1275 Start Date1898-01-01 End Date1996-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- London, England, UK
- Biography
- painter, illustrator and cartoonist, was born in Croydon, England, on 4 October 1898, educated in Chile (1909-12) and as a boarder at Farnham Grammar School, England (1912-14). His family came to Australia in 1914 and he worked on their farm in Queensland until 1919. Then he moved to Brisbane where his first job was as an illustrator with a Brisbane department store. He also drew newspaper cartoons in Brisbane. His ink cartoon signed “Cabby”, Blind Man’s Buff (Brisbane Town Hall Art Collection), done for the Brisbane Mail in 1921, shows a man wearing a blindfold labelled 'unemployment’ and 4 tiny old men in spats running away labelled 'Repat’ (with promises), 'Town’, 'Country’ and 'Govt’.
In 1922 Curtis sailed to the USA – his cabin-mate was his great friend, the pioneer filmmaker, Charles Chauvel. There he studied at the Art Institutes of San Francisco and Chicago and undertook industrial commissions as a freelance commercial artist. He married Ruth Baldwin, whom he met in Hollywood and their daughter, Robin, was born in Chicago. While in Chicago, Curtis worked as an architectural draftsman for the town planner of San Francisco Daniel H. Burnham (1846-1912), after the great fire of 1871 led to intense skyscraper rebuilding in the ’80s and ’90s – presumably after the 1906 earthquake.
The family returned to Sydney in 1928 and Curtis set himself the task of recording the erection of the Harbour Bridge, inspired by the 'wonder of work’ and the words of Burnham: 'Make Big Plans: for little plans have no magic to stir men’s blood and in themselves may never be realised’. His Building the Bridge: Fourteen Lithographs Celebrating the Construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge with foreword by Dr J.J.C. Bradfield (1931/33? reprinted as The Bridge , Currawong Press, 1981) is said to have led to many commissions from heavy industry.
Curtis’s lithographs distil key 'remembrances’ in the Bridge’s construction. Curtis’s admiration for civil engineering had developed while living and working in America and his contact with the writings of Joseph Pennell motivated a lifelong interest in industrial modernism. As soon as he saw the Bridge on his return in 1928, Curtis had visited Bradfield to show him his portfolio and Bradfield introduced him to Dorman Long staff and they let him 'go all over the Bridge’, so long as he kept out of the 'bloody way’. He went whenever he could afford to, which was 'once every several weeks’ and while on the Bridge he sketched quickly in crayon and later drew exactingly in pencil for lithography. On the day of the opening, 19 March 1932, The Daily Telegraph featured a drawing and announced the publication of Building the Bridge , by Simmons Limited. He sketched the dizzy heights and, to visualise the Opening Celebrations, he hired Charles Kingsford-Smith to fly him around the harbour. As he sketched, Curtis said he often 'felt the curious eyes of the inhabitants of North Sydney’s Lanes’ upon him (The Bridge, 1981).
His first lithograph showed the work team joining the arches. He made another print of them completing the Bridge deck. But the Depression had decimated his freelance work and he took his family to Queensland, where they picked fruit. Curtis returned to Sydney when a friend promised access to some lithographic equipment. He and the supportive printer published this book and they sold a few copies. Bradfield said 'in these drawings are expressed the strength, the labour, the romance of a great undertaking’. Soon after, BHP commissioned Curtis to document the Newcastle steel works for its golden anniversary. He published four more books after 1933, including A Vision Takes Form , which records the building of the Sydney Opera House.
Curtis’s drawings are now held in public institutions throughout Australia, eg The Coal Miner n.d. [1930s?], charcoal heightened with white, ML (Pic. Acc.5494). He painted murals and did industrial illustration in 1932-38, including the series Australia at Work , which was syndicated in Australian newspapers. In 1933 he was commissioned to supply drawings of the Newcastle steel works for the BHP Review Jubilee number; he also visited Broken Hill that year, where his first exhibition was held, followed by Kalgoorlie and Perth. Wollongong CAG has 18 pencil drawings, including eight commissioned by BHP illustrating the Hot Strip Mill at Port Kembla, four pastel and wax crayon drawings and one watercolour, mainly of Port Kembla industrial subjects. 'Mr Mac’ (private collection), a far more comical pencil drawing of MacRobertson’s Chocolate Factory at Melbourne in 1939 (with frog workers), was included in the 1999 S.H. Ervin exhibition, Artists and Cartoonists in Black and White (cat.34).
During WWII Curtis recorded working life in the Commonwealth Munition factories (1939-41), worked as Camouflage Officer in Australia and with the RAAF in New Guinea (1941-43), until he was finally appointed an official war artist to record the nation’s industrial war-time production (1943-45). More than 200 works are in the Australian War Memorial (AWM) collection. After the war, he and Ruth travelled throughout Australia and he submitted regular work to Walkabout . His poster, “Follow the Sun by Clipper to Canberra, Australia’s National Capital” c.1940s (NLA) was published by Australian National Publicity Association (ANPA). He recorded the first expedition to Northern Australia for the Australian Geographical Society, and he continued to paint murals of Australian life and industry. During the 1950s he did drawings of workers and manufacturing at the Victa lawnmowing factory (Powerhouse Museum). In 1959-64 he illustrated the construction of the Gladesville Bridge for the NSW Department of Main Roads, and from 1959 to 1969 he worked for the Sydney Opera House Trust compiling a detailed visual record of the erection of the Opera House. A Vision Takes Form: Sydney Opera House (Sydney, A.H. & A.W. Reed, 1967, with foreword by Prof. H. Ingham Ashworth – one of the judges and professor of Architecture at Sydney University) consists of a selection of reproductions of his paintings and drawings now held in the building itself. Ruth died before this work was completed. In 1969-70 he travelled to New Zealand, Central America, USA, Europe and Asia with his second wife, Ellice Macoun.
Curtis held solo exhibitions at Von Bertouch Galleries, Newcastle (1986 and 1988) and at Richard King’s Print Room in Sydney, as well as at regional and interstate galleries, including Broken Hill Art Gallery and a survey exhibition at Eastend Gallery, Broken Hill in 1989. Lloyd Rees, Frank and Margel Hinder, Joshua Smith and Max Dupain were among his close friends. Robert Curtis died on 23 March 1996, aged 97, survived by Ellice and his daughter, Robin Moore.
Writers:
Holder, JoKerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 4 October 1898
- Summary
- Mid 20th century illustrator and artist. In 1922 Curtis travelled to the USA with his great friend, the pioneer filmmaker, Charles Chauvel. There he developed what was to become a lifelong interest in industrial modernism and on returning to Sydney in 1928 he set about documenting the construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Mural designs for corporate clients and department stores are also known.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 23-Mar-96
- Age at death
- 98
Details
Latitude-42.880556 Longitude147.325 Start Date1952-01-01 End Date1995-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
- Biography
- poster and installation artist, fabric designer, craftworker and gay activist, worked in a vast range of media and materials. In the mid-1970s he was known for the exquisite hand-painted textiles he produced for 'Flamingo Park’, the fashion house run by Jenny Kee and Linda Jackson, but from 1975 all his work, regardless of medium, was about gay experience. Involved with the Sydney Gay Liberation movement since 1972, his first solo exhibition Secret Love , held at Sydney’s Hogarth Galleries in 1976, featured collages explicitly exploring gay male sexuality, anti-gay legislation and public and private sexual hypocrisies (Gott 6). He visited the USA in 1977 and fully participated in its wildest gay scenes.
Back at Sydney, McDiarmid’s first post-US exhibition was the Australian Dream Lounge , an installation at Hogarth Galleries in December 1977 (and possibly later at Lewers Bequest and Penrith Regional Art Gallery) which paid homage to Australiana and 1950s kitsch. The following year he showed Trade Enquiries at Hogarth, a series of large-scale collage works examining the effect on Australia of the 'Macho’ look and the new power of the 'pink’ dollar. Some of the collages were turned into a portfolio of 8 offset lithographs, published by Watters Gallery in May 1979 (shown in S.H. Ervin b/w exhibition, 1999, cat. 107).
McDiarmid lived almost continuously in the US from June 1979 to December 1987. In 1982 he wrote in an Artist’s Statement submitted to the Crafts Council of Australia with Men Quilt , his 1979 paean of praise to the multiple joys of gay sex (Gott 6):
I am interested in popular culture. My work is the intersection between folk art, women’s work (needlepoint, patchwork quilts) and contemporary materials. I use loud, cheap and vulgar plastics to make “pretty” pictures—pieces of wall decoration. Good taste can be a prison.
A favourite material from the early 1980s was hologram foil, used in Rapper, Dapper, Snapper , a monumental wall mosaic destroyed in 1982 by Pan Am en route from New York to Sydney for exhibition, and Body Language 1990 (hologram foil on board, NGV). Since his artworks produced no income, he continued to earn his living designing textiles for women’s clothes, moving in the early 1980s to more 'tribal’ designs. In about 1983-84 he began a series of enormous graffiti paintings on cloth, which in turn led to the production of Day-Glo and other vivid disco-wear. He made large fabric works on the subject of HIV/AIDS in the mid-1980s.
After returning to Australia at the end of 1987 McDiarmid immersed himself in community art projects. He did several of the posters for Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras from 1986 (and 1988 and 1990 ) prior to his death in 1995(Mitchell Library [ML] POSTERS 463/1-7), and definitely in 1988 , which has no signature (ML POSTERS 461/1-3). He was also the Artistic Director of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Workshop/Parade. Included in the Tin Sheds exhibition, “Dead Gay Artists”, 1-23 February 2002 curated by Robert Lake.
Writers:
Staff Writer
jeffreystewart1950
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2020
- Born
- b. 1952
- Summary
- McDiarmid worked in a wide array of media and styles in his artmaking. After 1975, all his work focussed on gay experience, and he is known for his huge wall hangings and other fabric works about HIV/AIDS in the mid 1980s. He used bold designs and colours and very kitsch, 'non-art' materials, such as hologram foil - his argument was: "Good taste can be a prison."
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1995
- Age at death
- 43
Details
Latitude-19.8516101 Longitude133.2303375 Start Date1948-01-01 End Date1995-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Wurrumiyanga, Bathurst Island, NT, Australia
- Biography
- This record is a stub. You can help out by adding more detail.
Writers:
Olivia Bolton
Date written:
2014
Last updated:
2014
- Born
- b. 1948
- Summary
- Eddie Puruntatameri was Australia's first Indigenous studio potter. After studying at Bagot pottery he returned home to Bathurst Island where he established Tiwi in 1972. Later he worked st Pirlangimpi Pottery, Melville Island.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1995
- Age at death
- 47
Details
Latitude-38.15 Longitude144.35 Start Date1922-01-01 End Date1995-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Geelong, VIC, Australia
- Biography
- An industrial designer practising in Melbourne, Featherston was born in Geelong and began his career as a designer in glass and lighting without formal training.
After service in the 1939-45 war, he began to develop a range of furniture that has become his signature product: the Relaxation range (1947-49) and the famous Contour Chairs (1951-55 but re-released in the 1990s). This furniture was initially made by Grant Featherston but later licensed to other manufacturers.
Featherston formed a design partnership with wife Mary in 1966 and together they were the winners of many Good Design Awards. Internationally, his best-known work is the famed Talking Chair, commissioned by architect and design critic Robin Boyd for the Australian Pavilion at Expo ’67 in Montreal. When sat upon, these chairs delivered a tape-recorded message on Australian topics in French and English.
Grant Featherston was one of the pioneers of industrial design in Australia and helped form the Society of Designers for Industry (now the Design Institute of Australia) in Melbourne in 1948. Curator Terence Lane organised Grant Featherson’s retrospective exhibition 'Featherston Chairs’ at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1988.
Writers:
Bogle, Michael
Michael Bogle
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. c.1922
- Summary
- Featherston was an Industrial design and design industry leader. Recognised for his furniture and exhibition work in partnership with Mary Featherston, he helped to form the Society of Designers for Industry (now the Design Institute of Australia) in Melbourne in 1948.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- c.1995
- Age at death
- 73
Details
Latitude50.083333 Longitude14.416667 Start Date1921-01-01 End Date1995-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Czechoslovakia
- Biography
- This entry is a stub. You may help the DAAO by adding to it.
Writers:
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 1921
- Summary
- Conceptual and mail artist active in the 1970s, his work was characterised by an intellectual rigour.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1995
- Age at death
- 74
Details
Latitude51.507222 Longitude-0.1275 Start Date1920-01-01 End Date1995-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- London, England, UK
- Biography
- Born in London in 1920 into a family linage of journeymen tailors to royalty on his mother’s side and a horse rustler turned antique dealer with a passion for painting on his father’s side. With the death of his mother, Raymond from age two, spent his childhood as an orphan before coming to NSW Australia in 1939 through a youth immigration scheme. In 1940 he joined the WW2 Australian infantry. At 21 he was amongst Australia’s deadliest jungle fighters against the Japanese on the Malay peninsula before the Allies’ surrender, after which he spent four long years as a POW in Changi and on the Burma railway. Here he learnt to paint and draw and remarkably kept diaries dotted with emotive drawings.Immediately after his discharge from the military hospital he married Elma Mackay Gibson. They lived and worked in the Horsley Park Post Office where Ray was the Post Master and had a studio. In 1946 Moult-Spiers entered the art scene in Sydney when he exhibited his semi abstracts with the “Contemporary Art Society”. From here he dipped in and out of the Sydney art scene, first as a student of art at East Sydney Technical College as part of the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme, devised for returned soldiers, and operating from 1947 to 49. By 1950 Ray Moult-Spiers was a foundation member of the City of Parramatta Art Society. In 1953 he held a solo exhibition in the David Jones Gallery, Sydney, which was pre-announced with a full colour two-page spread written by Herbert Hull for the February edition of the popular “Australia Magazine” called “A.M.”. The press reviewers including James Gleeson defined his solo show of 52 works with terms like ‘Fantasy’. In January 1956, Moult-Spiers left Australia for a work trial with Walt Disney as a Fantasy artist no less. He was away for a year, but because his wife was not permitted to stay in America, Moult-Spiers was back in Horsley Park by 1957 exhibiting with a group of five young contemporary artists in a show which was very much ‘anti-art school’ and in a Dadaist move exhibited at the CWA Rest Rooms, Fairfield. Moult-Spiers won the 1961 “City of Parramatta Art Prize” with his painting titled “The Mourners” and in 1962 he won the “City of Parramatta Contemporary Art Prize”. Later in 1962 Moult-Spiers was on the executive for the “Australian Art Associates”, a nationwide organisation for modern painters, architects, sculptors, designers and creators in plastic arts. In October 1964, Moult-Spiers and Collinridge Rivett held a two-man show at the Penthouse Gallery, Church Street, Parramatta. It was opened by the University of Sydney Archivist with proceeds going to the International House Appeal. The write up describes Moult-Spiers as being “recognised as one of Australia’s most creative and original contemporary painters.” Raymond Moult-Spiers and his wife moved to Stradbroke Island in 1970, where his wife died suddenly in 1977. Raymond continued painting eventually becoming a recluse until his death in 1995. His last exhibition was on the Island in 1994. He is survived by two of his children to another relationship.
Writers:
parsoj
Date written:
2020
Last updated:
2020
- Born
- b. 9 February 1920
- Summary
- Moult-Spiers began his career with an exhibition of pictures with the “Contemporary Art Society” in 1946. He was a student of art at East Sydney Technical College and a foundation member of the City of Parramatta Art Society. By 1962 Moult-Spiers was a member of the “Australian Art Associates". He moved to Queensland in 1970 where he continued exhibiting.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 3-Aug-95
- Age at death
- 75
Details
Latitude51.507222 Longitude-0.1275 Start Date1917-01-01 End Date1995-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- London, England, UK
- Biography
- illustrator and commercial artist, was born in London and grew up on a chicken farm 50 miles to the north. Unable to find work as an illustrator after leaving school, she painted scenery, designed and made sets and costumes and acted for provincial and small London theatres. She continued to sketch, and she also did occasional commercial art, her first regular commission being to fill in the patterns and fur trimmings on hundreds of outline fashion drawings.
Senior migrated to Australia in the 1940s with her architect husband. He joined the Public Service and she began to work as a freelance illustrator, her major client being the Sydney printing and publishing firm John Sands. She wrote and illustrated Bush Haven Animals (1954) and illustrated Little Brown Piccaninnies of Tasmania by Jane Ada Fletcher, Kurri Kurri the Kookaburra and Two Thumbs the Koala (1950 and 1951) by Leslie Rees, John of the “Sirius” and John and Nanbaree (1955 and 1962) by Doris Chadwick, Cousins-Come-Lately (1952) by Eve Pownall and, she said, 'my old favourite, Eve Pownall’s first Australia Book ' (1952).
After her husband died of multiple sclerosis in 1968, Senior devoted herself to Australian wildlife studies, most notably posters for the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service. Other posters included a series issued by the NSW Bush Fire Committee such as Prevent Bush Fires (n.d., Josef Lebovic Gallery), all featuring 'Smokey Bear’. Until 1970 Senior was a regular illustrator for the NSW School Magazine . She lived at Collaroy Plateau, on Sydney’s northern beaches until her death in 1995.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1917
- Summary
- Illustrator and commercial artist who was born in London and migrated to Australia in the 1940s. Senior wrote and illustrated a number of children's books and later in her career devoted herself to Australian wildlife studies, most notably posters for the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1995
- Age at death
- 78
Details
Latitude-37.9502592 Longitude145.0043868 Start Date1914-01-01 End Date1995-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sandringham, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- Isabel Roberta St Margaret Donald née Suter, sketcher, was born on 25 August 1914 at Sandringham, Victoria, to Robert John Suter, a farmer, and Emily née Birtwistle Owen. Isabel, or Bobby as she preferred to be called, attended school at Quambatook in country Victoria then went in to service for 12 months until she was old enough to go in to nursing. She completed Division 1 Registered Nurse training at the Royal Melbourne Hospital in April 1939. She enlisted for army service with the 2/8 Australian General Hospital on 25 September 1942 and served in New Guinea. Her service number was VX108173. Bobby was a talented artist and writer. While serving in New Guinea she completed a book of sketches depicting the every day life of a nurse. This book was eventually donated to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.
Bobby married late in life at age 38 in 1952 and had only one child, Robert. In the early years of their marriage, Bobbie and her husband Robert ran a private nursing home in Toorak. They eventually moved to Cairns in Queensland where Bobbie had time to devote to her passion of painting. Following Robert Snr’s death, she and Robert Jnr returned to Melbourne to the security of family support.
Bobbie had quite a long battle with breast cancer and eventually died on 26 May 1995.
Writers:
Staff Writer
georginacusack
duggim
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2013
- Born
- b. 25 August 1914
- Summary
- Mid 20th-century sketcher and nurse, Suter kept a secret diary throughout her postings with the army that she filled with humorous cartoons that depicted the often less-than humorous situations she encountered during her time with the Australian Army Nursing Service.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 26-May-95
- Age at death
- 81
Details
Latitude-35.0641302 Longitude138.8586385 Start Date1911-01-01 End Date1995-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Mount Barker, SA, Australia
- Biography
- painter, silk-screen printer, potter and art teacher, was born at Mount Barker (SA) on 24 March 1911. She won a scholarship to the Adelaide School of Arts and studied in 1936-41 under Marie Tuck , Dorrit Black , Leslie Wilkie, Louis McCubbin and Ivor Hele. She joined the United Arts Club where students could sketch from life. From 1935 she exhibited with the Royal South Australian Society of Arts (RSASA) and was elected an associate member while still a student; in 1941 she won the RSASA Portrait Prize. The following year she joined the army, where she lectured in the Education Section until 1945 as well as establishing a Fine Art Print Library and organising an art exhibition of work by army personnel.
After the war Chapman and the Sydney artist James Cant co-founded the Studio of Realist Art (SORA) in Sydney; she became its secretary, gave drawing lessons and established a library at SORA’s premises and organised and participated in SORA exhibitions ( see Marjory Penglase). She and Cant married in 1946. In 1950 they went to London and remained there for five years, also visiting France and Italy. They returned to Sydney, but a year later moved permanently to Adelaide. Chapman lectured at the SA School of Art from 1958 to 1969 and from time to time afterwards although officially retired. She was also an art critic for the Adelaide Advertiser during these years. In 1961 she was awarded the Melrose Prize for portraiture. After her retirement she began to produce serigraphs like The Girl With A Long Nose (1970, NGA) and Katinka (1973, p.c.), and silk-screen printing has remained a major interest. Dora Chapman died in Adelaide on 15 May 1995.
PORTRAIT: Self Portrait n.d. (c.1940), oil on canvas 76.2 × 64.3 cm. Art Gallery of South Australia
Painted in Adelaide, where Chapman had previously had an outstanding student career, this unusual self-portrait presents an oddly ambiguous view of the artist. The setting is Chapman’s own studio yet this figure seems a stranger there, nervously deflecting her gaze as if the viewer-who of course is Chapman herself as well as us-is the real owner of the place. The coat, scarf and broad-brimmed felt hat (which became a trademark) suggest that this person really belongs outdoors, and to some extent she does; at least the largest of the works pinned on the wall would have been painted en plein air . Chapman was then painting landscapes, portraits, still life and interior subjects so the image could be read as representing all facets of her art-except that it carries no conviction that the artist/subject belongs in any specific location.
Inextricably intermingled with the disjunctive subject and setting is the sexual ambiguity of the figure. Short, concealed hair, clothing suitable for either sex, a solid right fist and such strong facial features do not indisputably proclaim that this is a woman in her late twenties; the artist might equally be a younger man. That frank, sexless androgyny complements, indeed justifies, the severely realist idiom of the work. Although there is much artifice in the rendition of the figure and the schematically rendered objects, the power of this portrait comes from the viewer’s conviction that it is an absolutely honest, unflattering, factual statement.
In fact, few metaphysical problems about her art or her sexuality seem to have troubled Chapman in the 1940s. She was far more concerned with changing society through social realist art. In 1945 she married a fellow painter, James Cant, and moved to Sydney, where they co-founded the Studio of Realist Art ( see Marjory Penglase ). Chapman became the secretary rather than an official exhibiting member, who were all men, and did much of the work to sustain the group’s teaching, exhibiting and social programmes-a typical woman’s role. Inevitably, her own art suffered as a result. Chapman’s great integrity in presenting with such artistic detachment this insecure stranger in her studio makes this a compelling work. The artist-subject rightly looks warily away from the self who is painting her, unsure of her place in the studio or, as yet, in life itself.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
1992
- Born
- b. 24 March 1911
- Summary
- Painter, silk-screen printer, potter and art teacher. Resident of South Australia, New South Wales, and England, she was concerned with changing society through social realist art.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 15-May-95
- Age at death
- 84
Details
Latitude-37 Longitude144 Start Date1910-01-01 End Date1995-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Victoria
- Biography
- Thelma Carter (1910-1995) was a Gurnai fibre artist who lived in east Gippsland, Victoria.
This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Allas, Tess
Date written:
2007
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1910
- Summary
- Thelma Carter (1910-1995) was a Gurnai fibre artist who lived in east Gippsland, Victoria.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 17-Apr-95
- Age at death
- 85
Details
Latitude40.712778 Longitude-74.006111 Start Date1906-01-01 End Date1995-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- New York, New York, USA
- Biography
- sculptor, 'born in New York, brought up in Buffalo, and living in Boston’, had a rich early life. Her father was interested in natural history, while her pianist mother was interested in classical and advanced music – Debussy and Bartok. Wagner was sung in their summer house at Eagle Lake by visiting German opera singers. Margel Harris and her sister studied modern dance, 'as “movement” rather than interpretation’, with a pupil of Isadora Duncan ( see Bernice Agar ). However, she always wanted to be a sculptor and was taught to work in clay from the model by Charles Grafley and Frederick Allen at the School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
In 1930 she married Frank Hinder , whom she had met at Emil Bisttram’s summer school at Moriah, Lake Champlain. With their daughter, Enid, they came to Frank’s native Australia in 1934. Although Margel experienced severe culture shock she never returned to America, travelling overseas only in her seventies, to China. She made her first carving, Doves , soon after she arrived; it was shown five years later in Exhibition 1 (1939).
The sculptor Gerald Lewers’s understanding of the qualities of wood and stone gave direction to her subsequent years of carving. No sculptural style had yet emerged that was as modern as the paintings of the Australian modernist group, of which she was a part, although Eleonore Lange in her catalogue introduction to Exhibition 1 advocated a sculpture which 'eliminated natural appearance, silhouette and surface modelling to concentrate on shape relations’. Margel was already working towards this, her work suggesting primitive and eastern aspects of modern art.
During the war Margel worked as model-maker for Professor Dakin and made models used in advertisements. Resuming sculpture in 1943, she became interested in movement and in getting away from a solid shape with a central axis – in becoming anti-classic. Her many bird and animal sculptures now reflected moments in the process of life; a crane’s tail unfolding became an abstract organic carving. By 1952 wood had been banished as too sentimental. She wanted to be spontaneous, which was hard in wood, so turned to metal for the rest of her career. Her 'space-age’ period was ushered in by two competitions in 1949-53. Her new work embraced the theory of Gabo and Maholy-Nagy – constructed out of space and time. Margel’s competition model for the Pinkerton Memorial used cement, perspex and cast aluminium in a constructivist way to articulate space. It was in her second competition piece, The Unknown Political Prisoner , that this quality of articulation was perfected.
Compared to Gabo, Margel’s work is asymmetrical, more intuitively wayward. While she is always trying to get away from a centre, from gravity, the sadness, she says, is that one cannot. Compared to Hepworth, she uses form in a less absolute sense. She feels Hepworth’s work is static. The asymmetry, the necessity to move around the work to comprehend its form, became central to her art and led to the revolving constructions begun in 1954. Her later career includes large public sculptures, her masterpiece being the Captain Cook Memorial Fountain in Civic Park, Newcastle (1961-66).
Writers:
Free, Renée
Note: primary
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1906
- Summary
- Sculptor, born in New York she moved to Australia with her husband and became involved in the Austalian modernist movement. Her later career includes large public sculptures, including the Captain Cook Memorial Fountain in Civic Park, Newcastle, 1961-66.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1995
- Age at death
- 89
Details
Latitude-27.5610193 Longitude151.953351 Start Date1906-01-01 End Date1995-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Toowoomba, Qld, Australia
- Biography
- Gloria Alice Lovelock was born in Toowoomba on 25 February 1906, the first daughter of the two boys and two girls born to William Lovelock and Florence Annie née Jones. The family came to reside in Sandgate a few years later where Gloria attended the Sandgate State School and later studied secretarial courses at the Domestic Science High School, Brisbane. She first became involved with pottery when she accompanied Olive Dougherty (later Moase qv) to pottery classes at the Central Technical College in 1926. She exhibited a collection of pottery at the Second Annual Exhibition of Work by Art Students of the Central Technical College in December, 1933; the Third Annual Exhibition in December, 1934; and in the Sixth Annual Exhibition in November, 1937. She may also have exhibited her work in 1935 and 1936 but individual exhibitors are not cited in these years. She continued her classes with L. J. Harvey when he was teaching at Horsham House and was included in exhibitions there until 1941. She exhibited pottery at the Royal National Agricultural and Industrial Association in 1939 and pottery, leather and macramé work at the Arts and Crafts Society of Queensland in 1941. She also exhibited a vase modelled as a tree trunk at a students’ exhibition at Horsham House during the 1940s.
After this she worked for the Red Cross as a remedial craft instructor teaching returned servicemen leatherwork, chip carving and pottery and, in turn, was taught leather plaiting by one of her patients. She taught pottery to the University of Queensland physiotherapy students at the Royal Brisbane Hospital during 1944. She was appointed a Superintendent for the Red Cross in 1945 and in late 1949 replaced Mrs C. W. White in charge of the Red Cross Depot. She worked as a secretary for a few years before she had to retire to care for her aged parents and subsequently worked as a secretary at St Aidan’s Anglican Girls School, Corinda during the 1970s.
Gloria Lovelock was one of the most highly regarded potters of the Harvey School and demonstrated her skills at workshops during the Queensland Art Gallery’s 1983 exhibition 'LJ Harvey and his School’.
She died at Redcliffe on 6 March 1995.
Queensland Art Gallery: Research Curator, Queensland Heritage
Writers:
Cooke, Glenn R.
Note: Research Curator, Queensland Heritage, Queensland Art Gallery
Date written:
2003
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 25 February 1906
- Summary
- Gloria Lovelock was one of the most highly regarded potters of the Harvey School and demonstrated her skills at workshops during the Queensland Art Gallery's 1983 exhibition 'LJ Harvey and his School'.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 6-Mar-95
- Age at death
- 89
Details
Latitude-27.467778 Longitude153.028056 Start Date1963-01-01 End Date1994-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Brisbane, Qld, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. c.1963
- Summary
- Scott was an active participant of the 1980s QLD ARI sector.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- c.1994
- Age at death
- 31
Details
Latitude-32 Longitude147 Start Date1960-01-01 End Date1994-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- NSW
- Biography
- Stephen Cummins was an Australian filmmaker, curator and artist active during the 1980s and early 1990s. A founder-member of Queer Screen, Cummins’ work was an early contribution to Queer Theory and cinema studies and a number of his works, particularly in Super 8, are considered historically significant.Cummins’ Super 8 films included Blue Movie and Breathbeat [both 1984] Deadpan [1985], and Le Corps Image [1987], each film demonstrating the artist’s fascination with the subcultural signification of the male body. Later projects such as Elevation [1989] – a project funded by the Australian Film Commission – was a 16mm film project extending and refining Cummins’s approach. Resonance [1991] – made in collaboration with Simon Hunt – was screened internationally picking up a number of awards including being voted Best Short Film at the 38th Sydney Film Festival [1991], Best Australian film at the National Gay & Lesbian Film Festival and Best Short Film at the Turin Gay & Lesbian Film Festival, Italy [1992]. Cummins also made film and video projects for broadcast. The 1992 project Life’s Burning Desire [52 mins, Betacam] and the short Body Corporate [9 mins, Super 8, 1993] were both screened on SBS Australia.As a curator, Cummins organised programs of Australian Super 8 film to tour Europe and the US such as Eclectic Dreams [1986], 34° S 151° E [1987] and Surface Imprint [1989]. Cummins’ curated programs of film for Australian festivals including Bent, a program of SPLASH: The Sydney Film and Video Event at the Chauvel Cinema [1988].Cummins graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Sculpture/Photography from Sydney College of the Arts in 1984 and was awarded a Graduate Diploma, also from SCA, in 1986. From 1990 until the time of his death in 1994 Cummins was enrolled in the Master of Art Program at the University of Technology.
Writers:
Andrew FrostScanlines
Date written:
Last updated:
- Born
- b. 1960
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1994
- Age at death
- 34
Details
Latitude-30.748889 Longitude121.465833 Start Date1941-01-01 End Date1994-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, Australia
- Biography
- cartoonist, was born in Kalgoorlie, WA. He left school aged 15 and moved to Perth where he became a copy boy on the West Australian 'to fill in the time before joining the Air Force’. The air force 'knocked me back because my eyes were crook, so I ended up becoming a press artist’. Simply because there was a vacancy, he was put in the art department in 1969 and began drawing cartoons. He was soon appointed the daily cartoonist, the first since the paper began publication in 1933 [in 1934 according to the Australian 31/10/1998, 11]. He remained until 1978 then moved to Sydney to join the Daily Telegraph (1979-80). In 1980 he transferred to the Australian where he remained for 14 years, until his death. Rigby , who was drawing in Perth when Mitchell was growing up, was a key influence on his work (as he was on so many newspaper cartoonists, e.g. Benier , Slapp ), though Les Tanner 'influenced me a lot on caricature’ and he was a fan of Jolliffe 's 'for years and years’.
Mitchell had work syndicated worldwide through New York. He won Stanley Awards for the best editorial/political cartoonist in 1985, 1987 and 1992 and for best comic strip artist in 1987-88 for Bustards of the Bush . Probably his best-known work, this weekly strip was developed from In the Scrub with Harry Bottler (a parody of the TV 'bush’ personality Harry Butler). It appeared in the Weekend Australian from 1983 until he died; a collection, Mitchell’s Bustards of the Bush was published by Cumberland Press, Parramatta, in 1984. In 1989, when Mitchell was dying of leukaemia, News Ltd instituted the Bill Mitchell Memorial Award for young artists. He lived to present the first in 1990, joking that the name needed to be changed. Despite chemotherapy he continued to produce cartoons from his home at Muswellbrook (NSW) – faxed to Sydney – until he died in May 1994. He was survived by his wife, Rhonda, their four sons – Stuart, Leigh, Dale and Christopher – and various grandchildren. The Bill Mitchell Memorial Art Award continued to be sponsored by the Australian newspaper for some years.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1941
- Summary
- Popular late 20th century Perth and Sydney newspaper cartoonist. Mitchell won Stanley Awards for the best editorial/political cartoonist in 1985, 1987 and 1992.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- May-94
- Age at death
- 53
Details
Latitude-31.9559 Longitude115.8606 Start Date1931-01-01 End Date1994-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Perth, Western Australia, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1931
- Summary
- Marsh was the principal of a design firm originally known as Neville Marsh Interiors (1965, dates vary), later becoming one of the principals of Marsh Freedman, in partnership with George Freeman (ca.1975, dates vary). Specialising in residential interiors, Marsh, formerly with the British Colour Council, was known for his colour work. He retired in 1986 and moved to Italy, later reviving his career with hotel work in Bali.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-94
- Age at death
- 63
Details
Latitude53.1144444 Longitude19.0530556 Start Date1922-01-01 End Date1994-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Golub, Poland
- Biography
- Joseph Stanislaw Ostoja-Kotkowski, abstract expressionist painter, theatre set designer, photographer and experimental film producer, was born in Golub, Poland on 28 December 1922, the son of Stefan Kotkowski and Jadwiga Niejedli. As a child he showed an interest in art, although his father, who was a bank manager, did not approve of painting as a career. During the Second World War, Ostoja-Kotkowski received art lessons from an artist he met in Poland. Before the end of the war, he was evacuated from Poland and sent to Dusseldorf, where he applied for and received a scholarship to study at the Dusseldorf Academy of Fine Art in Germany, from 1945 to 1949. Whilst at the Art Academy, he studied painting under the guidance of Professor Hauser.
Towards the end of 1949, Ostoja-Kotkowski immigrated to Australia, arriving in Melbourne aboard the ‘Fairsea.’ In his migration papers, he was described as a ‘mechanist’ and for his first job he was sent to work in a concrete factory. Unsatisfied, he sought the nighttime shift in order to focus on his artistic study during the day, whereby he attended classes at the National Gallery School in Melbourne, Victoria, under the tutelage of Alan Sumner and William Dargie.
In late July 1953, Ostoja-Kotkowski was one of eight Melbourne artists in a group exhibition showcasing contemporary Victorian art at Macquarie Galleries, Sydney. His co-exhibitors included prominent artists such as Arthur Boyd, John Brack and Charles Blackman. Around June of 1953, shortly before this exhibition, he moved to Leigh Creek in the north of South Australia, where he continued his artistic practice in painting, while also earning a supporting income as a house painter. Some of the paintings he completed during this time were transported to Melbourne and exhibited in the ‘Herald Open Air Art Show,’ held in the Treasury Gardens off Spring Street and Collins Street (8-14 December 1953). However, Adelaide was to be backdrop for his first solo exhibition, which took place at the Royal Society of Arts in 1955. South Australia also became his official home, as he settled in Stirling, in the Adelaide Hills.
In 1955, Ostoja-Kotkowski commenced collaboration in film production with Ian Davidson. These two artists worked together on a range of projects together, including several creative films, the first being ‘The Quest of Time,’ which was a surrealist work questioning the distinction between the ‘dream world’ and reality. Furthermore, Ostoja-Kotkowski and Davidson jointly undertook documentary assignments. In 1956, they were given the task of recording the activities that celebrated the Port Adelaide Centenary and they photographed the South Australian Architectural Exhibition that was held in the Botanical Park. Ostoja-Kotkowski contributed designs to the exhibition, where one of his first two sculptures in steel was additionally displayed.
Ostoja-Kotkowski’s creativity traversed multiple mediums. In addition to painting, film, photography and sculpture, he wrote poetry and designed décor for numerous theatre productions, his first in Adelaide being for ‘The Prisoner,’ produced by Philip Fargher. He painted backdrops for several productions by the South Australian Ballet Theatre, including ‘Pas Noirs et Sentimentals’ and ‘Cinderella.’ Moreover, he produced stained glass windows for private firms and he experimented with metal, bronze, plastic and new paints, including vitreous enamel.
In 1957, Ostoja-Kotkowski and Davidson exhibited their experimental films at an exhibition of contemporary South Australian art at David Jones Gallery, Sydney. Ostoja-Kotkowski’s painting ‘Form in Landscape’ was shown for first time at this exhibition, after which time it was displayed in Adelaide where it won the Cornell Prize. The Art Gallery of South Australia later acquired this painting.
Ostoja-Kotkowski’s public reputation as a noted contemporary Australian artist was further demonstrated by his inclusion in the “Art in Everyday Life” exhibition. He was one of eleven artists commissioned by Kelvinator Australia Limited, through the Australian Woman’s Weekly, to each paint a refrigerator that would be displayed in a touring exhibition and then sold at auction with proceeds going to Legacy House, Sydney. The exhibition commenced in Sydney in December 1958 and travelled to Brisbane, Melbourne and Adelaide. Fellow exhibitors included Arthur Boyd, Clifton Pugh and Jon Mulvig.
In 1958, Ostoja-Kotkowski began to work with the Elder Conservatorium of Adelaide University. He designed sets for Donizetti’s ‘Elixir of Love’ and employed innovative light settings. This can be seen as a precursor to his ‘Sound and Image’ productions, starting in 1960, where his visual production on the theme of ‘Orpheus’ comprised dance, music and sound, with projectors displaying photographs that faded in and out together in sequence.
Ostoja-Kotkowski’s innovative artistic practice led to a number of public projects in the following decades of his extensive and celebrated career. In 1964 he devised an illuminated mosaic pattern on the glass fronted MLC Building for the Adelaide festival, as well as a executing a large mural for BP House in Melbourne, constructed from steel, fibre glass, resin and copper. During the 1970s Ostoja-Kotkowski won an Australian wide competition for a mural at the Adelaide Airport, and continued activities in electronic and light displays. These activities drew upon the research he conducted during a Fellowship he received from the Australian American Educational Association, which took him to the US to study laser art and technology. In 1984 he presented a laser kinetics concert in the streets of Ballarat on the occasion of the Ballarat Festival. Furthermore, in 1991 his home country, Poland, invited him to present a concert with the National Philharmonic in Warsaw. This major production involved 13 lasers accompanied by the music of national composers.
Ostoja-Kotkowski received an Order of Australia in 1992. He passed away two years later in 1994. His work is held in several prominent public collections, including the Art Gallery of South Australia, the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth and Powerhouse Museum, Sydney.
Writers:
ecwubben
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 28 December 1922
- Summary
- Joseph Stanislaw Ostoja-Kotkowski, abstract expressionist painter, theatre set designer, photographer, experimental film producer and light and sound artist was born in Golub, Poland in 1922 and he arrived in Australia in 1949. His diverse artistic practice included innovation in laser art and sound and image technology. Ostoja-Kotkowski was awarded an Order of Australia in 1992.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1994
- Age at death
- 72
Details
Latitude-22.815924 Longitude127.7642195 Start Date1920-01-01 End Date1994-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Kiwirrkura, WA, Australia
- Biography
- Born near Kiwirrkura c. 1920, Milliga was a Kukatja speaker. Her country was Purrungu and Mulyurtju. She lived at Balgo and started painting for Warlayirti Artists in 1989. Despite being very elderly, the artist loved painting and seemed to enjoy conveying something of her feelings for her country. All of her works tell of the food and wood sources in the area where she lived for many years. Towards the end of her life, she produced a series of totally abstract works marked by layers of hazy dotting.
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1920
- Summary
- A Kukatja artist who began painting for Warlayirti Artists in 1989.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1994
- Age at death
- 74
Details
Latitude-26 Longitude121 Start Date1920-01-01 End Date1994-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Western Australia
- Biography
- Designer of textiles, painter, china painter, leatherworker and art teacher was born in Western Australia on the 2nd of February 1920 to Louisa May Smith n_e Forbes and her husband Dr Eric Smith. Her mother a teacher of music, singing and painting prior to her marriage, was a painter and member of the Western Australian Women’s Society of Fine Arts and Crafts who became a well-known china painter. She had studied art under Francesco Vanzetti. The family set off later in 1920 for Los Angeles and Edinburgh where her father completed his medical training. They returned to Perth in 1927. She attended St Clare’s College where her teacher was Miss Brockway and later St Mary’s Girls School under Margaret Saunders whose Perth School of Art she had also attended on Saturdays. Saunders, her mentor for ten years, encouraged her to make her own designs and had shown her how to make repeat patterns for printing. Forbes-Smith studied commercial art from 1941-43 at Perth Technical School under Iris Francis and Ivor Hunt and followed that with general art studies to 1946. She was one of the first students to graduate from Perth Technical College with the Art Teachers Diploma. The hours had been rigorous 9-4pm and 8-9.30 five days a week. Forbes-Smith travelled regularly with her father making four trips to Singapore in the 1930s and 1952. Sketches made on the voyages were later incorporated into designs for textiles. Forbes-Smith learnt china painting from Grace Nicholls and showed regularly with the Western Australian Women Painters and Applied Arts Society. In the August 1939 exhibition at Newspaper House Art Gallery she exhibited two designs for needlework, a design for centrepieces and a lampshade. However it was textile designs in 1941 which were described in a newspaper of the day as: “Not only modern but in accordance with the most modish fashion tends, and practical. Particularly attractive is a diagonal conventionalized design in native weapons, boomerangs, woomeras and the like in agreeable stripes. There is an unusual combination of leschenaultia and boomerangs. The whole range of exhibits, selected by art authorities, though comparatively small, is constructive and encouraging.” Forbes-Smith exhibited leatherwork and textile designs with the Women’s Society in 1945 the year she was invited to become member of The Studio Club, which met in the Turf Club building in central Perth. Other members were Margaret Johnson, Audrey Greenhalgh, Nell Chappell, Iris Francis, Aimee Santo Crimp and Dorothy Hanton n_e Stubbs. She enjoyed the critical involvement of this supportive women’s group. Forbes-Smith also taught private classes for girls in the club premises. In 1947 she studied at the Adelaide School of Design under Davis and Hoffman but ill with rheumatism returned after six months. Forbes-Smith joined the Perth Society of Artists in 1948. She would have to leave Western Australia to pursue a career as a textile designer as the manufacturing base was not there and this was not something she wished to do so instead she became a painter and teacher until she married Herbert Clement Kentish in 1952 and resigned from teaching. Forbes-Smith taught at Park School, St Hilda’s Girls School, Guildford Grammar School and Lady Lawley Cottage. After her marriage she lived on a dairy farm in Keysbrook, was active locally, teaching art and brought up three children. In 1952 she exhibited Bolinda Vale, Keysbrook with the Perth Society of Artists. In the 1960s and the 1970s when her children were grown she took trips to South Africa, New Zealand and the various states of Australia exhibiting her work or teaching painting on cruise ships. RED SECTIONS
Writers:
Dr Dorothy Erickson
Date written:
2010
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 2 February 1920
- Summary
- Designer of textiles, painter, china painter, leatherworker and art teacher. Forbes-Smith showed regularly with the Western Australian Women Painters and Applied Arts Society. In the 1960s and the 1970s she took trips to South Africa, New Zealand and the various states of Australia exhibiting her work or teaching painting on cruise ships.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1994
- Age at death
- 74
Details
Latitude57 Longitude-4 Start Date1918-01-01 End Date1994-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Scotland, UK
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1918
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1994
- Age at death
- 76
Details
Latitude-34.65589 Longitude117.64688 Start Date1915-01-01 End Date1994-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Mount Barker, WA, Australia
- Biography
- Bella Kelly was born in 1915 in Mount Barker, which is in Minang country in the South Coast region of Western Australia. Kelly was the daughter of Billy Colbung (dec.) and Mina Bayla Brockman (dec.), who were members of the Wardandi people and originated from the southwest region of Western Australia. Kelly’s birth name was Isobel Colbung. Kelly spent her childhood in the bush, and would sometimes draw pictures in the sand while she sat around the campfire with her elders. Her parents earned an income from selling kangaroo skins to buyers who visited the region around Cranbrook (40 kilometres north of Mount Barker). In later years, her father worked as a labourer on George Warburton’s farm in Mount Barker. Kelly did not attend school, but in her early teenage years taught herself to read from comic books (The Albany Advertiser, 6 March 1967). After her parents passed away, she moved to Kojonup, and while she was a teenager she was employed as a domestic at the Carrolup Native Settlement, responsible for cooking and housemaid duties.Kelly painted consistently throughout her life. Her earliest creative works, made in her youth, were charcoal drawings and paintings on paperbark, but in her late 30s she began to paint with acrylic on canvas, and would go on to work with watercolours and gouache. This transition was, in part, made possible by the paint supplies Kelly received from a doctor in Mount Barker for whom she worked as a domestic from the 1960s. Dr Bourke, who also cared for one of Kelly’s grandchildren over several years, ultimately acquired a large collection of Kelly’s paintings over the period that she was employed by him (Krakouer, pers. comm. 2009). For the most part, her paintings depict the Stirling Ranges, often foregrounded by the trunks and branches of the Jarrah and Karri eucalypts of the area. The Stirling Ranges, also known to Noongars as the Blue Ranges, sit just to the northeast of Mount Barker where Kelly was born, and are part of the Minang people’s traditional country. They are visible from many of the towns where Kelly lived during most of her life. In the book Koorah Coolingah (Children Long Ago) (2006), her daughter Cheryl Narkle states that “...it’s always been the Stirling Ranges. There was something there that she’s telling us about what’s around Mount Barker, where she walked… where they camped at all their settlements and all that.” (Pushman & Wally 2006, pg 71).Kelly worked as both a domestic and a farm labourer on properties throughout the Great Southern and the South Coast regions, travelling between Albany, Mount Barker, Katanning, Wagin, Narrogin and other towns. Like her father, she worked on the Warburton property in Mount Barker (later the site of Goundrey Wines), where she was employed in both the 1940s and in the 1970s by Kitty Warburton, the daughter of George Warburton. Kelly’s grandson Jerry Narkle, who visits many properties in the region in his capacity as an Indigenous heritage officer, related to the author that he frequently meets landowners who knew or know of Kelly, and many of them own her paintings or recall her creating art while working on their properties. A small shack in which Kelly used to live opposite the Warburton’s property is now heritage listed with the Department of Indigenous Affairs in Western Australia (J. Narkle, pers. comm. 2009). Kelly painted in a naturalistic style, employed a vivid palette and used a small brush to pick up highlights on ridge tops, leaves and tree bark. She usually painted indoors, drawing entirely from her intuitive knowledge of, and love for, the Stirling Ranges. Her strong emotional identification with her country is conveyed in her intuitive use of colour and the dream-like appearance of many of her works. Jerry Narkle, who grew up with Kelly during the 1970s and 1980s, described her patient and dedicated approach to her art, and the fact that she would remain utterly absorbed in her painting for full days with few breaks (pers. comm. 2009). For Noongar artists practicing today, Kelly is strongly associated with the renowned Carrolup children artists who produced, exhibited and sold work to great acclaim in Australia and overseas under the guidance of Noel and Lily White, who taught at the Carrolup Native Settlement school in the 1940s and early 1950s. Kelly had worked at Carrolup as a teenager, and returned there later in life, in the 1980s. Furthermore, her four sons from her marriage to Henry Kelly: Flemming Kelly, Goldie Kelly, Greg Kelly and Simpson Kelly (all deceased) were taken away from her and spent part of their childhood at the Carrolup Native Settlement. Kelly remained in close proximity to the settlement for a number of years after her boys were taken away (C. Narkle, Pers. comm. 2009). Goldie, Greg and Simpson all painted at some stage in their lives, and a work by Simpson that was created at Carrolup when he was twelve years old (in 1948) is in the collection of the Berndt Museum of Anthropology. Kelly was creating work long before the Carrolup School began and seems to have been largely self-taught. However the stylistic affinities between her works and those of some of the Carrolup children, and the profound influence her practice has had on later generations of Noongar artists who work in the Carrolup style lead to her being regarded as an integral part of the Carrolup legacy.Kelly had three daughters and a son with her second partner, Largy Narkle, whom she met in the late 1940s: Cheryl Narkle, Lorrice Kelly (Lorrice kept her mother’s name), Caroline Narkle and Geoffrey Narkle (dec.). The Narkle children were removed from her care and raised in Wandering Mission, also known as the St Francis Xavier Mission, in Wandering. Geoffrey Narkle went on to become a well-known artist himself, and Caroline Narkle is also a practicing artist who paints in association with Mungart Boodja Art Centre in Katanning. The exhibition catalogue South West Central (2003) quotes the following statement from Geoffrey Narkle about his mother: “Bella Kelly painted to escape many social and political pressures of her time; [having had] her children stolen from her, she found a form of peace in her many landscapes, and she found great joy as many sat and watched her paint as she shared many of her stories. Bella Kelly will always be remembered for her love for her Noongar/Nyoongar people and her great love for her beautiful South-West country” (in Croft & Gooding 2003, pg 43). Kelly’s experience of losing her children, and the difficulty of rebuilding relationships with those children in later life, is partially narrated in the play King Hit, which was co-written by Geoffrey Narkle and David Milroy in 2002. It dramatises Geoffrey’s life story from growing up with his mother, father and siblings on Clayton Road Reserve just outside of Narrogin, to being taken with his sisters to Wandering Mission, to touring as a boxer with George Stewart’s boxing troupe.Kelly first exhibited her paintings in 1970 with her son Goldie in Perth. Other exhibitions followed, including one with her son Geoffrey at the Waterman’s Restaurant in Mount Barker in 1977, and a 1991 exhibition at Fremantle Arts Centre in which her paintings were shown alongside artwork by Alma Toomath and Michelle Broun. However Kelly’s works circulated widely outside of formal exhibitions. She sold her work through shops in Perth, like Inada Aboriginal Arts, and in the towns where she worked, such as a shop run by Noongar artist and writer Maxine Fumagalli in the town of Denmark. She would also sell individual works to farmers to support her family when she was short of money. Her works are on the walls of many households in Western Australia and have been acquired by interstate and international visitors to the Great Southern, Southwest and South Coast regions, having appealed strongly to Indigenous and non-Indigenous people alike. Among the collectors who acquired her work was Perth art entrepreneur and collector Mary Mácha. In 1988, Kelly received the NAIDOC (National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee) Aboriginal Artist of the Year Award.Kelly spent most of her later years in Mt Barker amongst her family, until she passed away in Perth in 1994. In a conversation with the author (2009), Caroline Narkle described how Kelly kept making work right up until the year of her death, and how her grandchildren loved to sit and watch her paint. She remains a greatly revered artist in Western Australia, having been a source of inspiration to Noongar artists such as Lance Chadd, Athol Farmer, Roma Winmar, and Charlie Colbung (her grand-nephew). Her works are in the collection of the Art Gallery of Western Australia and the Berndt Museum of Anthropology, and are kept on permanent display in the Albany Regional Hospital and the Mt Barker Senior High School. Exhibitions in which her works have been shown posthumously include 'Aboriginal artists of the South-West: Past and Present’ (2000) at the Lawrence Wilson Gallery, The University of Western Australia, and 'South West Central: Indigenous art from south Western Australia 1833-2002’ (2003) at the Art Gallery of Western Australia. In 2009 her works were included in the Brisbane Powerhouse exhibition 'The Legacy of Koorah Coolingah (The Legend of Children Long Ago)’, in which original works of the Carrolup school were shown alongside contemporary Noongar artists who have been influenced by their work.
Writers:
Fisher, LauraNote:
Date written:
2009
Last updated:
2011
Status:
peer-reviewed
- Born
- b. 14 January 1915
- Summary
- Noongar Aboriginal landscape artist from Mount Barker who is strongly associated with the Carrolup school of artists. Well remembered and respected in the southwest, Great Southern and South Coast regions of Western Australia.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1994
- Age at death
- 79
Details
Latitude-33.565 Longitude149.0177778 Start Date1909-01-01 End Date1994-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Burnt Yards, New South Wales, Australia
- Biography
- photographer, the eldest of three children, was born at Burnt Yards (NSW) in 1909. Her father, John, was manager then owner of a sheep and wheat property. When she left Walli Public School in March 1922 at the age of thirteen, Alice was presented with a Box Brownie camera. Films were sent by post to Kodak in Sydney until she purchased her own equipment for developing. The few known extant examples of her work (1926-31) are of her brother, Eric, and Bob Costello, a labourer employed by John Green.
Alice married Allen Roy McGregor, a BHP prospector at Junction Reef Goldmine, in the Church of England at Mandurama on 9 June 1934. They moved to Newcastle and had a son, Malcolm, in 1938. Alice did not pursue her early interest in photography. She died in July 1994.
Writers:
Goodhew, Vanessa
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1909
- Summary
- Although she abandoned her early photographic pursuits after she married, Alice enjoyed photographing her brother and a friend with her first camera in her early teens.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- Jul-94
- Age at death
- 85
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1908-01-01 End Date1994-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- painter, sculptor, illustrator and commercial artist, was born in Sydney on 22 April 1908, daughter of William Cowdroy. After a few years at Eden on the south coast of NSW, the family settled in Sydney. Vic attended Fort Street High School until she was thirteen and became ill with scarlet fever. After she recovered, she left school and began studying art at East Sydney Technical College. At the end of 1925, aged seventeen, she was in her fourth year as a sculpture student and Rayner Hoff was calling her his 'star pupil’. Although primarily devoted to sculpture (portrait heads and small nude figures), Vic also did story illustrations; Hoff predicted that in both fields she might some day rival Norman Lindsay , an artist whom she was said to admire profoundly. Yet even then, despite a common interest in drawing and modelling nudes, Vic’s work showed little direct Lindsay influence, being far more 'moderne’ and stylised.
In 1925 Cowdroy was drawing cartoons for Aussie – including a self portrait. That year she made plaster panel decorations for the Black and White Artists’ Ball, the bohemian event in the Sydney social calendar, said to be 'weirdly original in design, displaying her virile imagination, her innate sense of composition and her skilful modelling’. In 1926 she designed the poster for the Artists’ Ball (National Art School collection). Her graduate sculpture, Figure from Life , was illustrated in Art in Australia in March 1927.
Cowdroy also drew cartoons for the Bulletin in the 1920s, eg 'Violinist: “I want an E string please”/ Sadie: “Oh sir, if you don’t mind, would you pick it out for yourself, sir? I 'ardly know the 'es from the shes!”’ 11 June 1925 (original Mitchell Library [ML] Px*D457/91, address Miss V. Cowdroy, 119 Anzac Parade, Kensington); and (two smoking flappers) 'Musical Intelligence./ Mrs Nurich: “We dined the Baron last night.”/ Mrs Hibrow: “You don’t say! Did he bring his coronet?”/ Mrs Nurich: “Oh, I didn’t even know that he could play one!” 12 December 1925, 25 (original ML Px*D457/92, same address).
She continued to sign her work 'Vic Cowdroy’ after August 1926 when she married George Bunting (the subject of one of her earliest sculptures, a plaster head done when she was fifteen). They had a daughter, Diane, who became a fashion artist. Now illustration was Vic’s major interest. As 'Cowdroy’ she did lots of work for the Home (1928-31/ or 1934?), including a drawing for a Myra Morris story, 'The Dark River’ (2 January 1928, 18-19), depicting the difficult sentence: 'Bernadette’s mind was a dark, running river, swirling about him, seeking to carry him off his feet’. Her Home cartoons include The national dinner beverage , showing 'The Dinkum Australian abroad who, having exhausted his quota of serious drinking for the day, asks for a modest cupper tea’ (1 July 1931, 36), and The Big Australian Beach Parade (see Heritage ).
She produced drawings, including covers, for Wireless Weekly and drew a nonsense image for Ink no 1 (1933), 47 – the only issue published – 'Mr Johnson (from the Bank)/ “I come from the moon, my name’s Augustus, and you’re my little ray of moonshine”.’ For several years she did fashion features for David Jones and Farmers department stores, some published in Home . She illustrated three books of poems by her friend Ronald McCuaig with fine, witty line drawings: Vaudeville (1938), The Wanton Goldfish (1941) and Quod (1946). She also painted portraits. Her subjects include the English author and poet Peter Hopegood (private collection).
From January 1938 Cowdroy contributed numerous joke cartoons and elegant line and watercolour drawings to Man , Man Junior , Cavalcade and other semi-salacious, 'all-male’ K.G. Murray publications under the pseudonym 'Royston’. Her first cartoon in Man (January 1938) shows a predatory young woman addressing a meek employee at 'Car Registration’: “I’d like to know who owns car BW88”. Other examples are (women golfers in a bar) “Oh you declined! For the moment I thought you said reclined” August 1938, 35; (old woman to young woman going out) '“Be a good girl and have a good time.”/“Make up your mind mother”’ November 1938; (young woman to customs officer checking her luggage) “Oh, don’t worry with that one. It’s only some marihuana I’m smuggling in” December 1938; (woman with knickers round her ankles but hat intact) “Huh! I thought you said this stuff would knock your hat off” January 1939, 37; (barman to two demure-looking young women) “and remember, no risque stories, there are gentlemen present” May 1939. Also one of c.March 1940, 96.
In the 1940s Cowdroy shared a Sydney studio with cartoonists George Aria , “Carl” (Hottie) Lahm and Arthur Horner . In 1946, after George Bunting died, she sailed for England with their daughter. Two years later, in London, she married Arthur Horner, who had come over to work in Fleet Street. They had two daughters, Jane (a journalist) and Julia (a painter and illustrator). Vic stopped drawing while the children were young, but later took up animation. In a converted stable in Hertfordshire she produced forty-five minutes of animation virtually single-handed. In 1976 she returned to Melbourne with her husband. She died in Melbourne on 26 June 1994; Arthur Horner (best-known as the creator of Colonel Pewter in London Punch ) died in Melbourne in 1997.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 22 April 1908
- Summary
- Mid 20th century artist and cartoonist.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 26-Jun-94
- Age at death
- 86
Details
Latitude54.98 Longitude-1.61 Start Date1907-01-01 End Date1994-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK
- Biography
- Personal
Edmund Arthur Harvey was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK, on 20 February 1907, son of Arthur James Harvey and Margaret Harvey née Nicholson. His only sibling, younger brother Wilfred, died in infancy. Harvey migrated with his parents to Australia in 1909, but was sent back to Europe for studies at the age of eighteen. His parents returned to England for the duration of World War I, as his father was an engineer and worked in Southampton in a naval wartime position. They returned to Australia in about 1918, after the war. Harvey returned to Australia in 1927 after completing his studies in Europe. In 1940 he married one of his students, Lorna Dummer, in Sydney, New South Wales. She was thirteen years his junior, the daughter of Leslie Sidney Dummer (1890-1945), civil servant, and Milliken 'Milly’ Dummer née Chaffey (1892-1982).
The Harveys had one son, Antony James, and one daughter, Diana. In World War II, Harvey served in the Australian Army (22 April 1942 – 21 April 1944) in the Volunteer Defence Corps as a Gunner. In 1945, the Harveys moved to the Sydney suburb of Castlecrag, where they lived until his death on 23 May 1994. He was eighty-seven.
Education and professional
Harvey began his art studies in 1922 at the age of fifteen years, at evening classes in drawing under Henry Gibbons at East Sydney Technical College (ESTC) in Sydney. That same year he commenced full-time art studies with Julian Ashton at the Sydney Art School. In 1925, at the age of eighteen, he was sent to Paris, where he became a full-time student at the Academie Julien, and also took evening classes at Colarossi’s Ecole de la Grande Chaumière. In 1926 he studied in Florence, at the Academia Della Bella Arte in Rome, and at the Chelsea Polytechnic in London.
In 1927 Harvey returned to Sydney. From 1927-28 he was assistant to G.W. Lambert, ARA. In 1930 he attended evening classes at East Sydney Technical College (ESTC). Harvey was elected a member of the Society of Artists in 1932. In 1933 he assisted Norman Carter in preparing cartoons for stained-glass windows called Sheep Country , and two murals for the former Rural Bank building in Martin Place, Sydney, (the building was later demolished, but the murals were removed by the conservation staff of the Art Gallery of NSW).
Harvey developed a successful private practice. His landscape paintings were traditional in style, and mainly depicted scenes in rural New South Wales. He signed his paintings 'HARVEY’.
In 1935 Harvey and Arthur Murch founded the School of Decorative Arts, situated at the corner of Liverpool and Castlereagh Streets, Sydney.
Harvey became a part-time art teacher at ESTC in 1935, and became a full-time art teacher in the NSW Department of Technical Education on 2 September 1940. He was an art teacher (part-time 1936-1940, full-time 1940-1971) at North Sydney Technical College and ESTC (which became the National Art School). He became Head of the North Sydney Technical College annexe of East Sydney Technical College, and Senior Head Teacher. In 1972 Harvey was Senior Head Teacher of Diploma Painting, Fine Arts Division, at the National Art School. He retired at the end of 1971, after thirty-seven years teaching at the National Art School, and continued to paint in private practice until his death.
Writers:
Rost, Fred
Date written:
2009
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 20 February 1907
- Summary
- Edmund Arthur Harvey (1907-1994), generally known as E.A. Harvey or simply Harvey, British-born Australian painter of landscapes in oils, and teacher, particularly at the National Art School, Sydney, NSW.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 23-May-94
- Age at death
- 87
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1907-01-01 End Date1994-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- Frances Burke was best known as a fabric designer and an adventuresome retailer of modernist furnishings through her shop New Design P/L which first opened in 1948.
Burke, born into a Melbourne family involved in the textile trade in Flinders Lane, was initially trained at Melbourne Technical College (now RMIT) and studied painting at the National Gallery School. Bernard Hall was the Director of the National Gallery School (W.E. McInnes after 1935) and the training there was rigorous and academic. The school’s colour palette, not allowed until fourth year, began with burnt sienna and ended with titanium white.
Perhaps as a corrective, she later attended George Bell’s school of painting at its Bourke and Queen Street location from 1936-38. Three flights of creaking timber stairs led to Bell’s studio in the old commercial building; more adventuresome students took the goods lift. Her fellow students at this time included Mary Alice Evatt (Mrs H.V. Evatt) and Sali Herman amongst others.
Critics have observed that George Bell drilled his students to paint from the subject and their imagination. As a consequence, artists such as Francis Burke used images of nature in her design work as starting points; not as goals. As she later confessed in an interview, “I was all the time with my head in a book…George taught me to create from my own mind and thoughts.”
Frances Burke was fortunate to mature at a time when the art of the Australian Aborigine was being re-discovered by contemporary artists and designers. In 1929, the National Gallery of Victoria had mounted the exhibit “Australian Aboriginal Art” and in 1930 Margaret Preston published her influential essay “Applications of Aboriginal Designs” in Art in Australia. Many of these images became part of Burke’s early oeuvre
When she left the Bell school, she founded Burway Prints (fabric prints) in August 1937 with fellow Technical College graduate Morris Holloway. Their first exhibition in 1938 was a critical success. This firm eventually became Frances Burke Fabrics, but she continued to use a textile converting company managed by Morris Holloway to print her designs.
Burke’s textile work was often derived from Australian forms and colours and she was part of a trend amongst designers in the 1930s and 1940s to look more closely at Australian imagery. Byram Mansell, for example, established a textile studio in Sydney in 1930 and rather obsessively explored Aboriginal themes for several decades. Claudio Alcorso’s Silk and Textile Printers, Rushcutters Bay, Sydney also produced a textile range called “Modernage” (1946) that included a number of Aboriginal-influenced images and colours
In 1948, in an expansive mood, Burke established New Design P/L on the first floor of 55 Hardware Street between Little Bourke Street and Lonsdale Streets. She advertised nationally and sold furnishings, fabrics, and domestic utensils designed in the relatively new Modernist style. With its first floor position, New Design had more of a gallery atmosphere than a street front shop. The shop survived in a variety of city and suburban locations until 1967.
Burke’s New Design is part of an Australian tradition of women-directed design emporia that includes Melbourne’s Cynthia Reed Modern Furnishings (1934-35) Margo Lewers’ Notanda in Sydney (1935) and Marion Best Fabrics (1938) in Woollahra
In the 1950s, Frances Burke made a convincing transition to the reigning minimal Modernist style in her fabric designs and interior furnishings. New Design also showcased furniture by Clement Meadmore and Grant Featherston. She also did the interior design work for the Hayman Island Resort during this period.
In 1956, the Olympics in Melbourne presented an Arts Festival, which included a Society of Designers for Industry-coordinated exhibition of industrial design at the Royal Melbourne Technical College (now RMIT) featuring Burke’s work amongst other industrial and graphic designers.
Burke’s status as a designer was widely recognised early in her career. In 1947-48, when a professional design association, the Society of Designers for Industry (SDI) was mooted by R. Haughton James, she became a founder member. The SDI 's original committee included such design luminaries as Fred Ward, Ron Rosenfeldt and Grant Featherston. This important organisation has now evolved into the Design Institute of Australia (DIA).
As designer and retailer, she had many important and influential commissions in Government House, Canberra, several Australian embassies and consulates in Europe, the United States and the Pacific Region.
In her later career, Frances Burke played a substantial administrative role in the design community in Melbourne and was awarded a MBE (1970) and an Honorary Doctorate (RMIT) in 1987 for her services in design. Frances Burke became increasingly inaccessible in her later life and this has had an ill effect on the documentation and national acknowledgement of this important designer. Her work is represented in the National Gallery of Australia by a collection assembled by curator John McPhee, the RMIT Design Archive collection, the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences and other state galleries and museums.
Writers:
Bogle, Michael
Michael Bogle
Date written:
2011
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1907
- Summary
- Burke founded screen-printing business, Burway Prints, Melbourne 1937. Established and managed "New Design" retail outlet, founder member Society of Designers for Industry. Her textile designs featured fauna and flora (often Australian), abstract appropriations of Aboriginal designs and organic forms drawn from nature.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 14-Oct-94
- Age at death
- 87
Details
Latitude52.561928 Longitude-1.464854 Start Date1906-01-01 End Date1994-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- England, UK
- Biography
- print and poster maker (including colour linocuts and some b/w work) and postage stamp designer, was born in England and studied at the Slade under Henry Tonks c.1925. Her first linocut, made to instructions over the telephone from Claude Flight to be shown at Flight’s exhibition of linocuts, was purchased by the Victoria & Albert Museum. She continued her studies at Chelsea Polytechnic under Henry Moore, and at the Académie Montmartre under Ferdinand Léger. Arrived Australia in 1953 where she designed posters, e.g. Sturt’s Desert Pea, Australia 1956 (NGA) for ANTA and Discover Australia c.1954-58, photolithograph (Powerhouse Museum, cited Baddeley cat. 5). She exhibited regularly in Australia before migrating to New Zealand.
This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1906
- Summary
- Female artist of the Slade School and Académie Montmartre who studied under Henry Moore and Ferdinand Léger. Mayo briefly produced tourist posters in Australia after travelling from England and before migrating to New Zealand.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1994
- Age at death
- 88
Details
Latitude-34.7523871 Longitude149.7198009 Start Date1896-01-01 End Date1994-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Goulburn, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Commercial and watercolour artist, was born in Goulburn, NSW, daughter of a railway worker. Her aunt was Louisa Lawson, mother of Henry Lawson. The Albury family moved from Goulburn to Hornsby c.1911 and Winn studied art at East Sydney Technical College. She travelled to the USA in the 1920s where she worked as a commercial artist at Sacramento, California. After returning to Sydney, she seems to have worked as a commercial artist in the 1930s.
A collection of Winn Albury’s designs, mostly for lampshades, arrived at Historic Houses Trust (NSW) in 1998 with the part of the Lorenzini archive that had been auctioned in 1995 as part of her deceased estate. Watercolours by both Winn and her sister Ethel were included, along with a large volume of material by Augusto Lorenzini (1852-1921).
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1896
- Summary
- Twentieth century female watercolourist who worked as a commercial in Sydney and Sacremento, California. Work found amongst her estate included a number of designs for lampshades.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1994
- Age at death
- 98
Details
Latitude-32.8316667 Longitude151.3511111 Start Date1953-01-01 End Date1993-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Cessnock, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Artist, was included in the Tin Sheds exhibition, “Dead Gay Artists”, 1-23 February 2002.
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1953
- Summary
- Late 20th century artist
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- Feb-93
- Age at death
- 40
Details
Latitude-23.3782137 Longitude150.5134227 Start Date1949-01-01 End Date1993-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Rockhampton, Qld, Australia
- Biography
- Ben Wickham was born and raised in Rockhampton where his father and some of his brothers were painter/decorators. He was educated at the Park Avenue State School and later at the North Rockhampton High School. He was largely self taught although he had lessons with local artist Charles Haywood and had the support of the art teacher Ainslie Cox, who let him set up a studio under her flat in Victoria Street, Rockhampton. She encouraged him to have lessons with Roy Churcher in Brisbane and he also was encouraged by a student teacher Annette Pirrett. He had his first exhibition at age 15 at Forday’s Paint Shop. Wickham came to Brisbane in 1967 and exhibited with the Royal National Association that year and worked at an advertising agency, Harold Vinnicombe and Associates. He held further solo exhibitions in Rockhampton at Gallery 1-11 in 1968 and at Gallery Up Top in Quay Street in 1971. He also shared an exhibition there with potter Philip McConnell a year later.
He worked as a graphic artist for Capricornia Regional Electricity Board from 1970 and exhibited with the Rockhampton Branch of the Royal Queensland Art Society. He moved to Melbourne in 1972 briefly to work freelance before returning to Rockhampton. He was awarded a Rotary Club Art Prize in 1973 and produced a series of bronze heads for the (now) University of Central Queensland and also produced the sets for productions at the Philbeam Theatre.
Later he moved to Sydney where he worked as a freelance scenic artist and the Sydney Theatre Company’s inaugural production The Sunny South in 1975 is included in his credits. His practical skills were developed as a scenic painter for Opera Australia over several years the early 1980s. He was also involved in the production of commercials for T.V. and worked on the production of the 1983 film Razorback, directed by Russell Mulcahy. He travelled between Queensland and Sydney for the remainder of his life. He painted several productions for the Nimrod Theatre Company including their final production of Tartuffe in 1985. Apart from his time in Rockhampton, Wickham did not exhibit extensively, although he continued to produce work on a reduced scale.
Writers:
Cooke, Glenn R.
Date written:
2000
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1949
- Summary
- Ben Wickham's assured skill as a draftsman was evident in his early exhibiting career but his peripatetic lifestyle mitigated against its full development.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 14-Aug-93
- Age at death
- 44
Details
Latitude-32 Longitude147 Start Date1946-01-01 End Date1993-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- New South Wales
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1946
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1993
- Age at death
- 47
Details
Latitude-38.15 Longitude144.35 Start Date1939-01-01 End Date1993-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Geelong, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- artist and cartoonist.
His 1977 Great Divide cartoon about art was in the Artists and Cartoonists in Black and White: The Most Public Art exhibition at the S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney 1999.
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 29 December 1939
- Summary
- Internationally influential late 20th century Geelong raised conceptual artist. Central to the Art & Language movement.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Sep-93
- Age at death
- 54
Details
Latitude-33.0880805 Longitude147.1479606 Start Date1933-01-01 End Date1993-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Condobolin, New South Wales, Australia
- Biography
- KEVIN GILBERT (10 July 1933 – 1 April 1993) was born into the Wiradjuri nation on the Kalara riverbank (Lachlan River) in Condobolin, Central New South Wales. During his lifetime Kevin was a tireless advocate for Aboriginal rights and responsibilities and has left a legacy for others Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal to follow in the struggle for recognition and acceptance of Aboriginal sovereignty and an understanding of the spirituality of the oldest living culture in the world.The youngest of eight children, Kevin and his siblings became orphaned at a very young age. He escaped the orphanages and with two of his sisters, returning to Condobolin to their family and extended family where they lived off the land in a ‘fringe camp’ and holding onto Wiradjuri language and culture. Married with two children, Kevin successfully worked his way to being a station manager on a property near Condobolin, but his marriage ended in tragedy with the murder of his wife, for which he served over fourteen years in jail. With limited reading material, and a formal education to fourth grade, Kevin read dictionaries from cover to cover and developed an extensive vocabulary.In Long Bay Goal Kevin learnt the art of lino-cutting techniques which enabled him to become the first Aboriginal printmaker. He made his own tools 'from a spoon, fork, gem blades and nails’, carved 'old brittle lino off the prison floor’ and printed images using the back of a spoon. His artwork was first exhibited in 1970 at the Arts Council gallery, Sydney, in an exhibition organised by the Australia Council. His creative talents also flourished through poetry, essays and plays. Kevin became the first Aboriginal playwright with The Cherry Pickers being written in 1968. In 2001 The Cherry Pickers, directed by Wesley Enoch, toured to the Commonwealth Games Cultural Festival in Manchester 2002; Exeter; Brighton; Nottingham and Salisbury, England.In 1971, Kevin joined the Gurindji Land Rights campaign and was instrumental in establishing the Aboriginal Tent Embassy opposite Parliament House in Canberra in 1972. He crystallised central issues of the Aboriginal political struggle in Because a White Man’ll Never Do It and it is recognised as an Angus and Robertson Classic. He exposed the reality of surviving genocide in the oral history Living Black, a collection of Aboriginal people’s stories which won the National Book Council award in 1978. In 1979 he spearheaded the National Aboriginal Government protest on Capital Hill, Canberra, calling for acceptance of, and respect for, Aboriginal Sovereignty. In 1981 he moved to the bush on the Queanbeyan River and co-ordinated the Treaty’88 campaign. He defined a legal argument for justice in Aboriginal Sovereignty, Justice, the Law and Land (including Draft Treaty) and completed the books Inside Black Australia, The Cherry Pickers and Child’s Dreaming. To coincide with the 1988 opening of the new parliament house, Kevin commissioned and exhibited the ground breaking photographic group exhibition Inside Black Australia: Aboriginal Photographers’ Exhibition. Later that year, for his anthology Inside Black Australia, the Governor-General presented him the 1988 Human Rights Award for Literature, but Kevin publicly refused it on the grounds that Aboriginal Peoples continue to be denied basic human rights in their own land.In 1992 Kevin Gilbert was instrumental in re-establishing the Aboriginal Tent Embassy and spent most of the last year of his life at this Tent Embassy. He had a profound conviction that the Aboriginal Embassy is the vehicle through which there will be a resolution to the underlying conflict over the opposing sovereignties in Australia. In the lino-print Colonising Species, with the blood of the oppressed dripping on the Crown, he depicts the turning point for justice as the High Court Mabo decision.His art has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is in major collections. In 1992 he was awarded a four-year Creative Arts Fellowship for his 'outstanding artistic contribution to the nation’ but sadly died six months later aged 59. On 8 April 1993 the Memorial for Kevin was held at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, Canberra, where some of his ashes were placed in the Fire.In 1995 Kevin was posthumously presented the RAKA poetry award for Black from the Edge and was highly commended in the ACT Book of the Year award. His autobiographical book for children, Me and Mary Kangaroo, was short listed for the 1995 Australian Multicultural Award.Kevin has 6 children Kevin, Kerry, Kate, Ruth, Euroka and Kalara and many grandchildren and great grandchildren and great great grandchildren. He is also survived by his 2nd and 3rd wives Cora and Ellie. BooksThe Cherry PickersLiving BlackBecause a White man’ll Never Do ItThe Blackside: People Are Legends and other poemsThe Purfleet ReportInside Black AustraliaAboriginal Sovereignty, Justice, the Law and Land (including Draft Treaty)Flashes of Essence (poetry recordings)Black from the EdgeChild’s DreamingMe and Mary Kangaroo (published posthumously)LinocutsTotality; Corroboree Spirits; Bhoolbene Miggai; My Fathers’ Studio; Lineal Legends; Eagle Men Legend; Burrawang; Mabung; Massacre Mountain; Christmas Eve in the Land of the Dispossessed; Colonising Species.
CollectionsNational Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; Queensland Museum, Brisbane; West Australian Art Gallery, Perth; Powerhouse Museum, Sydney; Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, Canberra; National Museum of Australia, Canberra; Private Collections.Exhibitions2013 – I Do Have A Belief (1933- !993) Art Retrospective Belconnen Arts Centre Canberra.2004 – Athens Olympics, Athens, Greece.2001 – Intermission, Wharf 2 Gallery, Sydney Theatre Company, Sydney.2001 – Kevin Gilbert Retrospective, Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-Op, Sydney. 1996 – 1999 – Breath of Life: Moments in transit towards Aboriginal Sovereignty – toured nationally to Canberra, Adelaide, Armidale, Moree and Sydney, Perth, Townsville, Towoomba and internationally to Rebecca Hosacks Gallery, Soho, London; and Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, Commonwealth Peoples Centre, Durban, South Africa. 1995 – Yiribana, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.1994 – Urban Focus, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra;1994 – Tyerabarrbowaryaou II – I shall never become a whiteman, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney Harbour; Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, Ballarat, Victoria; Urban Focus, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, exhibited in Cuba at the 5th Havana Biennial. 1994- Who’s Afraid of black, Red and Yella, Museum of Ethnology, Rotterdam.1994- Legends From Down Under, Boomerang Galerie, Amsterdam.1992 – 1994- New Tracks-Old Land, Australian Galleries, Green Street, Soho, London; USA tour, New York, Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon and Massachusetts Collage of Art, Huntington Gallery, Boston Massachusetts; Northern Territory Museum of Arts and Sciences, Darwin; Queensland Aboriginal Creations, Brisbane; Redcliff Entertainment Centre, Redcliff, Queensland; and Memorial Tribute, Gallery One, National Gallery of Australia.1992 – Painting Our Dreaming, Alliance Francaise Gallery, Canberra; ’92 Pressing Spiral Arm Gallery, Canberra.1991 – Tjukurrpa Nganampa Kantyila Kanyintjaku – Keeping Our Dreaming Strong: Hackett, ACT; Alliance Francaise Gallery, Canberra; Social Images, Gorman House, Canberra.1990 – Desert Art, Albert Hall, Canberra.1988- 1999 – Inside Black Australia, Aboriginal Photographers Exhibition: Showground, Wagga Wagga; Trades and Labour Club, Newcastle; Queensland Museum, Brisbane; Museum of Victoria, Melbourne; Narragunnawali, Canberra Contemporary Art Space, Canberra; Albert Hall, Canberra; Leftbank Bookshop, Tin Sheds Gallery, Sydney; Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-Op, Sydney; and Centreprize, London.1975-76 – Kooringhat Gardens Art Gallery, Taree.1971 – Robin Hood Gallery, Sydney.1970-71 – Arts Council Gallery, East Sydney.
Writers:
Staff Writer
241056
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2016
- Born
- b. 10 July 1933
- Summary
- Painter, printmaker, cartoonist, photographer, poet, writer, historian and activist. Produced the first known fine art prints by an Aboriginal artist, made while he was in prison.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1993
- Age at death
- 60
Details
Latitude-21.424707 Longitude128.5459056 Start Date1925-01-01 End Date1993-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Lake Wills, Western Australia, Australia
- Biography
- Born “in the bush” around Lake Wills c. 1925, Nagomara was one of several senior Tjakamarra men in the Balgo community whose work primarily concerned Water Dreaming and rituals associated with rainmaking. His country was in the Stansmore Ranges around Mangkai. He was custodian of various Tingari and Water Dreaming stories for this area. He also painted the area around Nguntalpi, a very sacred place of many rocks and caves, where his father is buried. A Kukatja speaker, Albert Nagomara began painting for Warlayirti Artists in 1988. His works generally use strong, simple motifs, such as roundels and watercourses, but beneath their simplicity lies a great reservoir of Law matters.
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1925
- Summary
- A Balgo artist with Warlayirti Artists Association whose starkly simple works belie the depth of knowledge of Tingari and Water Dreaming stories for which he was custodian.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1993
- Age at death
- 68
Details
Latitude-33.7497631 Longitude151.0657475 Start Date1925-01-01 End Date1993-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Beecroft, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- painter, cartoonist, comic strip artist and illustrator, was born in Beecroft, NSW. He studied at East Sydney Technical College (ESTC) for two years, then spent a year in the art department of the Sydney Sun . After serving in the Australian Air Force in 1943-46 he worked for Frank Johnson Publications. Many Belbin originals are in the Johnson Papers (Mitchell Library Px*D68, vol.1), particularly dozens of book covers, e.g. black and white 'Schoolboys outshoot hell-fire bushrangers’ by John Barr signed 'Phil Belbin 46’ and others in both colour and black and white (see State Library of New South Wales black and white exhibition 1999). Sheill (1999, 113) states that perhaps his best comic was The Raven , published as one of Frank Johnson’s Triumph Comics in September 1946.
Belbin’s 30-year association with K.G. Murray Publications included hundreds of illustrations, cartoons and comics, the later often signed with pseudonyms such as 'Humph’ and 'Duke’. He produced Peril on Venus and Climax comics for Murray, and he also worked as a freelance illustrator for publishers and advertising agencies. He was the first Australian artist commissioned to do illustrations for Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. In 1969 he developed a newspaper strip, The Early Birds , most of which later appeared as part of the Air Hawk series. Belbin received a Citation of Merit from the New York Society of Illustrators in 1974.
This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 9 September 1925
- Summary
- Late 20th century Sydney painter, cartoonist, comic strip artist and illustrator. A graduate of the East Sydney Technical College, Barr served in the Australian Air Force during WW2 before beginning a 30 year association with K.G. Murray Publications. In 1974 Belbin received a Citation of Merit from the NY Society of Illustrators.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1993
- Age at death
- 68
Details
Latitude-38.085466 Longitude141.8198006 Start Date1917-01-01 End Date1993-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Lake Condah, VIC, Australia
- Biography
- Connie Hart, Gunditjmara basket weaver, was born in 1917 in Little Dunmore, near Lake Condah Mission in South Western Victoria. Connie attended the mission school during her childhood, but was always attentive to the stories and practices of her mother and her elders while she was growing up. When she was sixteen she began to work as a maid and cook for properties in the western districts of Victoria, before she moved to Melbourne. During World War II she worked in a munitions factory, and in later years she worked as a wardsperson at St. Vincent’s Hospital, and in a shoe factory.
Connie only began basket weaving in 1983 at the age of 65. Having returned to Little Dunmore to care for her mother who had suffered a stroke, Connie recollected the baskets that her mother had made from Puung’ort grasses when Connie was a child. As she is quoted as saying in the book Living Aboriginal History of Victoria (in Jackomos & Fowell 1991, pg 74):
'No one taught me to make my baskets. My mum told me we were coming into the white man’s way of living. So she wouldn’t teach us. That is why we lost a lot of culture. But I tricked her and I watched those old people and I sneaked a stitch or two.’
Connie went on to craft a great variety of baskets, as well as eel traps and baby carriers. She passed on weaving methods to a number of members of her family, including Sandra Aitken , as well as many other Indigenous and non-Indigenous people through basket weaving workshops.
Connie Hart passed away in 1993 as a much loved and revered member of the Victorian Indigenous community.
Writers:
Fisher, Laura
Date written:
2008
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1917
- Summary
- Highly regarded Gunditjmara basket weaver and community elder who began weaving in her 60s and facilitated the regeneration of localised Victorian Indigenous weaving practices. Self-taught after observing mother and local Elders.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1993
- Age at death
- 76
Details
Latitude-34.9275 Longitude138.6 Start Date1912-01-01 End Date1993-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Edwardstown, Adelaide, SA, Australia
- Biography
- painter and sketcher. Hele studied art at Adelaide’s Prince Alfred College, the South Australian School of Arts and in Europe. He first came to national attention with a number of prizewinning history paintings in the 1930s.
Appointed an official war artist during World War II and Korea, Hele’s work was widely distributed in exhibitions and books.
Hele was a prolific Archibald Prize winner during the 1950s (1951; 1953; 1954; 1955; 1957). “Once I start a portrait I like to go straight through until it’s finished. While I’m doing it I think it, dream it – I’m obsessed by that one thing… the human face and the human form are always the greatest things to me…” he explained in 1962.
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Riddler, Eric
Date written:
2007
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 13 June 1912
- Summary
- A leading figurative artist working in Adelaide in the mid 20th century. Hele served as a war artist in the Second World War and Korean War and won the Archibald Prize for portraiture on several occasions during the 1950s.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Dec-93
- Age at death
- 81
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1911-01-01 End Date1993-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
- Biography
- illustrator and cartoonist, was born in Sydney, 28 April 1911, older brother of Frank Hodgkinson . After studying at the Royal Art Society of NSW under Dattilo Rubbo and at East Sydney Technical College under Rayner Hoff , he worked as an illustrator on the Daily Guardian and the Sun in Sydney (1929-31), then on the Melbourne Herald (1932-76). With the writer Hal Porter, he used to frequent the Café Petrushka in Little Collins Street, a 1930s Bohemian haunt that featured the work of young contemporary artists on its walls. In 1938-39 he visited England, France and Italy to study art in European galleries and to investigate commercial printing for the Melbourne Herald .
During WWII he served as an official war artist in New Guinea ( Concert Party, Milne Bay ), Ceylon, India, Burma and Darwin and was included in the Exhibition of Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture by Australian Official War Artists , National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne 1943-44 (see catalogue pp.12-14). He held exhibitions of his drawings of the dancers in the De Basil ballet company in 1939 and 1943, the latter in the foyer of His Majesty’s Theatre. His original cartoon, Old Man, Borneo (c.1934-37, La Trobe Library), was included in the 2000 Global Arts Link exhibition Bluey and Curley , whichalso showed a straight portrait sketch, Gunner Jackie Peacock (1942, Australian War Memorial).
Some of Hodgkinson’s post-war drawings are illustrated in Norman Macgeorge (ed.), The Arts in Australia (Melbourne: Cheshire, 1948). They include Studies from Life (male rear and details from life class), p.48; Drawing (55), a white on black image of a man lecturing in a crowded theatre to illustrate Macgeorge’s 'The lecture as an art form’; The Orchestra (63), a very detailed, white on black, theatre scene; The 'Cello Player (65); The Troubadour (68), who looks like a modern woman; and The Reader (71), a white-on-black Renaissance man reading a book by candle light. Both he and Macgeorge were members of the Melbourne Savage Club, Roy becoming a fifty-year member like William Dargie . He drew the Savage Club Christmas card in 1948, showing Santa coming down the chimney and saying to toddler labelled 1948, “Well son! They Haven’t Nationalised Me Yet!!” (ill. Johnson, p.156) A concert programme for the Melbourne Savage Club Jubilee Dinner in 1954, done with Alec Gurney , is illustrated in Johnson (p.157). His oil portrait of Judge Frederico, Savage Club President in 1974-77, is illustrated on p.165.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 28 April 1911
- Summary
- Mid 20th century Sydney-born and trained, Melbourne-based war artist, illustrator and cartoonist. During WWII Hodgkinson served as an official war artist in New Guinea, Ceylon, India, Burma and Darwin.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1993
- Age at death
- 82
Details
Latitude-33.8798136 Longitude151.078522 Start Date1907-01-01 End Date1993-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Strathfield, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- John Samuel Coulson Mills (John Mills), painter and Illustrator, was born in Strathfield NSW on 12 September 1907. His father Samuel was an established journalist who also worked with Val Morgan, writing scrip to accompany cinema advertising. His mother Augusta was an actress. They divorced when John was seven. It was at this age that he expressed his unwavering desire to be an artist. Growing up in Bondi and the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney, Mills gained admission on scholarship to the Sydney Technical College (later National Art School) at the age of 13. At the time he was the youngest in attendance.
At the age of 16 his father passed away and as an only child, his mother became financially dependent upon him. He began work as an artist in the advertising department of Metters and it was during his two years there that he designed the “kooka” logo, the distinctive kookaburra image which adorns the original Metters stoves. He would also go on to design the Mortein logo featuring the mosquito on the dog’s tail which accompanied the catchphrase: ‘when you’re on to a good thing, stick to it’. After leaving Metters, Mills began work as a freelance artist, illustrating fiction and advertisements for the publications of the day which included The Australian Women’s Weekly, The Bulletin, Woman’s Mirror, Australian Magazine (A.M.), Man Magazine and Rydges Business Journal.
It was also at this time he began attending classes at the Royal Art Society of NSW under the tutelage of Datillo Rubbo, Sydney Long and James R Jackson. As well as being on a scholarship for painting for two of his three years there, he was also awarded prizes for Composition of Subject (1st), Best Collection of Work (1st), Drawing from Life (2nd) and Still Life (2nd). In the evenings at the Royal Art Society he would hone his skills on the top floor of an old building on Pitt Street and by day he would put these skills to work to earn his living. His paintings were hung at exhibitions of the Royal Art Society as well as the NSW Society of Artists with both holding annual exhibitions at the Education Department Gallery in Bridge Street.
In 1938 he joined Australian Consolidated Press (ACP) on a permanent basis illustrating fiction and covers for The Australian Women’s Weekly. His colleagues at this time included John Santry, Bill Pidgeon (aka WEP), Carl Shreve, Thora Ungar, Virgil Reilly, Wynn Davies, Rene Dalgleish, Des Condon, Geoffrey Turton (aka Petrov) and George Finey. He was now a full-time artist working to deadlines and well known as a leading artist of Australia’s most popular magazine with over 600,000 copies sold every week.
By this time he was living in Mosman and commuting by ferry. On the ferry he enjoyed many conversations with fashion illustrator Agnes Mary Patricia O’Neill (Pat) who, due to the outbreak of war, had recently returned from London where she had attended the Slade School of Art and illustrated for several department stores, including Harrods. Prior to her travelling, Pat had studied at the Julian Ashton Art School and was a fashion illustrator for the catalogues and weekly papers of David Jones, Mark Foy’s, and Farmers. As two working artists with shared hopes for the future and in love, it wasn’t long before he proposed and they married in 1942 at Scots Kirk Presbyterian Church in Mosman. Pat was always a good critic of her husband’s work and despite his talent, declared that ‘no man can draw a woman’s clothes’.
Soon after having their first child, Ken in 1942, Mills put his experience as an amateur sailor to use and enlisted in the Royal Australian Naval Volunteer Reserve (Naval Auxiliary Patrol) [R.A.N.V.R. (N.A.P.)]. He sailed on the HMAS Zanana for Papua New Guinea to assist operations at Milne Bay. He was witness to air raids over Finschhafen and Goodenough Island, assisting in recovery efforts. In June 1944 he was promoted to Skipper (R.A.N.V.R) of HMAS Koorine based in Sydney Harbour.
As an unofficial war artist, Mills sketched and painted hundreds of pictures during his time in the Pacific. He also painted his experiences after his return while he was recovering from Malaria at the Concord Repatriation General Hospital. The culmination of this work was a solo exhibition of 101 pictures at Macquarie Galleries on Bligh Street on 16 August 1944. The exhibition was a sell-out and Mills donated the proceeds to the R.A.N. Relief Fund. One of these paintings titled Auxiliary Patrol to the Rescue featured on the cover of The Australian Women’s Weekly on 12 August 1944.
After the war, Mills returned as a full-time artist for ACP and he and Pat had two more daughters, Jane (b1945) and Jo (b1949). Principally illustrating for The Australian Women’s Weekly, Mills often used his children as subjects for his illustrations with all three regularly appearing in print. His son Ken features on the cover from 25 November 1950. His daughter Jane features on the cover from 22 October 1949. And his youngest daughter Jo features on the cover from 31 December 1949. Taking turns with Bill Pidgeon, John Santry and other leading artists, Mills had illustrated the cover of The Australian Women’s Weekly forty times by 1950. After this time, photography became the principal medium for covers but the demand for his work within the pages remained for the next twenty years. During his time with ACP he is estimated to have completed more than 5000 illustrations. Also a keen photographer, Mills developed many of his own photographs of sessions at home in front of the camera with his wife Pat, acting out dramatic scenes as reference material for his illustrations.
Although principally an illustrator, his watercolour landscapes were selected for the Wynne Prize on six occasions in the 1960s. After retiring from ACP in 1973, Mills continued to paint for leisure in both oils and watercolours with his paintings appearing in many regional and local exhibitions. After suffering a stroke in 1991, his urge to paint remained, using his left hand to paint watercolours from still life and of Mosman Bay. His determination to walk again and his resolute spirit is captured by his daughter Josonia Palaitis, whose painting of her father won the Doug Moran Portrait Prize in 1994. John Mills passed away peacefully with his wife Pat and his family by his side on 19 October 1993.
Writers:
Guy Palaitis
Date written:
2021
Last updated:
2021
- Born
- b. 12 September 1907
- Summary
- Artist and illustrator best known for his prolific contribution to The Australian Women's Weekly before, during and after WW2.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 19-Oct-93
- Age at death
- 86
Details
Latitude50.97058355 Longitude0.0930414 Start Date1906-01-01 End Date1993-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Uckfield, Sussex, England, UK
- Biography
- The English born Ivor Francis became a dominant influence in Adelaide cultural life from the late 1930s until the 1970s. painter and cartoonist, was official cartoonist for the South Australian Teachers Journal 1938-45.
This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2013
- Born
- b. 13 March 1906
- Summary
- The most prominent of the South Australian surrealist artists, inspired by the writer Max Harris. Francis was also an art critic and cartoonist. Francis was official cartoonist for the 'South Australian Teachers Journal' 1938-45. His creative practice declined after he was appointed to the education board of the Australian Broadcasting Commission.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 6-Nov-93
- Age at death
- 87
Details
Latitude-35.9995747 Longitude146.3906094 Start Date1902-01-01 End Date1993-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Corowa, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- painter, printmaker, craftworker and gallery director, was born in Corowa and grew up in the NSW countryside. From an early age she was encouraged by her mother to draw. The family moved to Melbourne in 1920 and Helen attended the National Gallery School in 1922-25. Influenced by Claude Flight’s Lino-cuts (London, 1927), in the late 1920s she began making linocuts and, a few years later, wood-engravings. She produced many for exhibition, as ex libris plates, for greeting cards, and as illustrations for privately published books such as Russell Grimwade’s Flinders Lane (1947) and J.D.G. Medley’s Stolen and Surreptitious Verses (1952).
In 1949-55 Helen Ogilvie was director of the Peter Bray Gallery in Melbourne. Aiming to show the most exciting contemporary work, she organised exhibitions of such artists as Margo Lewers , Helen Maudsley, John Brack, Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Charles Blackman and Ian Fairweather. In 1956 she moved to London where she partly made a living designing and making modern lampshades. She also began to paint the small studies of Australian rural buildings for which she has become best known. In London she had two successful solo exhibitions – one held after she returned to Australia in 1963 – and she participated in several group exhibitions.
Back in Australia, Helen Ogilvie continued to explore the countryside, sketching and painting the humble buildings she admired which she was aware were disappearing. At the end of the 1970s she decided that she had said all she wanted to say in her art and from then on produced little work. Her interest in the art world, however, remained acute until her sudden death in Melbourne on 1 August 1993. The last solo exhibition she was able to attend opened at australian Girls Own Gallery, Canberra, on her 89th birthday, 4 May 1991. From 1990 until her death she shared her memories with the contributor—with generosity, clarity and a delicious sense of humour – for a book of her wood engravings to be published by Officina Brindabella, Canberra.
Writers:
Maxwell, Helen
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
1992
- Born
- b. 1902
- Summary
- While working as the director of Peter Bray Gallery in Melbourne, Helen Ogilvie organised exhibitions for such avant-garde artists as Margo Lewers, John Brack, Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd, to name a few. Her own work was also very modern and she was engaged with the Crafts Revival of the 1950s and 60s, which allowed her to make a living designing cutting edge lampshades in London for a period.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1-Aug-93
- Age at death
- 91
Details
Latitude-38.661326 Longitude178.0206487 Start Date1902-01-01 End Date1993-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Gisborne, New Zealand
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1902
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1993
- Age at death
- 91
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1947-01-01 End Date1992-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- Craftman, jeweller, painter and gay activist, was included in the Tin Sheds exhibition, “Dead Gay Artists”, 1-23 February 2002.
This artist’s biography is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
stokel
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 17 December 1947
- Summary
- Artist and gay activist, was included in the Tin Sheds exhibition, "Dead Gay Artists", in 2002.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- c.August 1992
- Age at death
- 45
Details
Latitude-26.286773 Longitude132.13302 Start Date1946-01-01 End Date1992-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Ernabella, SA, 'in the bush', Ernabella, SA, Australia
- Biography
- Born 18 November 1946 'in the bush’ at Ernabella. Her mother came into the mission from Angatja. Her father’s country is Pukara. Yipati grew up on the mission and attended Ernabella school. She had two daughters, Tjimpuna and Carol. Yipati’s chosen subjects for paintings included principally scenes from the Piltati Dreaming line and depictions of food gathering on Pitjantjatjara lands. She was previous Chairperson of Ernabella Arts, the organisation which she joined in 1965 as a young girl, training in weaving and developing her painting skills. Her death in 1992 ended a long and distinguished artistic career, which is not elaborated here at the express wish of her immediate family.
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 18 November 1946
- Summary
- Pitjantjatjara artist from Ernabella who worked in a range of media, including batik and screenprint. Kuyata was dedicated to her work and her role as Chairperson of Ernabella Arts. She was an artistic leader in her community.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1992
- Age at death
- 46
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1941-01-01 End Date1992-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Tony McGillick is important in Australian art both as a driver behind the eponymous Central Street Gallery and for his paintings. Influenced by hard edge American abstraction, McGillick’s colour field paintings were seen as the forefront of the internationalism of Australian art replacing earlier parochial movements.
Named after two of his then communist parents’ heroes, Antonov Carlyle McGillick was born in Sydney in 1941. Later in life, Tony (as he was known) said “My childhood was very happy” (Tony McGillick quoted in Throsby and McCarter, 1992, p. 60). He wandered around Kings Cross barefoot, played in Trumper Park and caught the tram to swim at Redleaf Pool in Double Bay, Sydney.
In 1958 he started studying at the Julian Ashton Art School. McGillick also worked in advertising which he continued to do for the rest of his life.
In 1960 he went to London where he stayed for six years. During this period, McGillick participated in group exhibitions in London, Edinburgh and Frankfurt. After a short period in New York, he returned to Sydney in 1965.
McGillick’s pivotal period was the Central Street years. In April 1966, together with Harold Noritis and John White (his half-brother), he opened Central Street Gallery. This was Sydney’s first 'white box’ gallery and while a diverse group of artists exhibited there, many were 'colour field’ painters. He had a joint exhibition with Roy Harpur and Rollin Schlicht in August/September 1966 and in 1968, his first one-man exhibition which was also shown at Pinacotheca in Melbourne. While McGillick’s paintings could appear to be simple areas of colour, there was much more to them. On his studio wall he had a postcard of Titian’s work A Man with a Quilted Sleeve . He drew the outline of a five sided geometric shape based on the sleeve. This is the shape of each panel in Jasper’s Gesture . This work is held in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.
In 1968, he exhibited in 'The Field’ at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, which was later shown in Sydney. This exhibition introduced McGillick’s work to a wider public.
In 1970, Central Street Gallery closed but the space continued to be used by the Institute of Contemporary Art for exhibitions. In 1971, he was involved in the magazine, Other Voices .
McGillick continued to participate in various group exhibitions until 1973 but largely stopped exhibiting. He continued to paint and unstretched draped canvas works replaced his irregularly shaped geometric canvases.
In 1978, he had a one-man exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, titled 'Survey 6 Tony McGillick’ but after this his work was rarely shown. In 1990 his work was included in the exhibition 'Central Street – An exhibition of selected paintings’ at the Charles Nodrum Gallery in Melbourne which was also shown at Sydney’s Ray Hughes Gallery in 1991. In the catalogue essay, McGillick was described as the “main source of (Central Street’s) intellectual and physical energy” (McGillick, 1990).
In the early 1990s, McGillick started to think about exhibiting again and was planning an exhibition at Sherman Galleries (Sydney) but this was unrealised due to his sudden death on 3rd November 1992.
Instead in 1993, Sherman Galleries had a memorial exhibition and another one-man exhibition was held at Annandale Galleries in 2000.
Writers:
Stewart Reed
Date written:
2008
Last updated:
2010
- Born
- b. 22 February 1941
- Summary
- A colour field painter who was also one of the founders and directors of Central Street Gallery in Sydney.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 3-Nov-92
- Age at death
- 51
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1939-01-01 End Date1992-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- He was born on 7 April 1939, the son of Clem Whiteley, an entrepreneurial businessman, and his wife Beryl (née Martin). The family home at 18 Lucretia Avenue Longueville, was near the Lane Cove River where it feeds into Sydney Harbour, so he always had a sense of the beauty of where land meets water. Whiteley could always draw: he won his first art prize at the age of seven. When he was nine his parents sent him to boarding school at Scots College in Bathurst on the other side of the Blue Mountains. This was culturally an unusual decision for urban Australians. The young Whiteley was unhappy at school and did not flourish. He did however come to love the country around Bathurst and later in life returned to it as subject matter. His enduring friendships from these years included the artist Vernon Treweeke.In 1956, the year after he saw an exhibition of Lloyd Rees paintings, Whiteley was awarded first prize in the Young Painters section at the Bathurst Show. He left school mid-year and began working in the art department of the Lintas Advertising Agency. He enrolled in classes at the Julian Ashton School and also joined the open air sketch club conducted by John Santry on the shores of Sydney Harbour. He came to know Lloyd Rees who frequented the group. Always gregarious, the young Whiteley came to know students at Sydney’s other main art school, East Sydney Technical College, including the beautiful Wendy Julius. On weekends he returned to near Bathurst to paint around the old mining towns of Hill End and Sofala. He also ventured south to coast around Thirroul and Wollongong. Landscape was the dominant popular genre for Australian artists at this time, but Whiteley also wanted to explore the human condition in art, and one of his paintings of this period was of people in an inner city soup kitchen.In 1959 the artist and cartoonist William Pidgeon, who was a family friend, encouraged him to leave his job with Lintas and to concentrate on painting a body of work for a travelling scholarship to be awarded by the Italian Government. The judge was Russell Drysdale and Whiteley’w winning work, painted around Bathurst and Sofala, showed sensuous painterly qualities in the browns of the hills.He arrived at Naples on 25 February 1960, and spent some months in Rome as well as travelling to Florence and London. In Paris he was reunited with Wendy Julius and together they returned to Florence and then Venice. Whiteley first exhibited with a commercial gallery in London in 1960, and at the end of the year moved to a house in Ladbroke Grove in London, where he was reunited with friends from Sydney, including Michael Johnson, and met other Australian expatriates, including Arthur Boyd. The following year his work was included in the Survey of Recent Australian Painting at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, and a painting from this was bought for the Tate Gallery.In 1963 he married Wendy Julius, her body and her beauty became embedded into his subject matter. Whiteley’s successful London years were interspersed with extended visits to Europe and the USA. He drew the lithe movements of animals in the zoo, and made a memorable series of paintings and prints based on 10 Rillington Place and the activities of the psychotic murderer Christie.In 1967 he was awarded a Harkness Foundation Scholarship and moved to the United States. The Whiteley family (daughter Arkie was born in 1964) stayed in a penthouse in the Hotel Chelsea. Janis Joplin was one of Arkie’s baby sitters, and when they left, a Brett Whiteley painting took pride of place, hanging behind the desk in the reception area. The intensity of this American experience, which coincided with a time of cultural and political turmoil, was reflected in changes in his art. Sandra McGrath has linked his art of this period to a self-identification with Bob Dylan, and Whiteley at this stage did begin to grow his hair in a Dylanesque mop. The excesses,contradictions and conflicts he felt were at the heart of the American experience were expressed in his large panel series, The American Dream (1969).In July 1969 the Whiteley family left the USA for a simpler life in Fiji, where they were arrested for possessing marijuana and were deported to Australia, arriving in Sydney in November. They rented a house overlooking the Harbour in Walker Street Lavender Bay; later they bought it and modified the house for their purposes. Sydney at that time was on the cusp of change as the first generation of post-World War II babyboomers were not prepared to accept the wisdom of the past, but wanted new heroes. Whiteley’s international fame had preceded him, and he relished in the rock star status he was afforded in the popular media as well as in artistic circles. In Sydney, in the early 1970s, his excesses were seen as legitimate behaviour for a great artist. From about 1970 he also enjoyed the creative milieu of the Yellow House, which Martin Sharp had caused to be established on the site of the old Terry Clune Galleries in MacLeay Street, Potts Point. Here Whiteley worked collaboratively with old friends, and made new ones. The Yellow House ended in about 1973 and in its last days the drug that easily supplanted all others was heroin. Whiteley’s major work of this time was the panel series of Alchemy, a work on the elements of dross andmagic that combined to make art. It was an intense painting, and some were uncomfortable with its intensity. Afterwards there were more relaxed works, as views from Lavender Bay became elements in a series of Matisse influenced odes to the beauty of Sydney Harbour. These paintings became such objects of lust to Australian art collectors that the possession of one is the leitmotif in Up For Grabs (2000), a play by David Williamson.Whiteley was first awarded the Archibald Prize in 1976 for Self Portrait in the Studio. In the following years other self portraits tracked the changes in his body, perception and ability under the increasing influence of heroin. Wendy joined him for some years as an addict, but was eventually successful in withdrawing. In 1985 he purchased an old T-Shirt factory in Surry Hills, which he converted into a dedicated studio. He moved to the studio alone in 1987, but some time afterwards began to share with Janice Spencer, a fellow addict he met at Narcotics Anonymous.In 1989 Brett and Wendy Whiteley were divorced, but the acrimonious property dispute over the ownership of was still not settled at the time of his death from an overdose of methadone at a motel at Thirroul south of Sydney, on 15 June 1992.After Whiteley’s death his will was successfully disputed by his daughter Arkie, who was awarded the bulk of his estate. The NSW government established the Brett Whiteley studio as an ongoing (albeit sanitised) record of his working life. To honour his memory, his mother, Beryl Whiteley, established the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship. As with the Brett Whiteley Studio this is administered by the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Writers:
Olivia Bolton
Joanna Mendelssohn
Peter Pidgeon
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 7 April 1939
- Summary
- Brett Whiteley was the first Australian to combine a pop star's persona with that of a visual artist. He worked across the mediums of painting, sculpture and graphic work and was several times awarded the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prizes. He achieved domestic and international recognition early in his career in the 1960s. His Matisse influenced paintings of domestic interiors and Sydney Harbour remain enduring images.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 15-Jun-92
- Age at death
- 53
Details
Latitude-37.560833 Longitude143.8475 Start Date1939-01-01 End Date1992-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Ballarat, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1939
- Summary
- Performance poet, actor, dadaist and sound artist, inspired by the underground movements he encountered in the USA and UK in the late 1960s and early 1970s
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 19-Jun-92
- Age at death
- 53
Details
Latitude-22.815924 Longitude127.7642195 Start Date1925-01-01 End Date1992-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Kiwirrkura
- Biography
- Born 'in the bush’ near the present site of the Kiwirrkura community c.1925, Donkeyman Lee was a Kukatja speaker. His principal site is Walla Walla, just out of Kiwirrkura, and his paintings, which he began producing in 1985 at Balgo, are mainly Tingari stories for this area. Donkeyman usually worked on large-scale canvases and with these he managed to convey a sense of his desert country. His works, which are included in the National Gallery of Australia and the National Gallery of Victoria, are always bold and strong and full of his personal experiences of Men’s Law. They are also surprisingly innovative for an older man, and convey something of the easy-going good humour of the artist. He lived in Balgo and sold his paintings through Warlayirti Artists.
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1925
- Summary
- Kukatja artist who often produced bold, large- scale works, reflecting his strong association with Men's Law in Balgo. His work is held in major national collections.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1992
- Age at death
- 67
Details
Latitude-33.968226 Longitude151.1354509 Start Date1924-01-01 End Date1992-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Kogarah, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- comic book artist, was born Kogarah, NSW and educated at Kogarah Primary, Canterbury High and Sydney Grammar Schools. Jim Russell encouraged him to attend weekly art classes in Smith’s attic studio. Worked with Greater Union Theatres art department and also drew recognition charts for the air training corps before joining the air force. Demobilised in 1946, he sold an adventure comic strip Destiny Scott to the Sydney Morning Herald . He created Bunny Allen, the Glamour Girl (originals ML; one in SLNSW b/w show in 1999) and The Buccaneer for the All-Australian Comics Group. All 30 or so issues of Tex Morton’s Wild West Comics (1947-50), named after a prominent Country and Western singer, featured Chatto’s Bunny Allen .
In 1949 Chatto drew The Lone Wolf for Atlas Publications. In 1954, in association with Larry S. Cleland, he produced covers for H. John Edwards and Cleveland Press (comics and pulp novels). At Cleveland Press he drew The Twilight Ranger and El Lobo as well as covers and began a Skippy series based on the TV program for Page Publications (failed because it came out after the series had peaked). Etc (see Sheill).
In 1977 Chatto took over the Sunday newspaper strip Air Hawk and the Flying Doctor . He left to become a freelance cine-cameraman and TV producer.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1924
- Summary
- Late 20th century comic book artist and filmmaker.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1992
- Age at death
- 68
Details
Latitude52 Longitude20 Start Date1917-01-01 End Date1992-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Poland
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1917
- Summary
- Wolanski is the designer of the Lido clip-on tie and founder of Lido Tie Company. He was also active as a sculptor with works in Israeli Parliament, Tel Aviv and Fitzroy Gardens, Sydney.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-92
- Age at death
- 75
Details
Latitude51.4126079 Longitude-1.5167069 Start Date1917-01-01 End Date1992-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Hungerford, Berkshire, England, UK
- Biography
- sculptor and illustrator; drew comic illustrations in Australia Week-end Book 5 (1946), e.g. head (p.29) and man with tiny woman on his head (p.197).
This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 25 November 1917
- Summary
- Influential mid 20th century sculptor, illustrator and art teacher who taught extensively in Australia in the 1940s and 1950s before settling in Auckland, New Zealand. This biography deals with his wartime cartoons.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 28-Dec-92
- Age at death
- 75
Details
Latitude-37.8001 Longitude144.9671 Start Date1917-01-01 End Date1992-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Carlton, VIC, Australia
- Biography
- Sidney Nolan was born on 22 April 1917, the first of four children of a Melbourne tram driver, Sidney Nolan, and his wife Dora Sutherland. His parents were Australian born, but very aware of their Irish cultural heritage. Later that year the family moved to the seaside suburb of St Kilda, elements of which were later to feature in Nolan’s mature art.In 1932 Nolan left school at the standard leaving age of 14 and enrolled in design and crafts at Prahran Technical College. The next year he began working for Fayrefield Hats where he produced advertising and display stands. This technical work gave him an early introduction to spray paints and experimental use of materials. In 1934 he enrolled in evening classes at the National Gallery School and within a few years was making plein air paintings within the Victorian impressionist tradition. His interest in art and ideas led him on a more adventurous path. In 1938 he met the art patrons John and Sunday Reed and through his involvement with them became a founding member of Victoria’s Contemporary Art Society. The same year he married fellow art student, Elizabeth Paterson, the grand-daughter of the artist John Ford Paterson and moved to Ocean Grove near Barwon Heads. In 1939 Nolan saw the Herald Exhibition of English and European Contemporary Art, which introduced him to the art of 20th century Europe and radicalised his own approach to art. His first solo exhibition in 1940 was opened by John Reed. The same year Nolan’s daughter, Amelda, was born.The following year Nolan left his family to live with the Reeds at their home at Heide Park. He remained romantically involved with Sunday Reed until 1947 and she actively encouraged him to take a more experimental approach with his art. He began to use Ripolin enamel paint, material more commonly used by house painters. Its fluidity and rapid drying enabled him to freely experiment with different styles and to quickly paint more than one work at a time. He was drawn into the activities of the Reeds, Max Harris and the Angry Penguins group, and in 1944 painted a series of paintings in response to the poems of the bq). naivebq). poet, Ern Malley. After an issue of the Angry Penguins magazine celebrated the genius of Malley (with a cover illustration by Nolan) the poet was revealed to be a hoax concocted by two anti-modernist poets. The entry of Japan into World War II led to Australia conscripting soldiers for the first time in its history. Nolan was conscripted and posted to the Wimmera in rural Victoria. Two years later,faced with the possibility of being posted to New Guinea, he deserted the Army and took refuge with the Reeds at their Heide and Parkville homes. Living a fugitive life may have turned his mind to the circumstances of other fugitives from justice. Douglas Stewart’s radio play in verse, Ned Kelly, was broadcast in 1942, but Nolan never admitted Stewart as a possible source for his Ned Kelly series which emerged in the second half of the decade. These paintings remain his most memorable work and he continually returned to this subject matter throughout his career.In 1947 Nolan left Sunday Reed and her husband John to live with John’s sister Cynthia who was already establishing a reputation as a sensitive writer. They moved to Sydney where the new gallery director, Hal Missingham, was an active supporter of Nolan’s work. Their house at Wahroonga backed onto the property of the conservative artist Lionel Lindsay. When Lindsay observed Nolan’s practice of painting a row of paintings all at once he wrote to his friend Harold Wright, angrily denouncing Nolan as a charlatan. In 1948, he put his affairs in order, obtained a dishonourable discharge from the Army,and married Cynthia. The couple made several flights over outback Australia,and Nolan began his remarkable series of aerial paintings of the outback, where thin wiped layers of Ripolin are used to evoke the shapes of ragged mountains.In 1951 they left for Europe and in 1953 they settled permanently in London, but made frequent visits to other parts of Europe, Africa, Antarctica and often returned to Australia. The London base was essential to establishing Nolan’s British reputation. He was honoured with a survey exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1957, the same year as he created the set designs for the stage version of Douglas Stewart’s Ned Kelly play. He was awarded a Harkness Fellowship to the USA in 1959 and in 1963 was awarded an OBE for his services to art. Many retrospective exhibitions were to follow, including a 1967 exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, a 1973 exhibition in Dublin and a 1987 national touring exhibition in Australia.Cynthia Nolan committed suicide on 23 November 1976. In 1978 Nolan married Mary Boyd Perceval, the widow of artist John Perceval and sister of his friend Arthur Boyd. The relative haste of this marriage caused a permanent rift with his former friend Patrick White, who attacked him in his memoir Flaws in the Glass. Nolan responded in paint.In 1981 he was made a Knight Bachelor for his services to art, and in 1983 they settled at Rodd Farm on the borders of Wales where he enjoyed the expansive landscape for the rest of his life. While he was honoured by Australian galleries with exhibitions in the later years, he was emotionally more committed to Britain and Ireland. In 1986, four years before his death, he gave fifty paintings to the people of Ireland.
Writers:
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2011
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 22 April 1917
- Summary
- Sir Sidney Nolan, the son of a Melbourne tram driver, became one of Australia's most celebrated and honoured artists. His Ned Kelly series made him a household name. Working in several media and art forms - painting, drawing, printmaking, set design, murals, spray painting and collage - he created more than 10,000 individual works.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 28-Nov-92
- Age at death
- 75
Details
Latitude-27.467778 Longitude153.028056 Start Date1916-01-01 End Date1992-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Brisbane, Qld., Australia
- Biography
- printmaker and painter, was born in Brisbane on 4 January 1916, daughter of Joselyn Salisbury and Clifford Isles, a director of Isles, Love & Co, auctioneers. She married Max Allen in 1939; they had three children Sarah (Mrs Clive Lucas), Jocelyn and Nicholas, who donated a large collection of her prints to the National Gallery of Australia [NGA]. Joyce Allen, a friend of the printmaker Ailsa Allan , made her first linocuts in the late 1940s, e.g. The Pied Piper 1947, which was intended as an illustration to Robert Browning’s poem and hence never editioned. In the 1950s she attended classes given by Thea Proctor but only began working seriously on her prints in the early 1960s when her friend Ysobel Irvine introduced her to Willoughby Art Workshop and the teachings of Joy Ewart . There she met Elizabeth Rooney , under whose guidance she experimented with etching, although linocut remained her primary medium. Allen’s linocuts include Within a Week 1967 (Art Gallery of New South Wales, purchased by Hal Missingham from the exhibition Sydney Printmakers , Blaxland Galleries, 3 September 1967), The Pursuit of Trivia 1986, At the Gallery 1987 (private collection [p.c.]), Fury 1989, Death in the Dump 1989 (p.c.) and Muddle 1980s (every mother’s domestic situation). She always painted watercolour landscapes too.
Allen exhibited with the Australian Watercolour Institute and the Society of Artists in the late 1950s, with the Sydney Printmakers at Blaxland Galleries in the early 1960s and in Australian Print Council exhibitions in 1967, 1969 and 1971. She held solo exhibitions at the Willoughby Art Centre and with the Bowral and Berrima Art Societies. Her prints were included in the 1968 Bradford Print Biennale (UK) in 1968, with Baldessin , Ruth Faerber, Graham King, Elizabeth Rooney and Stephen Spurrier.
Allen and her husband moved to Bowral in 1970 where she taught briefly at the Heartfield School and continued to teach part time with the Bowral Art Society. A retrospective exhibition of her linocuts was held at Scheding Berry Gallery, Sydney in 1986 – the year a large collection of her works was acquired by the NGA (added to by her children in 1993 so that the gallery now has over 100 prints ranging from 'Backyard, Sydney’ 1947 and 'The giant pouring water’ and 'Title Page: The Lonely Giant’ 1948 to 'Diners’ and Still life in the dump 1991). She had a solo exhibition at australian [sic] Girls’ Own Gallery [aGOG], Canberra, in 1990 and her work was included in several group shows at this gallery. In 1991 she received the Visual Arts and Crafts Board of the Australia Council’s Emeritus Award but died suddenly at Bowral on 30 July 1992, just after a retrospective exhibition of her work had opened at Macquarie Galleries, Sydney. Helen Maxwell Galleries, Canberra (formerly aGOG) gave her another small solo show in June-July 2001.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 4 January 1916
- Summary
- Brisbane born painter and printmaker and a student of Thea Proctor and Joy Ewart. Allen was a regular exhibitor with the Print Council of Australia and in 1991 was awarded the Visual Arts and Crafts Board of the Australia Council's Emeritus Award.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 30-Jul-92
- Age at death
- 76
Details
Latitude-33.8520678 Longitude151.153689 Start Date1915-01-01 End Date1992-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Drummoyne, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- painter, graphic artist, cartoonist and printer, was born on 17 September 1915 at Drummoyne, Sydney. After helping milk cows on his parents’ farm at the beginning of the Depression, he served an apprenticeship as a commercial artist during the Depression then studied at East Sydney Technical College [ESTC] in the late 1930s. He helped form the Windsor Group, which painted landscapes around Windsor (see catalogue) and married actress Frances Cottingham. After about four years in the RAAF (at the Commonwealth Aircraft Factory, acc. Fox), he exhibited in the 'Australia at War’ exhibition (National Gallery of Victoria, 1945), winning a first prize for one of his paintings of Civil Construction Workers.
A member of the Communist Party of Australia, Rod Shaw was one of the founders of the Studio of Realist Art [SORA] in 1945, a body set up partly in dissatisfaction with the Contemporary Art Society (which had sided against Dobell in the 1944 Archibald Prize case). He was most active in its public programs; he showed work at the annual exhibitions, wrote and published its regular bulletins, organised art classes and taught drawing to interested Waterside Workers. After the war, with Dick Edwards, he founded the publishing company of Edwards & Shaw, which produced some of the finest art and poetry books seen in Australia; one of the last was James Mollison’s Fred Williams Etchings . It also published, for the Council of Civil Liberties, the banned report of the English trial of Penguin Books for publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover . He was also on the editorial board of Helen Palmer’s democratic-socialist journal Outlook , for which he drew cartoons and other humorous illustrations (Fox).
Despite having little time for painting, Shaw painted Cable Layers for the 1946 NSW Travelling Art Scholarship. He did not win, but after the oil was shown at SORA that year it was purchased by the Art Gallery of New South Wales. In 1947 (with Nan Hortin , John Oldham and Kevin Lynch ) he participated in the Australian section of the British Empire Exhibition at the Royal Easter Show, painting portraits of Henry Lawson, John Macarthur and Peter Lalor. His Pyrmont Washing (originally titled Washing Out, White Bay Cutting ) of 1948 was exhibited in that year’s SORA show (ill. Merewether). In the early 1950s he and others (including Hortin) began painting a large mural in the Waterside Workers Federation offices depicting the story of the Labor Movement from the 1890s strikes onwards.
By the mid-1970s Shaw’s own paintings had turned more towards figurative abstraction, but he produced little because he was increasingly involved in publishing and teaching. He contributed articles and illustrations to Overland , eg 'Dear Stephen’ no. 56 (Spring 1973), 23. Later he taught at Sydney University’s Tin Sheds and at ESTC. He died in December 1992 (see obit. Sydney Morning Herald , 8 December).
The Roderick Shaw collection of commercial illustrations, art posters and cartoons 1940-90 (Mitchell Library PXD 836) includes his business card; three pen drawings of Bathurst Island people, one dated 1942; drawings for magazines articles, stories and festivals; prints; four Aboriginal designs by Aboriginal artists in an A4 envelope (presumably 1942); four sketchbooks and loose leaves from sketchbooks; 13 political cartoons by 'Schweik’ (a pseudonym) and four other b/w drawings.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
staffcontributor
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 17 September 1915
- Summary
- Rod Shaw was a dominant figure in the left wing Studio of Realist Art in the 1950s while also being half of the progressive publisher, Edwards & Shaw which printed both the banned book The Trial of Lady Chatterely and the Art Gallery of New South Wales' catalogues. He was also well known as a painter,graphic artist, and cartoonist.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 7-Dec-92
- Age at death
- 77
Details
Latitude-27.467778 Longitude153.028056 Start Date1912-01-01 End Date1992-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Brisbane, Qld, Australia
- Biography
- Guilford Bell (1912-1992) was born in Brisbane, grew up on his family’s extensive rural properties in Queensland, and in 1930 was articled to a Brisbane Beaux Arts architect, Lange L. Powell (then president of the Queensland Institute of Architects). At night, he studied at the Central Technical College, from where he graduated in 1935 with a Diploma of Architecture and the gold medall for best student. In 1936, he went to London and began work with Georgian-style architect Professor Albert E. Richardson, head of the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College, London. While working there, he visited the Paris Exposition in 1937 and accompanied the distinguished archaeologist Max Mallowan and his wife, novelist Agatha Christie, on their spring 1938 expedition to Syria and their autumn 1938 expedition to Brak; Belle contributing most of the plans and drawings of the digging sites for Mallowan’s 1947 book, Iraq. Back in London in 1939, one of his drawings was exhibited at the Royal Academy and published in the Architect’s Journal before he returned to Australia when war was declared. He worked in Canberra for Ansett airlines, then in 1943 joined the RAAF as an architect, receiving his officer’s commission in 1944. In 1946, he registered in Melbourne as an architect, working on occasional joint ventures with the chief architect at Ansett, John A La Gerche. In 1948, he completed the ANA Terminal in Sydney and travelled to the United States with Reg Ansett to study resort architecture. On return, he designed the first buildings for Hayman Island Resort on the Great Barrier Reef. In 1952, he set up a private practice in Toorak and began designing grand houses for wealthy clients around Australia, including several on country and suburban sites in New South Wales during the 1950s and 1960s. In 1955, a young graduate architect, David Godsell, began working for him; leading to a strong shift in the work towards the principles of Frank Lloyd Wright and Richard Neutra. In 1961, after Godsell left the practice, Bell went into partnership with Neil Clerehan, but the Clerehan and Bell practice was dissolved in 1964 and Bell continued to lead his own firm until he took on a much younger partner, Graham Fisher, in 1983. The work was strongly influenced by his Beaux Arts training in the Classical Orders, but executed with modern materials, technologies and open plan concepts.Sources—Van Schaik, Leon (ed.). The Life Work of Guilford Bell 1912-1992. Melbourne: Black Inc (Schwartz Publishing), especially Philip Goad’s essay ‘A Very Private Practice: The Life and Work of Guilford Bell’, pp 106-131
Writers:
Davina Jackson
Date written:
2015
Last updated:
2015
- Born
- b. 1912
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1992
- Age at death
- 80
Details
Latitude-33.8894781 Longitude151.1274125 Start Date1911-01-01 End Date1992-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Ashfield, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Max Dupain (1911-1992)was Australia’s most important photographer between Harold Cazenoux and David Moore and John Gollings. The photographer of choice for most leading Sydney architects from the 1950s to the 1980s. Preferred black and white silver gelatin prints or 35mm colour slides to medium and large format transparencies. Dupain’s own house (shared with another noted photographer, his first wife Olive Cotton) was designed by Arthur Baldwinson in the mid 1950s. Books with substantial quantities of Dupain photographs include: Max Dupain, Old Colonial Buildings of Australia, Methuen 1980; Peter Johnson, Leslie Wilkinson: A Practical Idealist, Unwin Hyman 1983; Gael Newton, Max Dupain, David Ell Press 1980; James Broadbent, Clive Lucas and Ian Stapleton, The Golden Decade of Australian Architecture: The Work of John Verge, David Ell Press 1978, and Francis Greenway: A Celebration, Cassell Australia 1980.Sources—Various websites accessed on a Google search October 2004.
Writers:
Davina Jackson
Date written:
2015
Last updated:
2015
- Born
- b. 4 April 1911
- Summary
- Max Dupain was one of Australia's outstanding photographers of the mid 20th century, specialising in architecture, merchandise, industrial and portrait commissions, as well as his own landscape and scenery compositions. His works have been exhibited widely and form the basis of various books.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1992
- Age at death
- 81
Details
Latitude48.2 Longitude16.366667 Start Date1909-01-01 End Date1992-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Vienna, Austria
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1909
- Summary
- Book keeper in the family furniture business, Gerstl, from early 1950s until the 1980s. Her mother, Olga Kafka and brother Paul Kafka emigrated to Australia and the Gerstl family briefly lived with them in Lindfield when they arrived in 1947. The two businesses were kept strictly separate, but the families were socially close. From 1939-1946 Charlotte ran a cake shop in Shanghai that was a centre for European social life.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1-Jan-92
- Age at death
- 83
Details
Latitude-37.864 Longitude144.982 Start Date1908-01-01 End Date1992-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- St Kilda, Melbourne, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1908
- Summary
- Chamberlain began his career in automotive design as racing driver, later developing a racing car identified as the "Beetle". He later designed the Chamberlain Champion Model Tractor and produced it in a Perth, WA factory from 1955.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-92
- Age at death
- 84
Details
Latitude-42.880556 Longitude147.325 Start Date1907-01-01 End Date1992-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Hobart, Tas., Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1907
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1992
- Age at death
- 85
Details
Latitude-33.8933952 Longitude151.1368729 Start Date1906-01-01 End Date1992-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Summer Hill, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Frank Hinder was a Sydney cartoonist, illustrator, painter and printmaker. He was born on 26 June 1906 at Summer Hill, NSW. He had art lessons from his father, an amateur painter, and attended the Royal Art Society of NSW School in 1924, East Sydney Technical College in 1925-27, the Art Institute of Chicago in 1927-28, New York School of Fine Arts 1929 and the Master Institute of the Roerich Museum, NY, in 1930-31. Although best known as a painter (see Free) and a lithographer (see Bloomfield), he also did cartoons, graphic and advertising art in 1934-64. While in the USA in the early 1930s he contributed drawings to the New Yorker and to a Boston journal ( Boston Breeze ?), including a drawing of an American street crowd (Mitchell Library). He married Margel Harris in the US and they returned to Sydney in 1934.
In 1936 Frank illustrated Alice in Wonderland (the 4th Australian “Alice”). The Mitchell Library’s James Hardie Childhood collection includes his 'Hunting of the Snark’, with a lengthy series of b/w pencil drawings developing a drawing of the captain with a map 'that was a perfect blank’, based on a type of Golden Section theory about spirals and nested rectangles copyrighted by Fanning.
In the 1940s Hinder drew cartoons in Australia: National Journal , e.g. May 1947, and Australia Week-end Book 5 (1946), 13: “M’dear! Just one of those days you can’t call your lavatory your own!” (demented woman on phone with children’s party going on in the background) and p.196 (on dogs). An excellent ink drawing titled Frustrated artist shows a cartoonist (who looks like Hinder) at a drawing board and a man (who looks like George Lambert ) saying: 'Funny drawings, eh? I do them myself sometimes – but I put mine in the waste-paper basket’ c.1946, published Australia: National Journal . The original was included in the S.H. Ervin 1999 b/w art show (courtesy King Street Gallery, Sydney) with his matching drawing Universal Youth : “I know I’m right! – but I just can’t explain myself – not even to myself” c.1947, done for the same journal.
A coloured pencil drawing offered Deutscher-Menzies 1 May 2001, lot 180 (col. Ill, est. $700-1,000) Margo Draws a Vertebrae , inscribed 'Penrith – 45 F.C.H’, is a clever little portrait of Margo Lewers (a visually joke about her abstracting natural motifs). A good pen on vellum simple line nude appeared in Josef Lebovic Collectors’ List 1996 no.56, cat.26.
Further information:Frank Hinder (1906-1992), a painter, was interested in movement and rhythm in art and the truth behind appearances. He described his Construction painting as “trying to express a back-and-forth movement on the picture plain and he was strongly influenced by new scientific theories of his time, including Jay Hambridge’s 1902 book, Dynamic Symmetry (on the underlying order in natural forms). In 1930, he married Margel Hinder, a New York-born sculptor, in Boston, MA, and returned to Sydney with her in 1934.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Michael Bogle
Davina Jackson
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2015
- Born
- b. 26 June 1906
- Summary
- Mid 20th century modernist cartoonist, illustrator, designer, painter and printmaker. Hinder also worked with the Australian camouflage group during the 1939-45 war as a designer for the "Hinder Spider", a portable camouflage frame for soldiers. Theatre and set designs by Hinder are also known.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 31-Dec-92
- Age at death
- 86
Details
Latitude-36.3143823 Longitude146.8390836 Start Date1906-01-01 End Date1992-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Yackandandah, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- Cyril Gibbs was born in 1906 at Yackandandah, Victoria. He graduated from the Ballarat School of Mines and Industries in 1929 and taught part time at the Swinburne Technical College, Melbourne, from 1929 to 1931. Gibbs taught in Sydney for three years before moving to Brisbane in 1934 where, in 1936, he set up a commercial art studio. He took over from F.J. Martyn Roberts as the second Head of the Art School, Central Technical College, in 1938, and acted in this position until his retirement in 1971, when the institution became the College of Art, Morningside. Gibbs taught several generations of Queensland art students during this time including Marion Finlayson, Shirley Miller and Roy Paget.
Gibbs was involved in many aspects of arts administration apart from his teaching role. He was a Trustee of the Queensland National Art Gallery from 1946 to 1959, overseeing the appointment of its first Director in 1949, and acted as a member of the Art Advisory Committee for ten years. He regarded the 1946 acquisition of E. Phillips Fox 's major canvas, Bathing hour , with special pride as it was his direct responsibility.
Gibbs lectured in art subjects for the Board of Adult Education for 20 years, was a Vice-President of the Queensland Art Teacher’s Association, a life member of the Art Lecturers’ Association, and a member of the Art Advisory Sub- committee to the Queensland Board of Post Primary Studies for three years. Gibbs was also the Queensland Department of Education representative at UNESCO seminars in Melbourne, 1954; Canberra, 1963; and Melbourne, 1967 and was the Australian Representative at the Accademia di Belle Arti, Perugia, in 1964.
Gibbs was awarded the Coronation Medal for his services to art in 1953, elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, London, in 1964, awarded a certificate in art and culture from the University of Perugia, Italy, also in 1964, and was awarded an honorary Bachelor of Arts from the College of Art, Brisbane, the year before his death.
Gibbs was awarded watercolour prizes at the Royal National Association and Industrial Association from 1959 to 1961 and subsequently acted as judge for the prize for many years. He received the Caltex Warana prize for watercolour in 1962 and exhibited with the Redcliffe Art Contest in 1960, 1961 and 1965, being awarded the prize in the latter most year. Gibbs’s work was also included in numerous other group exhibitions such as the H.C. Richards Memorial Prize, 1959 and 1962, and the Caltex Centenary Prize in 1959. He exhibited with the Half Dozen Group of Artists and was Vice-Patron of that society 1984-92. A solo exhibition of his work was held at the Moreton Galleries, Brisbane, in 1949 and an exhibition of 'Paintings from the estate of Cyril Gibbs (1906-92)’ was held at Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane, just after his death in 1992.
Research Curator, Queensland Heritage, Queensland Art Gallery
Writers:
Cooke, Glenn R.
Date written:
2008
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1906
- Summary
- Cyril Gibbs was an accomplished watercolourist who produced a substantial output over his lifetime but his contribution to arts administration in Brisbane was probably as significant an achievement.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 19-Feb-92
- Age at death
- 86
Details
Latitude-37 Longitude144 Start Date1903-01-01 End Date1992-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Victoria
- Biography
- painter, printmaker, commercial artist and teacher, was born in Victoria. He studied at the NGV School, Melbourne 1919-23. Appointed an official war artist in 1941, he was captured in February 1942 after the fall of Singapore and spent three and a half years as a POW in Malaya, recording his experiences in a series of drawings exhibited on his return. In the Exhibition of Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture by Australian Official War Artists 1943-44 (JK catalogue), he was represented only by a self-portrait, lent by the Australian War Memorial (cat.23, ill. p.9), and a long catalogue note of extracts from his letters to the Australian War Memorial in 1942, plus a note stating that the self-portrait was 'the only work of Murray Griffin that can be shown. Mr. Griffin was appointed to work with the 8th Australian Dvision in Malaya and served in that theatre of war from November 1941, to February, 1942, when he was taken prisoner at the fall of Singapore. During his three months’ service in Malaya he completed a number of pictures which were packed ready for transport to Australia, but apparently did not leave the country, and their fate is unknown.’
Griffin also painted this experience, e.g. The Hungry Ones, Changi 1943, oil on board, Warrnambool AG (ill. Hanson, cat. 231 & John MacDonald, Federation NGA 2000). Although solely in Changi, where conditions were actually less harsh than many other Japanese camps, Griffin spoke to prisoners who returned from working on the Thai Railway and was inspired to make paintings and prints recording their experiences too, e.g. Hospital Ward, Thailand Railway (painting), Bridge Work, Thailand Railway 1946, pen, brush, brown ink and pencil with white, 51.4 × 35.6 cm, AWM, and Working on the Thailand railway cutting, July 1943 , brush and ink, 36 × 53.6 cm, AWM (last two illustrated in 'Special P.O.W. issue’, Journal of the Australian War Memorial 14, April 1989, cover & p.6).
Later Griffin became known for his colour prints, especially his birds and animals, e.g. The Owl , linocut, and Red Parrots , linocut and screenprint (ill Bridget McDonnell Gallery, Carlton, Early Australian Painters , catalogue of exhibition 25 May-15 June 2001, cats 42, 43).
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1903
- Summary
- Griffin spent three and a half years as a POW in Changi, recording his experiences in a series of drawings exhibited on his return. He later became known for his colour prints of birds and animals.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1992
- Age at death
- 89
Details
Latitude-29.7385108 Longitude151.7357523 Start Date1894-01-01 End Date1992-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Glenn Innes, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Porcelain painter Ethel Warbuton (née Beavis), was born in Glenn Innes, NSW, 1894. Warburton was married to Raymond Parker Warburton (also a porcelain painter), they had a daughter – Patricia Ganter.
Warburton painted porcelain cups and saucers for Aynsley China Limited c. 1916-55. Warburton was also a member of the NSW Arts & Crafts Society from 1922, and President of the society from 1961-65.
Examples of her ceramic painting are held at the Powerhouse Museum.
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Date written:
Last updated:
- Born
- b. 17 March 1894
- Summary
- Porcelain painter Ethel Warbuton (née Beavis), was born in Glenn Innes, NSW, 1894. Warburton was married to Raymond Parker Warburton (also a porcelain painter), they have a daughter - Patricia Ganter. Warburton painted porcelain cups and saucers for Aynsley China Limited c. 1916-1955. Warburton was also a member of the NSW Arts & Crafts Society from 1922, was President of the society from 1961-65. Examples of her ceramic painting are held at the Powerhouse Museum.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1992
- Age at death
- 98
Details
Latitude-18.324439 Longitude127.55465 Start Date1953-01-01 End Date1991-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Canning Stock Route, Western Australia, Australia
- Biography
- Born 'in the bush’ near the Canning Stock Route c.1953, Ena Gimme was a member of the Mulan community and a Kukatja speaker. She spent her early years in the area around Kinyu, north of the Canning Stock Route. Her traditional country was Kalliyangku, near the Canning Stock Route, and her main Dreamings are Tingari stories. The artist’s work shared more in common with that of older Warlayirti painters than it did with that of her peers. Perhaps this shows the influence of her mother, Eubena Nampitjin , on whose paintings she sometimes assisted. Ena Gimme began painting for Warlayirti Artists in 1989. She used layers of different coloured dotting to create 'rough’ but dramatic works, often with a 'floral’ look.
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1953
- Summary
- Kukatja artist from the small community of Mulan (WA). Her painting style is influenced by senior Warlayirti artists including her mother, Eubena Nampitjin. Her work is held in major public collections, such as the National Gallery of Victoria.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- Mar-91
- Age at death
- 38
Details
Latitude-32.936 Longitude117.178 Start Date1940-01-01 End Date1991-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Narrogin, WA, Australia
- Biography
- Greg Kelly, Noongar artist, was born in 1940 at Narrogin in south Western Australia. Kelly was one of Henry and Bella Kelly 's four sons, the others being Goldie Kelly , Flemming Kelly and Simpson Kelly . Greg Kelly was taken away from his parents in 1946, and he and his brothers spent a number of their childhood years in the Carrolup Native Settlement in Katanning. He left Carrolup when he was thirteen years of age, and began work as a farmhand on properties in the region of Wandering and Narrogin. Between 1958-68 he played for Cuballing Football Club.
Kelly began painting in the 1970s, working with watercolours, acrylics and oil paints. He did not exhibit his work, but sold paintings to family members and associates in the southwest, as well as international visitors to the region. Stylistically, his works bear the influence of the Carrolup style and of his mother, a highly acclaimed artist of the southwest who influenced many younger generation Noongar artists. Kelly’s brothers Goldie and Simpson were also artists.Kelly passed away in 1991.This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Fisher, Laura
Date written:
2009
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1940
- Summary
- Noongar artist who lived at the Carrolup Native Settlement in Katanning, WA, between the ages of six and thirteen. His mother was Bella Kelly, a highly acclaimed artist in the southwest of WA.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1991
- Age at death
- 51
Details
Latitude-30 Longitude135 Start Date1939-01-01 End Date1991-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- South Australia, SA, Australia
- Biography
- painter, printmaker, writer and tough SA feminist; ills in Roger Butler, My Head is a Map: A decade of Australian Prints , NGA catalogue, Canberra, 1992, eg. Birth 1986, linocut, NGA, or Woman and Herself 1986, linocut, NGA. Also etching on zinc, The General and Mata Hari 1964 (done at Central School, London), AGNSW, and 'Beauty and Beast’ 1989, no.11 in portfolio of 12 linocuts printed and published by A.T. Bolton at the Officina Brindabella, Canberra, 1990.
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 1939
- Summary
- A well-known twentieth-century author as well as painter.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1991
- Age at death
- 52
Details
Latitude-27.467778 Longitude153.028056 Start Date1921-01-01 End Date1991-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Brisbane, Qld, Australia
- Biography
- Harry Memmott (1921-1991) b.Brisbane. He spent his childhood at Annerley not far from his grandfather J.T. Sandison’s pottery works. He trained as a painter, studying art at the Brisbane Technical College, and completing a rehabilitation art course at the East Sydney Technical College after the war. He returned home in 1950 and set up a business making left-wing silk screen prints and picture frames. At that time, the Sandison pottery was being run by Memmott’s uncle, George Sandison, and Memmott learnt to make pots under the guidance of George’s partner, Merv Feeney. In the mid-1950s, he took over a section of the works and started making a range of souvenir wares. In the late 1950s, he began to make and teach studio pottery. In the late 1960s, he visited Japan, and soon afterwards, moved to the Dandenong Ranges, Victoria, to take up a position at the Prahran Technical College / Vic College Prahran, leaving his wife Cootch Memmott to take over the studio pottery business. In 1970 he published his influential 'The Australian Pottery Book’. His works are signed 'Harry Memmott’.”(Australian Pottery at Bemboka) – During the war Harry served with the Army Intelligence Unit in the Pacific. – Harry had twin sons.1980 – 1991 Head of Ceramics, PTC/VCP. – James Thomas Sundison – Victoria Pottery, Annerly. – Trainee & colleague of Merv Feeney when Merv took over J.T. Sundison’s Victoria Pottery.
Writers:
7write6
Date written:
2021
Last updated:
2021
- Born
- b. 1 January 1921
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-91
- Age at death
- 70
Details
Latitude-33.713759 Longitude150.3121633 Start Date1920-01-01 End Date1991-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Katoomba, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- painter and teacher, was born on 11 April 1920 at Katoomba, NSW.
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
1992
- Born
- b. 11 April 1920
- Summary
- A painter who studied at East Sydney Technical College and various colleges and universities in France and the UK. She was the first woman to receive the Wynne Prize, for her painting Valley Farms, in 1941 and the first female president of the Australian Watercolour Institute, presiding from 1955-1958.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1991
- Age at death
- 71
Details
Latitude51.2211097 Longitude4.3997081 Start Date1914-01-01 End Date1991-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Antwerp, Belgium
- Biography
- painter, theatre and fabric designer, was born in Antwerp, Belgium. She came to Sydney in youth and later studied art under Dattilo Rubbo . She was in Paris in 1935-38, studying and exhibiting at the Salon des Tuileries. Back at Sydney, she exhibited with the Contemporary Art Society and the NSW Society of Artists; she also designed sets for the Kirsova Ballet. In 1946-47 she designed for the Silk and Textile Printers Modernage Fabric range. Silk and Textile Printers Pty Ltd, founded by Orlando and Claudio Alcorso and Paul Sonnino, had begun production of screen-printed dress fabrics in 1939 at Sydney’s Rushcutters Bay, but this became virtually dormant during World War II. When production resumed in 1946 a small range of textiles designed by Australian artists was trialled, including Danciger’s Voyage within a Dream (1946, NGA: gift of the artist 1982). Danciger said of the design: 'I was primarily concerned with strong form, colour and movement. As it was to be printed on silk, it was necessary to keep in mind the lightness and delicacy generally associated with that material.’
The success of the 1946 experiment led to a more ambitious range of artists’ fabrics in 1947 – the year the factory moved to Hobart. Thirty-three 'fine’ artists designed the 1947 'Modernage Fabrics’. As well as Danciger, who produced Sea Fantasy (a sample is in the Powerhouse Museum), they included Jean Bellette ( a sample of her fabric is in AGNSW), Mary Curtis, Sheila Grey, Mary Lewis , Muriel Medworth , Margaret Preston , Suzanne Rogers and Betty Skowronski. Male artist-designers included Russell Drysdale , William Dobell , Douglas Annand , James Cant , Adrian Feint , Donald Friend , James Gleeson and Justin O’Brien. Silk and Textiles continued production in Tasmania until 1969 when the firm was taken over by Dunlop.
Along with many of the other 1946-47 designs, Sea Fantasy was illustrated in the company’s book, A New Approach to Textile Designing by a Group of Australian Artists (Ure Smith, Sydney, 1947, cat.34). A statement from the artist accompanied it: 'In this design, intended for a heavy furnishing material suitable for curtains, my wish has been to achieve a decorative effect that would be the dominant note in a modern room. For this city, where so many windows have a view of the sea, the motif of the design and the brilliant colours would make an appropriate frame.’
Eugene Goossens opened the 'Art in Industry’ exhibition of these 'Modernage’ fabrics at the Australia Hotel on 1 September 1947 and was reported in the Sydney Morning Herald as saying that 'when the “not too distant” opera house was built in Sydney to be the home of the orchestra, ballet, singers, and theatre group, a tremendous scope would be provided for Australian fabric designers and artists who knew about decor and theatre costume.’ The adventurous character of many of the Modernage designs was notable. As another of the artists in the scheme, William Constable , pointed out in the Daily Telegraph : 'One of the most curious things I’ve found about designing is that a great many people who shy at abstract or surrealist art on canvas, will buy and go on buying abstract or surrealist art in textiles or carpets.’
Writers:
Callaway, AnitaKerr, Joan
duggim
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2013
- Born
- b. 1 August 1914
- Summary
- A painter, theatre and fabric designer who worked with some of the most significant modernist artists in Australia.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- Jun-91
- Age at death
- 77
Details
Latitude-21.141956 Longitude149.1865149 Start Date1914-01-01 End Date1991-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Mackay, Qld, Australia
- Biography
- comic strip artist, illustrator, commercial and fashion artist, was born in her Irish grandfather’s pub in Mackay, North Queensland, on 18 October 1914 [ sic ], daughter of Patrick and Kathleen Mary O’Brien. Her mother, who modelled Aboriginal figures in clay and was an expert hand-weaver, inspired Kate (also known as Kath) to become an artist. After a peripatetic youth travelling around the Australian interior with her family (her father was a gold prospector, horse-breaker and general outback worker), she boarded at a Brisbane convent. The sisters encouraged her talent for drawing and reassured her about the propriety of attending evening life classes at the Brisbane Technical College, which they arranged for her. In 1937, she left for Sydney to study art with J. S. Watkins for three years.
In 1942, when Sunday Telegraph editor Cyril Pearl was looking for an Australian comic strip to replace Mary and Elizabeth Durack 's Nungalla and Jungalla , Bob Slessor (brother of the poet) suggested that O’Brien prepare a sample. Wanda the War Girl (retitled Wanda after the war) appeared from early 1943 until abruptly terminated mid-adventure in 1951. Initially influenced by Black Fury , an earlier wartime comic in the Telegraph drawn by another woman, the American Tarpe Mills, and by Petts’s extremely successful English stripper Jane , O’Brien’s Wanda increasingly acquired a vernacular Australian character. John Ryan called it 'one of the first comics to reflect a female point of view’ and believed it gradually 'developed a unique style which resembled some of the work of William Dobell and represented one of the most original and individual styles ever to appear in Australian comics’.
The strip was collected into comic books. Wanda the War Girl was published as a one-shot by Consolidated Press c.1944-46, while The Wanda Comic was the first and Wanda the fifth in Consolidated Press’ Supercomic Series (1947-1950s) – the only ones of the 66 published that were not US reprints (Mick Stone in Bonzer p.174). It brought Kate a certain amount of fame. She was mentioned from time to time in 'Granny’s’ column in the Sydney Morning Herald and she was invited to live at Merioola, Chica Lowe’s 'bohemian’ artists’ house in the eastern suburbs where everybody who was anybody in the arts gathered. She became involved in the activities of the loosely federated group of artists who infested the place (including painters Anne Wienholt and Mitty Lee Brown ) but split with them when they disapproved of her involvement with an ex-naval man, Robert Blanche, who had come to Sydney from India in 1947. The group apparently considered him unlikely to accept her life as an artist, but she nevertheless married him in 1947.
After the war O’Brien took over writing as well as illustrating Wanda , basing some of her stories on the books of Ashton Woolfe, head of the French Surêté, combined with items from the newspapers. In the late 1940s she sent her material down to Sydney from the Blue Mountains, where she lived for a short period after her marriage. She briefly taught art at Springwood Ladies College; Joan Kerr was one of her pupils (another was the Sydney fashion artist and women’s magazine editor, Jill Chalker). The Judy O’Neill Comic (Golden Comic, published J.S. Wilkinson c.1948), ’32 pages of packed action’ half in colour, which cost 6d, had a woman ace detective thwarting the nefarious plots of Otto Skrenk, one of Himmler’s deputies, Saki See, chief torturer to the Japanese Kempi, Arthur Fezzi, a henchman of Mussolini, and Boris Karkoss, an ex-terrorist, all of whom had fled to post-war Australia with atomic weapons. Although retrospectively admired as 'well drawn, witty and a real gem’ (see Shiell, p.144, full page ill. p.145), only one issue was ever published. No artist is identified on the cover, but the style is obviously O’Brien’s even though Mick Stone’s checklist of comics (in Shiell ed. 1998, p.161) claims it was by Jack Kilgour .
At the same time O’Brien worked as a commercial artist and book illustrator. Altogether she illustrated 12 books with Hans Christian Andersen’s Mermaid a favourite. She illustrated Australia’s first unabridged Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass in Australia (ACP: Sydney, 1943: reprints 1944, 1946 and 1947 – all on increasingly poor quality paper) – one of several wartime versions of Alice produced along with other British classics to compensate for the fact that UK books were no longer being shipped to Australia. O’Brien’s Alice is a bold, confident and assertive little girl in a short wartime skirt. She illustrated Ella Greenway’s Peter Cat (Colorgravure: Melbourne, 1950) and one of Nourma Handford’s 'Carcoola’ books – Carloola Backstage: A Career Novel for Girls (Dymock’s Book Arcade: Sydney, n.d. [1956]).
O’Brien had a distinguished career as a fashion artist. Her fashion illustrations for Georges, Farmers, Myers and David Jones department stores gained international acclaim. Advertisements for which she did the artwork won New York’s prestigious Retail Advertising Week’s Sekleman Award in 1962 (Hordern Bros) and in 1973 (David Jones), the former being the first presented to a retailer outside the USA. She continued to produce extremely stylish fashion drawings until arthritis forced her to stop in about 1984. Late in life she was cared for by the second of her four daughters, Cynthia Blanche, who described her mother as strong-minded, strong willed and an enemy of pretension. Kate O’Brien (Blanche) died in her Hazelbrook home on 8 May 1991.
Writers:
Kerr, James SempleKerr, Joan
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
1992
- Born
- b. 18 October 1914
- Summary
- Kathleen O'Brien was an illustrator and fashion artist. She studied at Brisbane Technical College and also with J.S. Watkins for three years. O'Brien's comic strip Wanda appeared in the Sunday Telegraph from early 1943 until 1951.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 8-May-91
- Age at death
- 77
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1911-01-01 End Date1991-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- printmaker, was born in Sydney on 27 May 1911, eldest child of (Sir) Charles Bickerton Blackburn, a medical doctor and later Chancellor of the University of Sydney, and Vera, née Le Patouret, whom her daughter remembered as embroidering beautiful tapestries. Both parents were interested in art; there were paintings by Thea Proctor , Elioth Gruner and J.J. Hilder in the family home at Potts Point. Vera soon decided that she wished to be an artist, although not necessarily a printmaker, finding the etchings her parents owned by Norman and Lionel Lindsay 'boring’. After visiting Europe with her parents in 1927 Vera returned to study Arts at the University of Sydney, under pressure from her father. She graduated BA with Honours in Classics in 1932. She also took private lessons in watercolour and linocutting with Thea Proctor throughout her university years, who recommended that she study full-time at the newly-established Adelaide Perry Art School. Vera was there from 1933 until leaving for England with her father in 1937, her mother having died the previous year. In 1936 she showed a linocut in the Contemporary Exhibition at Sydney’s Blaxland Galleries.
In London, Vera enrolled at the Westminster School of Art for two years, studying under Eric Schilsky for sculpture and with John Howard, Mark Gertler, Blair Hughes-Stanton and Bernard Mininsky. She disagreed with Frank Medworth 's ideas about linocuts and decided to postpone further work in this medium until returning home. Her friends among the Australian students in London included Jean Bellette , Ruth Pascoe, Eric Wilson, John Passmore and William Dobell .
Vera never returned permanently to Australia for in 1939 she married P.M. Game (son of a Govenor of New South Wales). Married life, a family and World War II took up all her time; apart from an occasional sketch, and she ceased working as an artist until the late 1980s, when she produced a number of linocuts. She continued to live in England until her death in Kent on 14 August 1991 and was 'rediscovered’ as an artist only in 1979 when Roger Butler curated an exhibition of her linocuts.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 27 May 1911
- Summary
- Printmaker Vera Blackburn was the daughter of artistically minded parents who encouraged her practice through lessons with Thea Proctor. World War Two, marriage and family life arrested her career until the 1980s, when she again took up printmaking.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 14-Aug-91
- Age at death
- 80
Details
Latitude-42.880556 Longitude147.325 Start Date1909-01-01 End Date1991-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
- Biography
- respected painter and illustrator of the 1940s and ’50s. She was married to the artist and critic Paul Haefliger, but while his work tended towards abstraction her mythological paintings epitomised the best of the Charm School.
This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a full biography.
Writers:
DAAO staff writer
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 1909
- Summary
- Respected painter and illustrator of the 1940s and '50s and a two-time winner of the Sulman Prize.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 16-Mar-91
- Age at death
- 82
Details
Latitude53.3806626 Longitude-1.4702278 Start Date1908-01-01 End Date1991-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sheffield, UK
- Biography
- Sculptor, was born in Sheffield, daughter of Jewish parents who migrated to Western Australia in 1923. In 1924 she was enrolled in 'Clay Modelling’ at Perth Technical School under J. W. R. Linton. The syllabus required: –
Drawing from the decorative casts, heads and figures, after this a short course of artistic anatomy; then painting from still life, drawing and painting from the life, and the study of composition.
Modelling will be carried on in conjunction with these Art Classes.
A Landscape Class will be formed for those who wish to take up this particular branch of art. A separate day will be set apart for this work, when students will be taken to some convenient sketching ground, where they may study from nature.
Students also studied Design, which included:
... historic ornament and principles of ornament, the drawing of scale plans, elevations and sections of the work to be designed, and detailed drawings of the different parts. ... Where the student wishes to apply the knowledge and skill acquired to his or her daily occupation, special attention is given to encourage the development of original design for that purpose.
The courses tried to cover the needs of designers for industry and other subjects were taught on demand. Linton for instance taught miniature painting on porcelain to those who were interested. Additional subjects introduced with the five-year Associateship included Geometry, Art & Architectural History, Architectural Drawing, Modelling from Life, Anatomy, and History of Art-crafts. A number of the students in the modelling class were talented at making portrait busts. Those who went on to make a name in this field included Mr F. Steitz, Finley, Jamie A. B. Linton and Eva Benson. Finney made busts of eminent persons. In 1926 she exhibited a study of a child. In 1928 she exhibited a bust of Mrs E. Kowadlo . In 1929 her exhibits included the Governor Sir William Campion, the Premier Mr Collier, the Lord Mayor, Rabbi Freedman, Archbishop Riley and Archbishop Clune . During the Depression she returned to England where she made figurines. She was injured in a bombing raid During World War II and returned to Western Australia in 1946. She was active in the Labour Party. In 1963 she returned to making sculpture. Some of her best known works are the portrait of Sir Walter Murdoch at Murdoch University, the portrait of Edith Cowan at Edith Cowan University, Dame Florence Cardell Oliver and others in the Parliament House Collection, Sir Harry Howard , Sir Claude Hotchin , Senator Dorothy Tangney , Aboriginal children from Sister Kate’s Home in the Western Australian Museum and Tommy Windich and Tommy Pierre in the collection of the Royal Western Australian Historical Society.
Writers:
Erickson, Dorothy (Dr)
Note: primary biographer
Date written:
2011
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1908
- Summary
- Sculptor, was born in Sheffield; daughter of Jewish parents who migrated to Western Australia in 1923.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1991
- Age at death
- 83
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1907-01-01 End Date1991-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- painter, was born in Melbourne on 12 December 1907, daughter of Charles Algernon Lempriere (grandson of the colonial painter T.J. Lempriere ) and Dora, nee Mitchell, sister of Dame Nellie Melba. Her wealthy family patronised local artists; Janet Cumbrae Stewart did a portrait of her mother and Florence Rodway and Bess Norriss Tait depicted Helen herself. Initially she studied art with Max Meldrum 's follower A.D. Colquhoun then, from 1930, with the dissident ex-Meldrumite Justus Jorgensen . For fifteen years she was one of the notorious 'bohemians’ at Jorgensen’s Eltham. She helped erect the first stage of the romantic complex of Montsalvat (begun 1935), making mud bricks for its walls and carving many of its wood and stone decorations. She also painted in appropriate tonal style. Extant oil paintings date from January 1935. On July 1940 she burst into bright pure light and colour when painting her mother’s house and garden at Lilydale – a building she designed as well as drew. Henceforth, she recollected, she was besotted with impressionism for plein air studies though continuing to paint portraits tonally. On 15 June 1945, much to Jorgensen’s dismay, his faithful disciple married Keith Wood. The following year, after Keith’s discharge from the army, they moved to Sydney. Artistically, this period is rounded off with the uncompromisingly realist Self Portrait of 1945 – her husband’s favourite portrait of her which he kept all his life.
Forty years of independent, professional practice followed. Between 1954 and 1973 Lempriere held over twenty solo exhibitions. She was one of the few Australian painters to establish an independent, international reputation in the 1950s and ’60s, but it was made in Paris, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Utrecht, The Hague and Milan more than in London, New York or Sydney (although she had solo exhibitions in all these places too) and consequently was unappreciated in Australia. Nor did she ever abandon figurative representation, a conscious choice made when studying with Fernand Léger in Paris. A more welcome and influential mentor was the Dutch artist, Fred Klein (father of the neo-dadaist Yves). She exhibited at the Salon des Surindépendents in 1953-55 and showed L’Adieu (1958) there in 1961 in the exhibition 'Surrealistes et Symbolistes’.
Lempriere painted Aboriginal subjects almost exclusively in Paris. An early attempt to express her belief in the basic duality of the European-Australian artist by combining Aboriginal themes with European colours and techniques is the unresolved Self Portrait of 1949, painted in Sydney (ill. Heritage ). Her “Aboriginal” paintings done in France more closely resemble the surreal frottages of Max Ernst (with similar echoes of fin de siècle symbolism) than Aboriginal rock art, despite being worked on rough hand-made paper to achieve a rocky effect.
Back at Sydney in 1966, Lempriere’s themes changed. Her 1969 solo exhibition at David Jones showed the results of a visit to Cambodia, focussing on the temples and the poetic atmosphere of Angkor Wat. Her most popular exhibition was of colourful semi-abstract marine paintings inspired by a visit to the Barrier Reef. She also produced some competent romantic lithographs (NGA) and throughout her life drew lively watercolour and pencil sketches, many of birds and animals. Although never a member of any circle of artists, her paintings seem most closely allied to the Sydney 'Charm School’ artists, as she herself perhaps was in training, aspiration and influences after the Melbourne years.
After some years of debilitating illness, Helen Lempriere died on 25 November 1991. Woolloomooloo Galleries held a two-part retrospective of her work in 1993-94. In 1994 Keith Wood established a scholarship for craftworkers in her name. The first Helen Lempriere Travelling Art Scholarship was awarded to Lin Li in 1997, and in 2001 the Helen Lempriere Sculpture Award was inaugurated at Weribee Park, Victoria and awarded to Karen Ward.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Note: Primary
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
1992
- Born
- b. 12 December 1907
- Summary
- painter and lithographer, born in Melbourne in 1907, Lempriere had a forty year career of independent, professional practice, died in Sydney, 1991.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 5-Nov-91
- Age at death
- 84
Details
Latitude-31.9559 Longitude115.8606 Start Date1906-01-01 End Date1991-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Perth, WA, Australia
- Biography
- Sculptor and modeller, daughter of Dr Leigh Cook of Claremont was born in Perth and studied at Perth and Fremantle Technical Schools over a number of years. She took both art and domestic subjects. Cook had not been able to enroll full-time because of duties in the family home. Cook, as the eldest daughter, was required to look after her delicate mother and younger sisters and could only attend intermittently between 1924 and 1928. She took classes in dress cutting and design, passing with credit, as well as art classes in life-drawing, light and shade (passing with credit) and landscape. Cook earned her living as a commercial artist, primarily as an illustrator, drawing advertisements for the jewellers Levinsons and Caris Bros and for Foy & Gibson department store. She also painted white furniture and wooden objects with wildflowers for the tourist industry and designed and screened curtain fabric. Cook became head of the women’s section of the Art Department at Ajax Plaster Co., before marrying the sculptor Edward Kohler who, after returning from Europe, became the head modeller at Ajax. After her marriage she made small clay models and figurines (in collaboration with her husband) as samples for Brisbane and Wunderlich. In 1950 Cook had two kilns built by her brother at her home in Gosnells and produced 'Kohlerware’. An example of Kohlerware was her angel vase.
Writers:
Dr Dorothy Erickson
Date written:
2010
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1906
- Summary
- Eileen Cook was born in 1906. She was a sculptor and modeller. Cook earned her living as a commercial artist, primarily as an illustrator, drawing advertisements for the jewellers Levinsons and Caris Bros and for Foy & Gibson department store.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1991
- Age at death
- 85
Details
Latitude51.4816546 Longitude-3.1791934 Start Date1903-01-01 End Date1991-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Cardiff, Wales, UK
- Biography
- painter, illustrator, muralist, cartoonist and writer, was born on 15 October 1903 in Cardiff, Wales, fifth of the eight children of George Frederick Harris (see National Gallery of Australia australianprints.gov.au website), painter-chairman of the Royal Art Society in Cardiff and RA exhibitor, and Rosetta Elizabeth, née Lucas. In 1920 the family migrated to WA, arriving in 1921. On board the Demosthenes the 16-year old Rhona was given the nickname “Pixie”, which she assumed for the rest of her life.
The family lived briefly in Perth, where Pixie exhibited fairy pictures with the WA Society of Arts, then moved to Sydney. (In 1930 the journalist 'P.P.’ claimed that 'Pat O’Harris’ had published a story and picture in the Triad at the age of 10 (i.e. before migrating), meaning c.1925 since 'P.P.’ believed that 'Pat’ was only 15 in 1930 and reported that she was studying art at East Sydney Technical College. As a result there is some speculation that Pat O’Harris might not in fact be Pixie O’Harris as has been previously assumed.) Pixie O. Harris worked as a commercial artist with the stationers and printers John Sands while attending Julian Ashton 's Sydney Art School in 1922-23. In 1933 her watercolour Thieves was included in the Sydney Art School retrospective exhibition.
Her first major children’s book commission was to draw black-and-white illustrations for Maud Rennor Liston’s Cinderella’s Party (1923). She then spent a short time in Adelaide sporadically attending art school before returning to Sydney. For the next three years she worked as a fashion illustrator for Anthony Hordern’s department store, wrote and illustrated stories in the Sydney Mail , and drew cartoons and caricatures for the Bulletin . Four original cartoons of 1925-30 and two undated caricatures (both of men) are at Mitchell Library [ML] Px*D498/12-17. She also did cartoons for Aussie , eg (male swimmer to woman in elaborate bathing costume) '“It’s great! Won’t you come in?”/ “My dear, I’d have to go and change”’ 1926 (ill. Lindesay 1979, 171); (ordinary suburban couple with odd pointed gumnut hair styles) “Darling, what is the weather forecast for to-day? I want to go to town to buy a new frock and hat.”/ “Cyclonic storm, thunder, hail and possibly a tidal wave!” 15 May 1930.
The Pixie O. Harris Fairy Book , an illustrated collection of radio stories by Pixie and other authors published in 1925, made her name. Soon afterwards, however, she changed it to 'Pixie O’Harris’, admiring the apostrophe a printer mistakenly added. She wrote a fairy poem and illustrated it for Ink #1 (1932, 9), wrote and broadcast a children’s program for radio 2UE, and contributed to the Australian Women’s Weekly , e.g. illustration to poem about witches 28 October 1933, 30.
In the early 1930s Connie Robertson, editor of the Women’s Budget , invited her to do a series of 'Pictures of the Near Great’. The result was a series of weekly 'gentle caricatures’ (acc. to Pixie’s interview with Hazel de Burgh). Nine original pen and ink caricatures in the series, collected by Connie Robertson and presented to the State Library of New South Wales [SLNSW] (ML PxA30), depict Frank Dalby Davison, Dulcie Deamer (in SLNSW b/w exhibition 1999), the woman poet E.M. England, writer Louise Mack, Price Conigrave, sculptor Rayner Hoff, sculptor Eileen McGrath , artist Dora Wilcox (Mrs William Moore) and Jessie Urquhart. A pencil drawing, Freda Thompson after her flight from England to Australia 1934 is in the National Library of Australia (PIC R10895). Pixie commented not long before she died:
“I could’ve done political cartoons. I used to caricature people – I was rather cruel with my pencil when I was young – till I found people were so upset they’d tear my caricatures off the wall of an exhibition. Especially women, they didn’t like it at all, being caricatured, and some of my fellow writers. So I gave up being cruel. When I caricature now, I do it for men only, because they can take it better”. (Guiffré p.185, quoted O’Sullivan p.122).
An oil painting c.1972 (coloured photograph ML SPF/O’HARRIS PIXIE) depicts 'Henry Kendall and his brother in the bush cradle’, while an oil of Ray Mathew in Italy c.1960, painted from a photograph, is in the SLNSW (ML 89S). In c.1983 she did a self-portrait as she appeared at the age of six (obviously from a photograph), now ML 979. Any element of caricature in her portraits is minimal and becomes increasingly so, as she admitted.
In 1927 Pixie O’Harris married Bruce Pratt, editor of The Australian Encyclopedia ; they had three daughters (one is Robyn Tranter). In hospital after the birth of the third, Pixie loathed the blank walls of her room and despaired of the effect such clinical bleakness would have upon 'children who sometimes have to spend weeks or months in hospitals’. So she painted a kangaroo fantasy mural on the walls of Wade House at the Royal Alexandra Hospital for Children in 1939. Over the following 40 years she did about 50 murals for children’s institutions for which she was awarded an MBE in 1976.
The 22 children’s books Pixie wrote and illustrated in her lifetime include Pearl Pinkie and Sea Greenie (1935), The Fortunes of Poppy Treloar (1941), Marmaduke the Possum (1941) and Poppy and the Gems (1944). Her last, Loveleaves the Koala , appeared in 1985. The final book she illustrated (with watercolours and pen and ink drawings) was The Pixie Alice: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Melbourne: Carroll Foundation, 1990). It was listed as no.125 in US collector Charles Lovett’s ’125 landmark publications in the history of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland’ and the drawings were said to be “not only charming, they are uniquely Australian. Her Alice has pig-tails, jeans, and a T-shirt adorned with a koala bear. In the drawing of Alice falling down a rabbit hole [pen and ink, Carroll Foundation], the map on the wall is of Australia, though it is hanging sideways… ( Alice in Australia exhibition)”.
Pixie began a successful parallel career as an exhibiting painter in 1937 when she and Joyce Abbot held a joint exhibition at the Wynyard Book Club. She began painting oil portraits and landscapes in the 1960s, when fairies were unfashionable and her books had fallen from favour with publishers and librarians (some were reprinted in the 1970s when attitudes, once again, were changing). Pixie O’Harris died in 1991.
Writers:
Callaway, AnitaKerr, Joan
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
1992
- Born
- b. 15 October 1903
- Summary
- Pixie O'Harris was a mid 20th century painter, children's book illustrator, muralist, cartoonist and writer. It was the birth of her third daughter that prompted O'Harris to paint nearly 50 murals over the following 40 years in a number of children's institutions. She was awarded an MBE in 1976 for her efforts.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 17-Nov-91
- Age at death
- 88
Details
Latitude-34.9275 Longitude138.6 Start Date1903-01-01 End Date1991-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Brighton, Adelaide, SA, Australia
- Biography
- painter, was born in Brighton, Adelaide on 21 January 1903 and received her early education at St Peter’s Girls’ School.
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Note: Heritage biography.
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
1992
- Born
- b. 21 January 1903
- Summary
- Painter, was born in Brighton, Adelaide on 21 January 1903. Sauerbier's initial art training was under Frederick Britton at the School of Fine Arts, Tynte Street, North Adelaide, run by Edith Napier Birks.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 11-Mar-91
- Age at death
- 88
Details
Latitude-33.87978 Longitude151.18541 Start Date1902-01-01 End Date1991-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Glebe, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
- Biography
- toymaker, was born Alison Wickham Davies on 2 October 1902 in New South Wales. After studying at Julian Ashton’s Sydney Art School, she married a grazier, Wilfred Hall Pownall (1897-1972), and went to live at Burleith, Gunnedah. While assisting in managing the farm and caring for her two children, Alison fostered her artistic talents by decorating the home and caring for the extensive garden. She was also well known for the finely crafted soft toys she made on her Wilcox & Gibbs sewing machine. In about 1940 she and Wilf made a miniature dolls’ house as a present for their daughter Pam. Alison Pownall died on 2 February 1991.
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Black, Pru
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 2 October 1902
- Summary
- Alison Pownall was a toymaker. With her husband Wilfred Hall Pownall she made (c. 1940) a miniature dolls' house as a present for their daughter Pam.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2-Feb-91
- Age at death
- 89
Details
Latitude-37.864 Longitude144.982 Start Date1899-01-01 End Date1991-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- St. Kilda, Melbourne, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- painter and printmaker, was born in St Kilda, Melbourne on 22 November 1899, daughter of Maria Tweedale and Arthur Edward McIntyre Berndt. She studied at Ashton’s Sydney Art School when Grace Crowley and Anne Dangar were teaching there before they left for France in 1925. She also had lessons from Dorrit Black in 1935 and from Adelaide Perry in 1943. At London in the 1950s she attended the Central School of Art and Craft. Best known as a painter, she was secretary of the Australian Watercolour Institute in the 1940s and the 1960s. Her few known prints include decorative linocuts done in the 1930s and some colour lithographs done in London.
This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 22 November 1899
- Summary
- Painter and printmaker, Berndt studied variously under Grace Crowley, Anne Dangar, Dorrit Black and Adelaide Perry before relocating to London to study at the Central School of Art and Craft. Best known as a painter, Berndt was secretary of the Australian Watercolour Institute throughout the 1940s and 1960s.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- c.1991
- Age at death
- 92
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1894-01-01 End Date1991-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, VIC, Australia
- Biography
- commercial artist and fashion designer, was born in Melbourne on 16 June 1894, third of the six children of Sylvester John Browne, a wealthy mining speculator and pastoralist, and Anne Catherine, née Stawell.
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 16 June 1894
- Summary
- After her father lost much of his wealth, Greene, although under no pressure, felt obliged to find work. She worked as a commercial artist, specialising in fashion catalogues. She would return to her interest in fashion and art after the social upheavals of the two world wars, when she created hats and handbags in the 1950s.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 31-Dec-91
- Age at death
- 97
Details
Latitude52.561928 Longitude-1.464854 Start Date1887-01-01 End Date1991-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- England, UK
- Biography
- potter, leather worker, china painter and designer, was born in England. She came to New South Wales with her family at the age of 10. In Sydney she studied model drawing and watercolour painting at Sydney Technical College under Alfred Coffey and life drawing at his private studio. After a trip to England, where she studied china painting at the Chelsea Art School, she returned to Sydney and joined the Arts and Crafts Society of NSW (in 1910). She exhibited with the Society from 1910 to 1942, and in 1922 held a joint exhibition in its rooms with her business partner Ada Newman . She also exhibited with the Women’s Industrial Arts Society and, with Ada and Jessie Newman, was a member of the 'Ceramic Art Studio’ which fired works for many Sydney China Painters.
Atkinson and Newman had entered into partnership in about 1916, establishing the Ceramic Art Studio in the Penfolds Building, 183 Pitt Street, Sydney, where both made pottery; Atkinson also taught china painting and leatherwork. The business was a great success.
In 1924 Atkinson returned to England in order to inspect Arts and Crafts 'schools and working depots’ in Manchester, Birmingham and London. She also visited the English Woman’s Exhibition of Arts and Handicrafts at Westminster Hall, London: 'a very fine display, but after diligent search [she] could find nothing essentially different from what we have in Australia’. In her opinion, the two most outstanding exhibits were the coloured woodcarvings by Ruth Bannister and the distinctive leather work by Mrs Spring – both Australians. She found little china painting of note in England, most workers being absorbed into the large potteries to work on stock designs.
She and Newman continued in partnership, their studio being relocated to 147 Elizabeth Street by 1938. In about 1940 they moved to the Newman family home in Muston Street, Mosman, where they used gas and, later, electric kilns and fired work for other potters. French porcelain blanks were favoured for china painting but were hard to obtain, so they often used Doulton and Worcester blanks purchased from Prouds in Sydney. The two women worked together until Newman’s death in 1949. Atkinson then gave up china painting and pottery, resigned from the Society of Arts and Crafts in 1950 and concentrated on watercolours until arthritis forced her to abandon this in about 1980. She died in 1991 at the great age of 103.
Many of Atkinson’s early pieces, based on the Persian scenes of Edmund Dulac, were unashamedly illustrative at a time when that style had already lost favour. Nevertheless, all her designs, while never particularly avant-garde, are very subtle and delicate, each peculiarly fitted to the shape of the vessel to which it is applied and each painted directly from nature.
Writers:
Timms, Peter
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1887
- Summary
- Potter, leather worker, china painter and designer. Atkinson set up the 'Ceramic Art Studio' with business partner Ada Newman. A regular exhibitor with the Arts and Craft Society of NSW, Atkinson also exhibited with the Women's Industrial Arts Society. Her address is given as "Braeside" Rae Street, Randwick.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1991
- Age at death
- 104
Details
Latitude-0.4192962 Longitude36.9517005 Start Date1954-01-01 End Date1990-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Nyeri, Kenya
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1954
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- Nov-90
- Age at death
- 36
Details
Latitude-21.141956 Longitude149.1865149 Start Date1943-01-01 End Date1990-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Mackay, Queensland, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 14 August 1943
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 30-Mar-90
- Age at death
- 47
Details
Latitude51.9847032 Longitude1.330909573 Start Date1921-01-01 End Date1990-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Eygpt
- Biography
- Commercial artist and painter who was born in Eygpt and served in the American armed forces before migrating from United States of America to Perth in 1948. He exhibited an oil painting, Morning Moon, with the Perth Society of Artists in 1950 and The Oil-Can Church in 1952. He was also represented in the Festival of Perth art exhibition in 1953. In 1963 he was one of the artists in 'Artists From the West’ at the Museum of Modern Art and Design in Melbourne. Voudouris taught commercial illustration to the evening part-time classes at Perth Technical College from 1969-1981. He was also a highly respected freelance commercial artist.
Writers:
Dr Dorothy Erickson
Date written:
2010
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1921
- Summary
- He taught commercial illustration to the evening part-time classes at Perth Technical College from 1969-1981 and was a highly respected freelance commercial artist.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1990
- Age at death
- 69
Details
Latitude-19.8516101 Longitude133.2303375 Start Date1919-01-01 End Date1990-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Yarripirlangu, NT, Australia
- Biography
- Born c.1919 at Yarripirlangu, south-west of Yuendumu, a site associated with the Ngarrka (Initiated Men) or Ngalyipi (Snake Vine) Dreaming. He was one of the senior men whose painting of the doors of the Yuendumu school helped to start up the painting enterprise in the community. He collaborated with Paddy Japaljarri Sims , Jimija Jungarrayi and Paddy Jupurrurla Nelson on Munga Star Dreaming 1985, purchased by the Australian National Gallery from Warlukurlangu Artists’ first Sydney show at the Hogarth Gallery in December of that year. His Milky Way Dreaming 1986, also purchased by the Gallery typified the exuberance of the early Yuendumu style, which remained undiminished in Larry Spencer’s work.
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1919
- Summary
- One of the original painters of the Yuendumu school doors in 1983; a project which ignited the painting enterprise within the local community. His work is in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1990
- Age at death
- 71
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1912-01-01 End Date1990-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Joyce May Abbott 1912-1990 was the daughter of Edgar Jospeh Abbott a waiter/clerk-steward and Gertude May nee Julius and grew up in the family residence 4 Cove street Watson’s Bay. She became a pupil of Fred Leist at East Sydney Technical College probably in the evenings, in the late 1920s and her interest in mural painting aligns with this influence. Abbott was active by 1932 when she exhibited but did not become a member at the Australian Watercolour Institute and had a work accepted in the Health Department Poster Competition in 1934.
Abbott became friends with the older established Sydney illustrator and children’s book author, Pixie O’Harris. The pair had enough work to have a joint exhibition at the Wynyard Book Club, Sydney, in 1937 which received several positive notices in the newspapers and was attended by notable figures including both the women’s teachers.
Joyce illustrated O’Harris’s Aboriginal theme book Goolara in 1943. Abbott contributed a picture story of her own on 'The adventures of Naroo and his playmate, Kawana’ to the 2 November issue of The New South Wales school magazine of literature for our boys and girls The story line makes for an interesting comparison with the award winning 1957 children’s photographic book by Axel Poignant Piccaninny walkabout:a story of two Aboriginal children. Abbott remained a contributor to the magazine until 1947.
Joyce Abbott was a finalist in the 1943 Wynne Prize and the 1944 and 1945 Archibald Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Abbott illustrated other children’s books including Grandpuff and Leafy(1943)and Leafy’s Seventh Wave (1948)by Gladys Lister and had a few illustrations used in a 1953 leaflet issued by the Australian Museum, Sydney, on Australian Aborigines written by Beryl Graham and F.D.McCarthy.
Abbott’s own books are school readers published by Angus & Robertson,_Playabout: A Picture-story Reader _in 1955 and _Ullagulbra. A Picture-Story Reader_in 1959. Abbott’s illustrations and a portrait of Aboriginal children at auction, suggest contact with Aboriginal people but she is not known to have travelled outside Sydney and may have used photographs.
Abbott married in 1944 but continued work under her own name -although not it seems ever working full time or being listed as a professional artist-illustrator There are no known works from the 1960s on. A scant few works in oil and on paper are listed at auction. An un-named portrait in oil by Pixie O’Harris sold at auction may be a portrait of Abbott from 1937 as both women were reported as including portraits of the other in their 1937 exhibition. Abbott has scant reference in literature on Children’s book illustration but deserves consideration as one of the illustrators of graphic stories about Aboriginal children.
Writers:
newtog
Date written:
2019
Last updated:
2019
- Born
- b. 1 January 1912
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1-Jan-90
- Age at death
- 78
Details
Latitude-27.6160323 Longitude152.7608348 Start Date1911-01-01 End Date1990-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Ipswich, Qld, Australia
- Biography
- painter and printmaker, was born Muriel Foote in Ipswich, Queensland. She acquired her lifelong nickname 'Mim’ during her formative years at the Presbyterian Girls College in Warwick. From 1930 to 1935 she attended Vida Lahey 's (q.v.) painting and drawing classes in Brisbane. She also studied pottery with L.J. Harvey in 1933. At Lahey’s suggestion, Mim moved to Sydney in 1935 to further her studies and absorb the latest European Impressionist influences. She attended Adelaide Perry’s School for Painting and Drawing. In 1937 she participated in an exhibition called “A Group of Young Painters’ at Macquarie Galleries. Included in the group exhibition were Vera Blackburn and Paul Haefliger . During this period she shared a studio in Daley Street with another former Lahey student, Rene (Toby) Williamson.
In 1938 Mim sailed to London. Whilst abroad she enrolled at Westminster Art School. She studied drawing with Meninsky, abstract painting with Enislie Owen, wood-engraving with Clifford Webb, drypoint and life drawing with Blair Hughes-Stanton and figure painting with John Howard. John Passmore and Eric Wilson were among the students in the painting class. During this period Mim also made sketching trips to Europe. With the outbreak of World War II, Mim was forced to return to Australia. Most of her paintings were left behind. The art school was closed and the buildings occupied by the army. Upon her return to Brisbane she exhibited with Ella Robinson (Fry, q.v.) and Vera M. Cottew in 1940. She was also asked to take over the arranging of the Friday lunch-time lectures at the Art Library in George Street. Lahey and Daphne Mayo , who had previously organised the lectures, received an Art Fund grant from the Carnegie Corp USA to raise money to purchase paintings for the Brisbane Art Gallery. From 1941 to 1945 Mim taught weaving, pottery, painting and art history at St Hilda’s Girls School which was situated at Stanthorpe during the War. In addition, in 1944 she taught part-time at Moreton Bay High School whilst also attending university. During this period Mim also taught weaving and design theory at the Red Cross and assisted with Lahey’s afternoon painting and drawing classes for children.
In 1945 Mim married James Graham Shaw, stepbrother of her old friend Rene Williamson. The following year they moved to Sydney where Graham worked as a biochemist at Superannuation Department, York Street. Together they had two daughters Helen Jane (born 1946) and Margaret Evelyn (born 1947). For her daughters she made toys such as jigsaw puzzles, hobbyhorses, dolls houses and leather comb-cases. Later she was to illustrate books for her grandchildren and their friends. After her marriage Mim signed her work 'M Shaw’ instead of 'M Foote’. However, illustrations, sketchbooks and cards were always signed 'Mim’.
Whilst in Sydney, Mim continued to strengthen her skills at Dora Sweetapple’s (q.v.) art school in Woollahra where she studied design and screen-printing. In 1957 she resumed teaching. Mim taught art at Queenwood Girls School in Mosman. Her husband died the following year, in 1958. She had been fortunate to have had a teaching career which enable her to support her young family. Three years after Graham’s death, she travelled England and Europe with her daughters visiting major art galleries and museums. Upon her return to Sydney, Mim resumed her teaching position at Queenwood. During the early 1960s she also taught art at Claremont Girls School in Coogee. Whilst Mim continued to teach, she also took the opportunity to be taught. She joined the screen-printing classes at the Workshop Art Centre, Willoughby, and in 1965 attended Phyllis Shillito’s Design Art School.
Due to family illnesses, Mim returned to Brisbane in 1971 and immediately joined the Half Dozen Group of Artists, which was located at St Mary’s Anglican Church, Kangaroo Point. The following year she became the group’s secretary and later Vice-President in 1974. From 1979 to 1982 she studied Fine Arts at the University of Queensland. Her lecturers included Nancy Underhill and Margaret Maynard. Mim’s desire to keep learning fuelled her interest in batik, which she later studied in Bali. In turn, Mim taught batik at The Half Dozen Group Studio. From the 1970s to 1989 Mim attended group painting sessions at The Half Dozen Group Studio and regularly exhibited in their group exhibitions. From 1987 to when her health began to fail in 1989, she attended Elizabeth Duguid’s art classes. Here she used acrylic and experimented with large still-life paintings.
During the 1970s and 1980s Mim travelled extensively visiting China, Russia, Italy, the United States of America, New Zealand and around Australia. She loved the Australian outback and travelled with art groups to Broken Hill, Cooper Pedy and central Australia. Along the way she made many sketches, notes and paintings. In 1985 she visited Kakadu in a group led by Clifton Pugh and in 1987 travelled to the Flinders Rangers with Jeff Makin.
In December 1989 Mim was admitted to Greenslopes Hospital with bowel cancer. She died at her Kangaroo Point home surrounded by family on 11 June 1990. In 1993 a retrospective of Mim’s art was held at The Half Dozen Group Studio in Kangaroo Point.
Mim Shaw lived life to the fullest. She was interested in everything and everyone. Her many interests included shells, geology, ballet, opera, music and travel. She believed art involved history, civilisation and religion. For Mim, art was a way of life.
For further information:
Photograph appeared accompanying an article by Dr Duhig. Women well known in the Art World in The Steering Wheel and Society Home, 4 May 1941 p 38. Meanjin Papers Contemporary Verse and Prose Vol 2. Number Three Spring 1942. Woodcut by Muriel Foote. L.J. Harvey and His School. Queensland Art Galley 1983 catalogue. p 101. Muriel Foote. Australian Studio Pottery and China Painting by Peter Timms. Muriel Foote p139.
Writers:
Collerton, E J
stokel
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2008
- Born
- b. 1911
- Summary
- Painter and printmaker known by her nickname 'Mim'. A member of the Half Dozen Group of Artists in Brisbane, Shaw travelled extensively overseas and taught art for many years in Sydney and Brisbane. A regular student herself, Shaw studied printmaking, painting, pottery and design.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 11-Jun-90
- Age at death
- 79
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1910-01-01 End Date1990-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Painter, illustrator and cartoonist, was born in Sydney on 19 December 1910 and grew up in working class Pyrmont where he went to a convent school which although it was strict, allowed the children to draw on Friday afternoons. His first job on leaving school was at Paramount Pictures in Sydney, where he emptied the jars of water used by the studio artists to clean their brushes. This led to him enrolling as a part-time student at the Royal Art Society under Dattilo Rubbo and Sydney Long and at East Sydney Technical College. He subsequently became a commercial artist at Paramount Pictures before becoming a black-and-white artist on Truth . This was followed by a short stint in advertising after which he freelanced. He contributed to Labour Daily in the 1930s when he was married with a small child. A second child was born during an extended stay in England in the 1930s, where he went to study at Westminster School, London, under Bernard Mehninsky and Mark Gertler. He shared a studio with William Dobell, Donald Friend and Arthur Murch. Other Australian fellow students included John Passmore and *Jack Carington Smith*who once called him 'the outstanding draughtsman of our era’. While in the UK he worked under Arthur Murch on the Australian Wool Pavilion Exhibition in Glasgow, along with Donald Friend , William Dobell , Fred Coventry and Rosalind Edkins.
Santry returned to Australia shortly before the outbreak of WWII and joined Australian Consolidated Press as a 'creative artist’, drawing illustrations and cartoons for the Daily Telegraph and the Australian Women’s Weekly . After an incident when he and the other cartoonists all refused to draw an anti-strike cartoon he decided to resume freelancing, which he combined with part-time teaching at East Sydney Technical College. { Fifty years says he taught Creative Art at Sydney Technical College.}
He was honorary secretary of the Society of Artists, which prided itself on representing professional artists and illustrators of a progressive bent. The president was his close friend Douglas Dundas who was head teacher at the National Art School, East Sydney Technical College. Santry taught drawing to Architecture students at Sydney University with Lloyd Rees and Roland Wakelin , then at University of New South Wales with Hector Gilliland , John Olsen and Leonard Hessing . He was the artist for the popular Chesty Bond strip and at night taught WEA classes in the suburbs. After the War he joined with Lloyd Rees, Roland Wakelin and others to paint around the lower north shores of Sydney Harbour, forming a collective they called the Norwood Group. In the 1950s a young discontented boy, Brett Whiteley, tagged along with the older men, absorbing their knowledge. Santry remembered the young man as 'a nice boy,very talented’.
Santry always combined cartooning and illustrating with painting post-impressionist landscapes and more realist figure studies, mainly of Sydney people and places especially working-class areas like Glebe, Surry Hills, etc.For many years his work was not noticed by the critics, who assumed he was only an illustrator. However in 1984 the Sydney dealer gallery Hamer-Mathew held a well received retrospective of his paintings, drawings and etchings, with a catalogue introduction by Joanna Mendelssohn. At the exhibition opening Lloyd Rees compared Santry’s studies of working class life on the streets – furtive greyhound trainers, barefoot children and street flower sellers – to the work of Courbet. The following year he held an even more substantial exhibition at the Art Exchange in Melbourne.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 19 December 1910
- Summary
- Mid 20th century Sydney painter, illustrator and cartoonist Santry taught drawing to Architecture students at Sydney University, which may have come from his association with Lloyd Rees as part of the Northwood Group.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1990
- Age at death
- 80
Details
Latitude-37.7667 Longitude144.9628 Start Date1910-01-01 End Date1990-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Brunswick, Melbourne, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- Sam Atyeo was born in Brunswick, Melbourne, the son of a chauffeur Alfred Atyeo and his wife Olivia (nee Cohen). He was a sickly child who enjoyed drawing. This led him to first study architecture at the Working Men’s College and then to study painting at the National Gallery School. His time there was distinguished by a lack of respect for authority as his (unsuccessful) 1930 entry for the travelling scholarship lampooned the head of the school, Bernard Hall.In the early 1930s he came to know Cynthia Reed, who had a Collins Street shop where she sold modern furniture, including decorative designs, and some painting. He began to supply her with his work and through her met and befriended Cynthia Reed’s brother John Reed and his wife Sunday. His work for Cynthia Reed brought him to the notice of the modernist Edward Dyason,the economic adviser to the Federal Government, who commissioned him to design a new facade and shop with a steel frame, chromium plating and black Carrara marble. Robin Boyd later called this Melbourne’s first modern building.Dyason also introduced him to Dr H.V. Evatt who became a life-long friend. The Reeds’ circle was self consciously radical and they encouraged modern art. Atyeo was one of the dominant figures in the group of artists and writers who gathered at their farm, Heide Park at Templestowe. In 1934 he painted the intensely sparse Organised Line to Yellow, now in the National Gallery of Victoria. In 1936 he left Australia for Paris. As well as continuing to paint, he also made posters to support the Republicans as people fled from Franco’s Spain. In 1939 he bought a farm in Vence, in the Alpes-Maritimes. He moved there with the Australian artist Moya Dyring after the German invasion. They soon left France for the Bahamas and then to Dominica. They married in 1941 but the marriage did not survive. In the Bahamas he met again with Dr Evatt and was soon ensconced in Washington as his personal assistant as Evatt headed the Australian procurement office in Washington for the duration of the war. At the end of the War he was based in Paris, but was dismissed from the diplomatic corps in 1950 after Menzies won the 1949 election. Atyeo was not prepared to follow the directives of a conservative government. He returned to his farm in Vence with his second wife Anne Lecoultre, who he married in 1950. After some years he returned to painting and exhibited these works on occasional visits to Australia. In 1983 Heide Park, the art museum that had been the home of his friends John and Sunday Reed, held a retrospective survey of his work. He died at his farm in Vence on 26 May 1990.
Writers:
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 6 January 1910
- Summary
- In addition to a career in painting after training at the National Gallery School, Melbourne, Atyeo designed interiors, murals, designed and painted furniture for commercial clients, incuding Cynthia Reed's Modern Furnishings, Little Collins Street, Melbourne.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 26-May-90
- Age at death
- 80
Details
Latitude-33.816667 Longitude151 Start Date1909-01-01 End Date1990-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Parramatta, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Sculptor, painter, printmaker, art teacher and carpenter. The son of Jesse Jewhurst Hilder and Phyllis Amy Meadmore, Vernon Arthur (Bim) Hilder was born in Parramatta, New South Wales, on 3 October 1909. His father, a respected watercolour artist, died of tuberculosis when Bim Hilder was six years old, and he and his younger brother, Brett, were raised by their mother. Photographs show that Bim Hilder bore a close resemblance to his father. In 1926 Hilder enrolled in a commercial art course at the East Sydney Technical College, but abandoned his training after one year although he continued with evening classes organised by the Royal Art Society of NSW. During the 1920s Hilder began working as a carpenter and later worked for several years with the North American architect Walter Burley Griffin at Castlecrag, Sydney, where he built several houses in the suburb as well as the Haven Amphitheatre. During the mid 1920s Hilder studied etching under Sydney Long, and one of his prints, Gum Trees, was exhibited at the Australian Painter-Etchers’ Society (APES) exhibition in 1928. The following year Hilder exhibited two more prints with APES. At this early time in his career he signed his work 'Vernon Hilder’, even though he was mainly known as Bim. Hilder’s early talent with aquatints saw his election to membership of APES in 1930. By 1932 the artist was signing his work 'Bim Hilder’. In 1932 he exhibited four works at the 'Sydney Harbour Bridge Celebration Exhibition’ in Sydney, an event organised by APES. The Bridge is arguably his best known print from this period and shows the final construction of this important national structure. The artist continued his involvement with APES until 1934. In the early 1930s Hilder designed and built a home at 177 Edinburgh Road, Castlecrag. In 1935 he married the commercial artist Roma Hopkinson and the couple lived for the rest of their marriage at this Castlecrag property. Hilder and his wife held a joint exhibition of their work at the Rubery Bennett Galleries in Sydney during November of 1938. According to the review in the Sydney Morning Herald (16 November 1938, pg. 10) Bim Hilder was exhibiting watercolours and etchings: “There is some pleasant work among the pictures which Mr. and Mrs. Bim Hilder have placed on view at the Rubery Bennett Galleries… Mr. Hilder is at his best when he emulated his distinguished father, J. J. Hilder, and invests his pictures with a touch of the romantic. “Camp Fire” is deeply imaginative in its direction of tall tree trunks which look in the half-light like the piers of a Gothic cathedral, and “The Bathers” is beautifully gay and delicate. Both artists present a series of firm, thoughtful etchings in monochrome and in colours.” Perhaps not liking being compared with his father’s art, Hilder abandoned watercolour and took up sculpture. According to his obituary in the Sydney Morning Herald (13 June 1990, pg. 10) Hilder began to sculpt after breaking his ankle, and he was artistically inspired by many things: “All natural phenomena fascinates me, the flight of birds, wave formation, patterns of erosion, characteristics of plant growth, marine life, crystal structure… I don’t have any great aims or direction – I just do the best I can with the ability I have.” After the war Hilder became involved with the Contemporary Art Society (CAS) and was listed as a member of the CAS Sydney committee in November 1947. His CAS exhibits were painted landscapes, mobiles and wooden sculpture. He ended his involvement with the Society in 1949. Reflecting the interest in civic sculpture in the post war period, the Society of Sculptors and Associates was established in 1951 and Hilder was a foundation member. He served twice as President of the Society during the late 1950s and early 60s, although exact terms of office are unknown. The Society of Sculptors and Associates held most of their annual shows at the David Jones’ Art Gallery during the 1950s and Hilder regularly exhibited his carved wooden objects. In 1961 he entered two of his works, Totempole and Brookvale Symbolic Sculpture, at the 1961 'Mildura Sculpture Prize’ exhibition in Mildura, Victoria. The 1961 exhibition was Hilder’s only connection with the landmark sculpture festival which later became known as the 'Mildura Sculpture Triennial’. In 1962 Hilder won a competition for a 'wall-enrichment’ on the new Reserve Bank of Australia building in Martin Place, Sydney. A staff correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald (14 December 1964, pg. 16) described the work: “Australian artist Bim Hilder is responsible for an arresting and interesting treatment of the marble walls above the Martin Place lifts… A 'wall enrichment’, it is an arrangement of metals forming what Hilder refers to as 'an integrating and disintegrating galaxy, representative of the manner in which nations and communities come together, and separate’...The finely textured Wombeyan marble is offset by the artist’s use of cast and beaten copper and bronze… Accenting one section of the galaxy is a six inch quartz crystal uncovered by geologist Ben Flounders in South Australia’s Corunna Hills.” Hilder wrote about the Reserve Bank project in the first issue of Artviews, the journal of the Artists’ Guild of Australia: “Winning the Reserve Bank Prize for a Wall Enrichment in their new Martin Place Building brought me other commissions, and from there on, I seemed to be an established sculptor. I have two main approaches to sculpture – one is to allow the shape and grain of the wood to influence me in the form that develops; the other, for larger works, is to use copper beating, welding, cutting away and adding, like a three-dimensional drawing in space. I don’t have any great aims or direction – just do the best I can with the ability I have.” The ten years following the Reserve Bank project saw many public sculpture commissions around Australia, but the Reserve Bank wall-enrichment and the Burley Griffin Memorial Fountain in Castlecrag (1965) are, arguably, his best known public art works. In 1962 Hilder began teaching art part-time at the East Sydney Technical College and from 1973 he also gave classes in sculpture at the University of New South Wales for their Student Union. In August 1976 Hilder had a one man show of his sculpture at the David Jones’ Art Gallery, Sydney. The exhibition was of nineteen works, ten cedar objects priced between $150 and $1,700. Typical wooden object titles were Molluscia and Ritual Dance. The later work was reproduced in Ken Scarlett’s 1980 book, Australian Sculptors. The exhibition also included nine bronzes in editions of twenty-five. Most of these works had animal titles, such as Penguin feeding its young and Furious Eagle. In 1983 Hilder had an exhibition of his work at the Bloomfield Galleries, Paddington, Sydney. Titled 'Three Generations of Hilder’ the exhibition showed the work of Bim Hilder alongside his father, J.J. Hilder, and his son, Kim Hilder. For the show, Bim exhibited his sculptures, watercolours and etchings. Information about Hilder’s career is brief and sketchy. Ken Scarlet visited the artist while researching his 1980 reference book on Australian sculpture and he lists sixteen of his major commissions in his entry on Hilder. Scarlett commented on Hilder’s vagueness in his entry on the artist (pg. 249): 'When I visited Bim Hilder I found that he did not have any records of his numerous commissions, or of the exhibitions in which he had shown work. He was not at all certain of dates, or sequence of events during his career. Perhaps these are common enough characteristics of many artists, but Bim Hilder also seems to depreciate his own talent…’ Scarlett went on to comment on the differences between Hilder’s wood and metal sculpture (pg. 250): “Bim Hilder’s work seems to have gone in two main directions – his organic sculptures carved from wood and his larger commissions often produced in metals.” In 1973 Hilder wrote a short article titled 'The White Canoe’ for a book titled, Castlecrag. He designed the book in association with fellow Castlecrag resident Eva Buhrich. In 1978 Hilder was awarded an MBE for his services to art. The artist died in Sydney on 8 June 1990 and was cremated at the Northern Suburbs Crematorium in North Ryde, Sydney. He was survived by his two sons, Kim and Larry. Examples of his small sculpture are included in the collections of the Art Gallery of NSW, University of NSW, and the University of Sydney.
Writers:
Silas Clifford-SmithNote:
Date written:
2009
Last updated:
2011
Status:
peer-reviewed
- Born
- b. 3 October 1909
- Summary
- Bim Hilder was a Sydney based sculptor, printmaker and painter active during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Foundation member of the Sculpture Society, twice president. He taught sculpture at the Sydney Technical College during the 1960s. Hilder had numerous public commissions including Reserve Bank, Martin Place, Burley Griffin Memorial, Castlecrag.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 8-Jun-90
- Age at death
- 81
Details
Latitude-27.467778 Longitude153.028056 Start Date1906-01-01 End Date1990-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Brisbane, Qld, Australia
- Biography
- Ida Isabel Martin was born in Brisbane on 29 May 1906, the second child and eldest daughter of the family of three sons and five daughters of William Henry Martin and his wife Isabella Susan née Laking. Her father was headmaster at the Oakey State School for many years. She was educated in Brisbane and the Ipswich Grammar School and subsequently became an apprentice teacher and trained in country areas. She taught at the Ascot State School from 1934 and from 1942 she began giving creative art classes there. She taught art subjects full-time from 1945 and later at the Kedron Park Teachers College. She started classes with L. J. Harvey at the Central Technical College in 1935 and when he set up art and craft classes at Horsham House she continued lessons with him until 1942. She ceased attending classes at that time due to her parents’ concern at the city’s inundation with American soldiers. Harvey’s lessons included wood carving, leather work and painting. She exhibited pottery at the Royal National Agricultural and Industrial Association 1938-39, 1946 and 1951 – she was awarded three first prizes in 1946. She also exhibited examples of her pottery with the Royal Queensland Art Society in 1946-47 and 1955-56.
Ida Martin later studied pottery with Hatton Beck at the Central Technical College during the 1950s when she learned to throw and decorate with under-glaze colours. From 1962 until she retired in 1972 she taught painting, drawing, pottery and carving at the Kedron Park Teachers College and it was only at this stage that she learned the skills of stacking and firing kilns. She died in Brisbane on 5 April 1990.
Queensland Art Gallery: Research Curator, Queensland Heritage
Writers:
Cooke, Glenn R.
Note: Research Curator, Queensland Heritage, Queensland Art Gallery
Date written:
2003
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 29 May 1906
- Summary
- Ida Martin was probably L.J. Harvey's most accomplished pottery student in the last decade of his life. She also had an extensive career as an art and craft teacher and was fondly remembered by her students.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 5-Apr-90
- Age at death
- 84
Details
Latitude-37 Longitude144 Start Date1906-01-01 End Date1990-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Victoria
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1906
- Summary
- Shaw trained at the Melbourne Technical College and attended the University of Melbourne Atelier, later taking a position with Stephenson & Meldrum (later Stephenson & Turner) and Frederick Romberg (working as Romberg & Shaw). In addition to her work in interior design and architecture, she is said to have worked as a site architect for some of Stephenson & Turner's large hospital commissions. She retired in 1968.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1-Jan-90
- Age at death
- 84
Details
Latitude-33.8349393 Longitude148.6925158 Start Date1905-01-01 End Date1990-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Cowra, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- sculptor, ceramicist, painter, photographer, poet, pacifist, garden designer, horsewoman and sometime riding teacher, was a professional by training and track-record even if her range makes her seem a dilettante – though never an amateur. She described her restless nature in lines from Sonnet :
The unexpected waits and calls to me,
Though present joys delight, they also serve
To wake a longing for variety…
Born at Cowra (NSW) in 1905, Clare McMahon spent much of her youth in rural Australia, growing up with a love of gardens, landscape and the natural environment. She studied painting and drawing for three years at Julian Ashton’s Sydney Art School but thereafter did little work in these media, although she took innumerable photographs for personal visual records. Realising that she was happier working in three dimensions than two, she went to England to study sculpture at the Chelsea School of Art in the 1930s.
After a brief wartime marriage contracted in England, she returned to Australia as Clare Pitman, the name she used professionally for the rest of her life. She worked as a military transport driver in Queensland, then moved to Sydney after the war in order to nurse her ageing parents. Having turned seriously to pottery, the only place she could find for a studio was her parents’ garage, granted to her as long as the car was not permanently displaced. Her electric kiln could be fired up safely only at midnight in order to avoid the ruinous effects of blackouts, then still a frequent occurrence due to post-war power restrictions. The technical merit of Korean Lion is all the more impressive when these obstacles to its creation are known.
In her later years Clare Pitman travelled widely, spending much time in England where she had a cottage and studio. In Australia she increasingly emphasised her sculptural work, specialising in portrait heads and traditional figures. Her late career trajectory is summarised by the fact that her 1975 solo show was 'sculpture and ceramics’ but her last, in 1980, was 'sculptures in bronze and clay’. It is, however, arguable that the peak of her artistic achievement was reached when she was working in the medium of ceramics in the 1940s and 1950s in Sydney.
Writers:
Dolan, David
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1905
- Summary
- Clare Pitman (née McMahon) was a sculptor, ceramicist, painter, photographer, poet, pacifist, garden designer, horsewoman and sometime riding teacher. She studied painting and drawing at Julian Ashton's Sydney Art School. In the 1930s she went to England to study sculpture at the Chelsea School of Art.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1990
- Age at death
- 85
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1905-01-01 End Date1990-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- painter, cartoonist and commercial artist, was born in Sydney on 28 November 1905, second of the three daughters of the poet, illustrator and cartoonist Hugh McCrae and his first wife, Annie Geraldine (Nancy) Adams. Georgiana McCrae was her great-grandmother and the poet Dorothy (Dorothea?) McCrae (Mrs Perry), who collaborated with the illustrator Edith Alsop , her aunt. Mahdi’s younger sister Georgiana Rose McCrae , known as 'Smee’, was also a cartoonist and illustrator; her elder sister, Dorothea Huntly (Mrs Norman Cowper, later Lady Cowper), known as Honey, was one of the Turramurra Wall Painters and later a potter. Her father’s lifelong friend, Norman Lindsay , taught Mahdi to draw.
Mahdi McCrae contributed cartoons to the Bulletin from 1918 until the 1930s, eg Catastrophe . This very stylish minimalist drawing of a young woman with a more stereotypical cartoon of an older woman in the background is captioned: '“What’s the matter?”/ “Fred!”/ “Killed? Wounded? Prisoner? Gassed?”/ “No! COMING BACK!”’ 7 March 1918, p11. An undertaker gag was published on 3 March 1927 and the “Vot a Vaste!” on 8 August 1927, p32. Five original Bulletin cartoons published 1934-35 are in ML (PX *D488), including one of a couple snogging outdoors, with the woman asking 'does rain stop play?’
She drew for Melbourne Punch in 1924-25, including a caricature of actor George Jennings (ill. Lindesay, WWW , 114) and a fresh version of the old broken-down car gag 1925 (ill. Lindesay 1979, 175). Her Smith’s Weekly cartoons include: 'Lady (engaging cook): “Do you mean to say you were really with Mrs. Woolbags?”/ Cook: “Well, if you don’t believe me, Mum, you can see her monogram on me camisoles”’ 1 December 1923, p18; Things that might better have been left unsaid . '“You silly, silly old thing, Henry! If you think I have brains enough for two, why don’t you marry me?”’ 23 July 1927.
Mahdi regularly contributed stylish drawings to Sydney Ure Smith 's Home magazine, mainly on the social page “Sydney s’amuse”. They include witty group caricatures, like Was it really Art for Art’s sake at the Society of Artists’ opening day?’-an 'impressionistic pattern of the Artists’ Ball with caricatures of participants, including Ronald McWilliam, her future husband, and artists Adrian Feint and Wanda Radford (September 1926, p34); a respectably-dressed group of participants in the 1927 Society of Artists’ exhibition (seen from the rear) followed by a view of their uninhibited fancy-dress selves at the Artists’ Ball that evening (1 October 1927, p28). She filled 'Sydney s’amuse’ with slightly exaggerated, usually quite flattering portrait heads of friends and acquaintances such as Thea Proctor and Hera Roberts . Her caricature of Pauline Watt of 1 February 1926 is less cruel than Elizabeth Mahony 's photograph of the same subject. Her own elegant silhouette appeared in 'Sydney s’amuse’ on 1 January 1927, 34, accompanying a report of her first solo show at the Sydney Art Salon in November 1926 where she showed 49 watercolours.
Aussie magazine, which published many of Mahdi’s cartoons in the 1920s, stated in 1924 – when she was still only 19 – that her work showed 'an extraordinary delicacy of line and virility of form’. Certainly her cartoon characters were more stylised (and stylish) than her Home carticatures, including a self-portrait in a joke about the eternal problem of the portrait painter ( Aussie , 15 February 1928):
“Call yourself an artist! I think it’s dreadful – I look like an orang-outang”.
“Yes; but you should have thought of that before you began the sittings, madame!”
The artist is identified by her hallmark Eton crop, and shirt and tie, also worn in a jaunty Cazneaux photograph in Home (1 September 1926).
Among the many magazines for which she drew cartoons was Beckett’s Budget . Eg '(Little girl) “Where did you live before you came to 'us’, Daddy?”’ 23 August 1927, p12. For the New Triad , then being edited by her father, she drew the splendid cartoon of an androgynous couple fighting over their Christmas present clothing.
Most of her cartoons were on Sydney society, particularly the many cartoons she drew for Aussie , eg 'Mother: “No! It’s not nice of you at all, Maude – I never told lies when I was a little girl.”/ Maude: “Goodness! How long was it before you started, Mum?” 15 July 1922, p10. (This seems her own gag since the title Backward is included within the drawing.) The issue of 15 January 1927 had three cartoons by Mahdi: (two women walking a dog on the beach) '“He’s simply unbearable in the house – refuses to cook his own breakfast.”/ “Then why don’t you make him eat it before he goes to bed”’; Vanity Bags [about men’s trousers] and Vain gentleman [in bathing suit] before passing ladies, and after [with chest, then belly], pp.15, 33 & 42. Later cartoons in Aussie include couple in evening dress published 15 February 1927, p33; 'Father: “See, baby is learning to walk”./ Social Mother: “Do you think it worth while to teach him? Practically, nobody walks nowadays!”'15 September 1927; and [two flappers undressing] '“Just fancy, they say that 5,000 lizards a year go to make up shoes for women.”/ “Isn’t it too marvellous what they train animals to do!”’ from the 'Undies’ number of Aussie 15 February 1928 (see Heritage ).
Mahdi McCrae had two quite different cartooning and caricaturing styles in Aussie . One is close to fashion illustration in style and subject; the other – often featuring burglars, lawyers (14 January 1923, p21) and businessmen – is more realistic and darkly expressionist in mood, eg a drawing of two burglars in a dark street at night with one saying, “Well, night, night – be good!” Aussie 15 October 1927, p15. The same issue carried a stylish pair of 'before’ and 'after’ drawings in her comic linear style, She went out looking chic – and came back looking shicker (p45). Gags about working-class ignorance and fecundity were an inevitable part of her repertoire, yet they too could be given a sombre realist edge through the drawing, eg [thin mother with baby and toddler to visitor] “Yes, an’ just imagine her marrying a black-an’-white artist!”/ “Gracious heavings! Not one of those dreadful half-castes?” Aussie 1929, p21.
Naturally, this dark mood is entirely absent in her fashion-conscious cartoons of brittle socialites and in her fashion illustrations. Like many young women, McCrae worked as a fashion illustrator for a while. Her first job was drawing advertisements for Farmers department store, as she recollected to Valerie Lawson:
I was told not to put any expression in the models’ faces. I left to go to Woman because they had this horrible man who ran the advertising department who wouldn’t even say “Good morning”. Everyone was petrified of him but I wasn’t shy at all. I sat on the edge of his desk and said “I never want to work here again”. He said, “You’re nothing but a social butterfly. Get off my desk.”
She remained at Woman for many years. Her cartoons appeared from the first issue, 6 December 1934. A full-page colour set of comic vignettes 'This [very Australian] Christmas!’ appeared on 27 December that year. She had a long-running comic strip in Woman , 'Michael and Chrystabel’, detailing the ups and downs of well-heeled married life. (example in Judd, Past Present ). She also illustrated books, including George Spaul’s fantasy tale, Where the Stars are Born (1942), Hauff’s Tales (of exotic Arabia) translated by Margaret H. Gallia (Sydney: William Brooks, 1950) and William Pacey’s stories of traffic rules for children, The Adventures of King Kobar (1954).
An indefatigable, lifelong sketcher, Mahdi McCrae was capable of embarrassing friends even in old age with her habit of whipping out her sketchpad to capture fellow diners in a restaurant. A scrapbook of Mahdi original cartoons is held in private collection. Mahdi married Ronald A. McWilliam in 1930. She died on 23 June 1990, aged 85. Her three daughters, including Vivian (Vivienne?) Alcaine and Dorothy McWilliam survived her.
Writers:
Kerr, JoanJudd, Craig
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
1992
- Born
- b. 28 November 1905
- Summary
- Mid 20th century painter, cartoonist and commercial artist. Her parents' great friend Norman Lindsay taught her to draw and throughout the course of her career she contributed to many publications including the Bulletin, Home, Aussie, Woman and Smith's Weekly.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 23-Jun-90
- Age at death
- 85
Details
Latitude-31.9559 Longitude115.8606 Start Date1903-01-01 End Date1990-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Perth
- Biography
- photographer and dressmaker, was born in Perth; the family first lived in Linden Terrace, then moved to James Street. Hilda attended the Perth Girls’ School but left at the age of fourteen to work in her father’s wood-turning business. At night she studied dressmaking and millinery at Perth Technical College and in 1921 was awarded a teaching cadetship. She taught dressmaking at the College until her retirement in December 1966; in 1948 she produced a series of booklets for the dressmaking course.
Hilda Wright took her first photographs in 1934 while on holiday in NSW; one of her 'pictorial’ images of the Burragorang Valley was published in the Australasian Photo-Review ( AP-R ) in 1938. She had a great love of wildflowers and in 1935 decided to photograph as many of the 6,000-odd species which grow in the West as possible. She joined the WA Camera Club and used a studio set up especially for her spare-time use at the Technical College. To recreate the natural colours of plant specimens—sent to her from all over the state—she used Winsor & Newton artist watercolours to tint her photographs.
In 1937 forty of Wright’s coloured photographs were displayed in the Kodak Gallery, Perth. 125 prints were exhibited in England in 1938: at Hatfield House, the Royal Institute, the Linnaean Society, and at the Royal Horticultural Society where she was awarded a Grenfell medal (silver) for the collection. She was again awarded a Grenfell medal (bronze) in 1950. In August 1939 she was elected an Associate of the Royal Photographic Society for her twelve black-and-white studies of wildflowers, the first WA woman to achieve this honour. (Her work for the award was in black-and-white as the Society did not accept tinted work.)
Wright’s photographs were published in Walkabout and AP-R and exhibited in many galleries, including the Art Gallery of WA (1940), the Kodak Gallery, Sydney (1941), the Royal Photographic Society Annual Exhibition (1942) and the Nature Studies section of the Royal Photographic Society centenary exhibition (1953). Each species had a botanical description provided by the Government Botanist.
Several critics have commended Wright’s work for its combination of botanical detail and artistic skill. The curator at the WA Art Gallery, George Pitt Morison, said that technically the pictures were perfect, well composed and with considerable artistic merit. Governor Sir James Mitchell said that as an 'advertising agent they are likely to do more good than the display of a million bags of wheat or a thousand bales of wool’, while the Government Botanist recognised her work as an important stimulant for the preservation of wildflowers.
Hilda Wright donated her negatives and bequeathed her collection of working and final prints and correspondence to the State Library. Another collection of her fine prints is held at the WA Herbarium.
Writers:
Sassoon, Joanna
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1903
- Summary
- Perth photographer known for her hand-coloured black and white photographs of the flora of the south-west of Western Australia. Fendick's work was widely exhibited in British Botanical Science and photographic exhibitions from the 1930s to 1950s.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1990
- Age at death
- 87
Details
Latitude-23.3782137 Longitude150.5134227 Start Date1902-01-01 End Date1990-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Rockhampton, Qld, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1902
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 29-Apr-90
- Age at death
- 88
Details
Latitude-37.7783921 Longitude145.0312833 Start Date1901-01-01 End Date1990-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Alphington, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- painter, Melbourne, painted The Fortune Teller , an oil that won her the National Gallery Travelling Scholarship in 1926. It was sold at Christie’s Melbourne auction part 1, 26 November 1996, lot151 ill.) Guest had worked as a maid in the house of the vendor’s grandfather, where it was found in a shed along with machine parts (est. $12-15,000).Memory of a colour pattern, the painting which Guest presented to the National Gallery of Victoria after completing her scholarship, was the first in a contentious series of contemporary scholarship-related paintings either rejected or withdrawn from exhibition by the National Gallery of Victoria in the early 1930s. Other artists affected by this policy included Constance Stokes and Sam Atyeo. Guest’s painting was hung for only a short period because it 'showed modern influences’, according to the Melbourne Herald (17 December 1932, page 4).In the late 1930s Guest wrote a children’s book about international travel which was accepted by the New York publisher Henry Holt. However, the rapidly changing international boundaries during the lead up to the Second World War rendered Guest’s illustrated maps outdated before the book could go to press.After the War, Guest patented a design for a perambulator, bed or like covering. A portrait of Nancy Guest by Sybil Craig is in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria.
This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Eric Riddler
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2019
- Born
- b. 26 November 1901
- Summary
- Painter. In 1926 Guest won the National Gallery Travelling Scholarship with her oil 'The Fortune Teller.'
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1-Aug-90
- Age at death
- 89
Details
Latitude53.866444 Longitude10.684738 Start Date1897-01-01 End Date1990-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Lubeck, Germany
- Biography
- painter, was born Elise Schlie in Lubeck, Germany, on 16 January 1897. She began her artistic studies at the age of 17 with a private tutor in Lubeck. In 1917-19 she studied at the Berlin Academy of Art under the German Impressionist Max Liebermann and saw works by many of the foremost modernists, including Feininger, Klee, Kandinsky, Chagall and Schwitters, all of whom exhibited at the Sturm Gallery.
After fleeing to Eutin during the Berlin Soviet, she renewed her studies in 1920 in the newly-liberalised Berlin Academy, then taught in a private girls’ school near Kassel until 1923, when she married Dr Arnold Blumann, director of one of the biggest chemical factories in northern Europe. From 1923 to 1934 she travelled regularly throughout Europe and became familiar with many aspects of modern art. She was particularly impressed by Cézanne and Matisse. She held only one public exhibition in Germany, at Hamburg in 1924.
In 1934 the Blumann family fled Nazi Germany. After four years in Europe, they arrived at Perth in 1938. Elise began to paint almost immediately; a lengthy series of views of the Swan River from Crawley began in 1939. Among the finest of these are On the Swan Nedlands (1942?, UWA) and Melaleuca on the Swan (Storm on the Swan) (1945, AGWA). In both, Blumann fused her understanding of European modernist painting—from Cézanne to Expressionism—with direct and detailed observation of the local light and weather.
She was able to maintain a coherent original style by developing the Jugendstil decorative sensibility fashionable in her student years. This can be seen at its best in her paintings of surfers and in Charles. Morning on the Swan (1939, NGA), a painting of her eldest son in which her knowledge of Cézanne is most evident. The composition of Surfers (1940) is closely linked to the vitalistic Jugendstil interpretation of the work of Rodin offered by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke in a book she was given in 1921 and treasured all her life. Blumann’s characteristic use of separate broad brushstrokes in a limited colour key combined with tight Cézannesque drawing marks her work as one of the few examples of an original modernism applied directly to Australian themes.
In the late 1940s Blumann became an important conduit for modernist ideas and attitudes through the Perth Art Group, which she had helped found in 1942. Summer Nude (1939, AGWA), one of the works in her first exhibition at the Newspaper House galleries in 1944, stirred up a minor scandal.
Blumann was a keen advocate of contemporary methods of art education. She made two trips to the north of WA in 1946 and 1948 recording a number of aspects of Aboriginal life such as Lenora Goldmining Town (1946, p.c.), a radical image of the devastation brought about by mining. From the 1950s she became disillusioned with the possibilities for art in WA and her work was sporadic and uneven. Nonetheless, she provided a vital example for the development of art in the state until the 1980s.
Writers:
Bromfield, David
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 16 January 1897
- Summary
- A student at the Berlin Academy of Art under German Impressionist Max Liebermann, Blumann fled Nazi Germany in 1938, she and her husband settling in Perth. An advocate of boundary pushing when it came to modern art, Blumann became an important conduit for modernist ideas and attitudes for the Perth Art Group, which she helped found in 1942. Furniture by the artist is also known.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1990
- Age at death
- 93
Details
Latitude53.4258455 Longitude11.8475244 Start Date1897-01-01 End Date1990-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Parchim, Germany
- Biography
- Painter born in Parchim, Germany. Blumann had private lessons from the Baron Lutgendorff Leinberg, Director of the Museum fur Kunst und Kulturschlichte der Hansaat L_beck, about 1913. Following this she went to the Berlin Academy of Arts under Max Liebermann and Kathe Kolwitz for 1914-18. She fled to Eutin during the Berlin Soviet and returned in 1920. She renewed her studies and taught in a private girls school near Kassel until 1923 when she married Dr Arnold Blumann director of a large chemical factory. Blumann travelled regularly in Germany, Italy and Switzerland and became familiar with many aspects of modern art. She held a one exhibition in Germany in Hamburg in 1924. In 1934 the family fled from Nazi Germany and after four years in Europe they arrived in Perth. Elise began painting almost immediately. Her work fused her understanding of European modernist painting with direct observation of the light and weather in her new home. She maintained an individual style based on the Jugendstil sensibility fashionable in her student days. In the 1940s she became a conduit for modernist ideas into Perth through the Perth Art Group which she helped Robert Campbell found in 1942. She made trips to the northwest in 1946 and 1948 and to Europe in 1949 but became disillusioned about the possibilities of art in Western Australia and her work became sporadic and uneven thereafter. The critic Charles Lemon wrote in the West Australian 25 July 1946: “This artist makes no concessions to realism. She says that our Landscape is founded on certain elemental and primitive qualities, mysterious and ancient origins which she dimly sees but strongly feels.” She ceased doing much work in the 1960s but travelled to Europe regularly until the 1980s.
Writers:
Dr Dorothy Erickson
Date written:
2010
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1897
- Summary
- Painter who studied at the Berlin Academy of Arts under Max Liebermann and Kathe Kolwitz (1914-1918). Blumann arrived at Perth with her family in the 1930s.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1990
- Age at death
- 93
Details
Latitude-19.2569391 Longitude146.8239537 Start Date1897-01-01 End Date1990-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Townsville, Qld, Australia
- Biography
- Jessica Mary Woodroffe was born in Townsville on 27 April 1897 to Frederick Woodroffe (who was to become a noted gardening judge and writer) and his wife Agnes née Maynard (who exhibited flower paintings and embroideries). She was a student at the Kangaroo Point Girls State School before enrolling at the Central Technical College. She had the example of her mother who was a painter and embroiderer. She studied modelling and design with her art subjects 1914-18 and was invited by L. J. Harvey to make up the numbers for his first night pottery class in 1916. Subsequently, she produced a considerable quantity of pottery in the studio her father made beneath their home in Main Street, Kangaroo Point.
She held the first solo show of pottery in Brisbane at the Sheldon Gallery, Queen Street from 7-14 December 1922. Very few of the more than 100 items on display were left unsold. An unidentified review remarked of the display that:
'Bowls, jars, plates etc. in rich glowing colours and artistic designs abound. The various articles, which have been appropriately arranged in separate groups which include a simply delightful float bowl with a most artistic bird ornament, a dull blue plate with a latticed edge, a jade casket with a quaint fish design, and a white jar distinctively patterned in blue. Distinctly novel also is the hen egg cup. Many of the bowls display fluted edges and floral effect, and in several instances colours have been blended with the most happy result. The whole exhibition is noteworthy for its sound craftsmanship and exquisite finish’.
A small bowl dated 1921 with a deep maroon glaze suggests it was glazed in the Central Technical College’s kiln as it is not a typical Stone’s Pottery glaze. Jessie Woodroffe favoured underglaze decoration and she recalls collecting the bisque fired pieces from Stones Pottery to decorate before the glaze firing.
Miss Woodroffe exhibited pottery at the Queensland Art Society 1919-21 and from 1922-32 (as well as other craft work) at the Arts and Crafts Society of Queensland. The artistic finish and fine quality of the glazes were frequently commended as in 1922 when she and the work of Mrs Devereux were praised. Unfortunately, no specific description of her work is given apart from 1928 when an “effective piece of pottery with a seascape showing palms against a sunset sky” was mentioned by The Brisbane Courier on 13 November 1928. She also exhibited pottery with the Queensland National Agricultural and Industrial Association (QNG&IA) 1921 and 1928-9.
She was represented in the Central Technical College exhibit at the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924 with a bowl decorated with bats (for which she received the first prize in the 1921 QNA&IA). She also sold some of her pieces through the Austral Book Club, Brisbane during the 1920s. She gave up pottery when she went to work for the firm of Murray Frazer Ltd. in Charlotte Street, as a half tone engraver even though L. J. Harvey asked her to work as his assistant at the College.
She died in the H.M.Weller Garden Settlement, Chermside, Brisbane on Christmas Day 1990.
Queensland Art Gallery: Research Curator, Queensland Heritage
Writers:
Cooke, Glenn R.
Note: Research Curator, Queensland Heritage, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Qld
Date written:
2003
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 27 April 1897
- Summary
- Jessie Woodroffe attended L.J. Harvey's first pottery class at the Central Technical College, Brisbane in August 1916 and was the first potter to have a solo exhibition of her work in Brisbane - at the Sheldon Gallery in December 1922.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 25-Dec-90
- Age at death
- 93
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1896-01-01 End Date1990-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 26 January 1896
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 31-Dec-90
- Age at death
- 94
Details
Latitude50.110556 Longitude8.682222 Start Date1893-01-01 End Date1990-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, Frankfurt-on-Main, Germany
- Biography
- sculptor, art historian and critic, came to Sydney from Frankfurt-on-Main in her native Germany in 1930 and quickly became prominent as a professional sculptor and, even more unusual, as a knowledgeable advocate of modernist art. Lange had produced a number of Art Deco-style medallions in Germany during the 1920s, and she received several commissions for similar small-scale work after her arrival in Sydney. These included a commission from Holy Trinity Church, Erskineville, for a terracotta jubilee medallion and an altar candlepiece based on Sturt’s desert pea which was to be cast in bronze.
In April 1932 she showed work in an 'Exhibition of Progressive Art’ at the Modern Art Centre in Sydney and in November exhibited a plaster figure, Meditation , in an exhibition simply called 'Seventeen Modern Artists’, again at the Modern Art Centre. Assisted by Edith Lanser, Lange made fifteen marionette figures for a three-act production, enabling her to present her own theatrical version of the Bible story in 1932-33. The first performance was at Burdekin House, Sydney, on 29 November 1932.
In July 1934 she exhibited two pieces of sculpture, The Heavy Plait (a small bronze) and Seraph of Light (a plaster figurine), in the Women Artists of Australia Exhibition at the Education Department Gallery in Sydney. The following year she designed and carved a Christmas crib for St James’s Church, King Street, which included seven painted plaster figures. Two of these, Young Shepherd and Madonna (AGNSW), were later shown in 'Exhibition I’ at David Jones Gallery (17 August-2 September 1939). She carved a cedar relief panel for the Sydney Teachers College in 1937 and in 1940 designed a memorial birdbath in cast stone for the Special School at Glenfield, but produced no more major work after that date. From 1947 until her retirement in 1954, she taught art at Frensham School, Mittagong.
Lange is remembered today for her insistent promotion of modern art. She published four articles in Art in Australia between May 1936 and March 1941 and was frequently quoted in the Sydney press. Throughout the 1930s and ’40s she made a living giving illustrated public lectures on all aspects of the history of art: at Sydney University, the Art Gallery of NSW, for the Contemporary Art Society (after it was formed in 1939) and elsewhere. During this period she was closely involved with the Crowley-Fizelle studio in George Street, associating with such artists as Frank and Margel Hinder , Ralph Balson, Frank Medworth, Grace Crowley , Gerald Lewers and Rah Fizelle. In 1939 she wrote the foreword to their Exhibition I catalogue, calling hopefully but prematurely for the 'abandoning [of] the representation of objects in order to establish a new realm of visual existence … this leads step by step to “abstract Art”’.
Writers:
Batchen, Geoffrey
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1893
- Summary
- Sculptor, art historian and critic, came to Sydney from Frankfurt-on-Main in her native Germany in 1930 and quickly became prominent as a professional sculptor.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1990
- Age at death
- 97
Details
Latitude-33.829075 Longitude151.24409 Start Date1893-01-01 End Date1990-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Mosman, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- illustrator, painter and printmaker, was born in Mosman, Sydney, on 29 October 1893. He studied art with Julian Ashton and Elioth Gruner (1909-15), then joined up and served with the Australian Field Ambulance in France (1915-18) including being present at the Battle of the Somme. After his discharge, he worked as a commercial and newspaper illustrator in Melbourne. Encouraged by Harold Herbert , he also painted watercolours. At Will Dyson 's suggestion, he went to London in 1930 and drew illustrations for leading magazines and newspapers, including the Illustrated London News and Country Life , as well as for Oxford University Press. He studied at St Martin’s School of Art, and in Paris.
Wenban returned to Australia in 1938 and continued to work as a commercial artist and book illustrator, including educational books. Most of his known originals are watercolours. During WWII he was chairman of the artists’ branch of the Civil Construction Corps (other artist members included Dobell and Joshua Smith ). In 1946 he was living in Sydney and still working as an illustrator. In 1954 he was one of the 10 artists of the 'Melbourne Popular Art Group’ who produced a folio of 14 linocuts, Eureka 1854-1954 (Melbourne 1954), which paid tribute to 'the stand of the Ballarat miners in the Eureka Stockade’ (copy Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery). Wenban was responsible for no.1, a silk-screen portrait of Peter Lalor. No.s 2 (“Joe! Joe! The Traps are coming” where the mine shaft is like a crucifix), 4 ('The Magistrate’) and 5 ('On Bakery Hill’) are by Noel Counihan ; no.11, 'The Sentry’ (a miner guarding the flag at night) is by Maurice Carter ; and Len Gale drew no. 8, 'The Blacksmith’. Like Counihan, Peter Miller did three – 6 (“Burn the Licences!”, a group of men), 10 ('The Sly Grog Seller’) and 12 ('The Pikeman’). Ailsa O’Connor did no.7, 'Building the Stockade’ (and erecting the flag), while Pat O’Connor did no.3, 'The Licence Hunt’ (a simplified story). Ernie McFarlane did no.9, 'The Blacksmith’ (second version, to complement Gale’s); no.13, 'Trampling the Flag’, is by Naomi Schipp ; and the last of the set, no.14 'After the Battle’ (a mother mourning over a dead body), is by Mary Zuvella .
Wenban had two painting retrospectives: at Sydney in 1989 and at Melbourne’s Galerie des Arts in 1990, the year he died.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 29 October 1893
- Summary
- Mid 20th century Sydney, Melbourne and London illustrator, painter and printmaker, Wenban studied art with Julian Ashton and Elioth Gruner. In 1954 he was one of 14 artists who contributed to a folio of prints which paid tribute to the miners in the Eureka Stockade.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1990
- Age at death
- 97
Details
Latitude-18.324439 Longitude127.55465 Start Date1940-01-01 End Date1989-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Canning Stock Route, WA, Australia
- Biography
- Born 'in the bush’ near Godfrey’s Tank on the Canning Stock Route c.1940. His death in 1989 robbed the community of Billiluna, where he had lived, of a gentle, quiet man who was a good artist. Possum was a Walmatjari speaker, whose country was around Kaningarra (Godfrey’s Tank). His principal Dreaming was Water. He began painting for Warlayirti Artists in 1988. His style was less typical of Balgo and more similar to other Kimberley art (especially Turkey Creek and Fitzroy Crossing). It was simple, obviously deeply felt, sometimes with human figures and usually surrounded by a pattern of hills.
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1940
- Summary
- Walmatjari artist who painted for Warlayirti Artists from Billiluna in the late 1980s, until his passing in 1989. His paintings are unusual for the Balgo region and are more similar in style to Kimberley Art.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1989
- Age at death
- 49
Details
Latitude-19.8516101 Longitude133.2303375 Start Date1932-01-01 End Date1989-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Janyinki, NT, Australia
- Biography
- Born c.1932 at Janyinki, west of Yuendumu, the custodians of this area being Napanangka/Japanangka and Napangardi/Japangardi. He was Warlpiri and had lived in Yuendumu for many years. He was involved with the group of senior men who began painting at Yuendumu in the mid ’80s. His 1986 Janyinki Jukurrpa , purchased by the National Gallery of Australia, depicted the site of Janyinki, which is associated with Ngarrka (Initiated Men) and Ngalyipi (Vine) and Ruutju (Women) Dreamings.
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1932
- Summary
- Warlpiri artist who contributed to the formation of the painting movement in Yuendumu in the mid 1980s. His work is in the National Gallery of Australia.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1989
- Age at death
- 57
Details
Latitude-37.8384623 Longitude145.0740767 Start Date1926-01-01 End Date1989-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Camberwell, Melbourne, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 25 April 1926
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 17-Jun-89
- Age at death
- 63
Details
Latitude-19.8516101 Longitude133.2303375 Start Date1925-01-01 End Date1989-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Lurumbu,Napperby station, NT, Lurumbu (Napperby station), NT, Australia
- Biography
- Kaapa was born on Napperby Station c.1925. He was initiated at Napperby, and subsequently worked there as a stockman. While still in his younger days, he moved to Haasts Bluff, doing stock work at the government cattle station. Kaapa was amongst the 400 people brought across at the start of the ’60s when Papunya settlement was established. An elder of the region, Kaapa’s tribal affiliation was Anmatyerre/Warlpiri/Aranda (the name 'Mbitjana’ is an Arrente skin name corresponding to Tjampitjinpa in the Western Desert system of skin names). His father, born at Warlukurlangu west of Yuendumu, was of mixed Anmatyerre/Warlpiri descent. His mother, who was born at Napperby was Anmatyerre/Aranda. One of Kaapa’s key sites was Mikantji, a rainmaking place near Mt Denison. Other Dreamings which he painted included Owl, Shield, Witchetty Grub, Pelican, Snake (connected with rainmaking rituals), Black Goanna, Emu and Yam. Kaapa had been involved with the inception of the painting movement. His acknowledged mastery of brush technique led to his selection by the other men to paint the mural on the Papunya school wall. As Geoffrey Bardon noted in his account of these events, 'Kaapa Tjampitjinpa had been a most enterprising and independent artist in the traditional manner before my arrival at Papunya.’ (G. Bardon, Aboriginal Art of the Western Desert , {Rigby, 1979}). In August 1971 Kaapa shared first prize in the Alice Springs Caltex Golden Jubilee Art Award and when Papunya Tula Artists was formally incorporated, Kaapa was its inaugural Chairman.
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Note: primary biographer
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1925
- Summary
- Anmatyerre/Arrente artist who was the principal painter of the Papunya school mural and a key player in the establishment of Papunya Tula Artists, being the first Chairman. He brought recognition to the group when he won the Caltex Alice Springs Art Award in 1971. His work is represented in major public and private collections.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- Oct-89
- Age at death
- 64
Details
Latitude-36.1281405 Longitude144.7516955 Start Date1922-01-01 End Date1989-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Echuca, VIC, Australia
- Biography
- painter, commercial artist and theatrical designer, was born at Echuca, Victoria on 11 May 1922. In 1940-45 she studied at the Melbourne Technical Art School (RMIT) under John Rowell (husband of Eugenie Durran ) and, briefly, with Murray Griffin then taught there in 1945-46. She met the painter Newton Hedstrom at one of Rowell’s classes and held her first exhibition with him at Melbourne’s Myer Gallery in 1946. The couple married and settled in Sydney, where they shared a studio with Theo Batten at 236 George Street.
Marjory was an inaugural member of the Studio of Realist Art and exhibited with SORA, the Society of Artists and in various competitive exhibitions. Her painting, The Headland , was hung in the Wynne Prize in 1948 and declared by Bernard Smith to be 'well above the average of the rest of the exhibits’. Her Coastal Highway was hung in the Wynne Prize (AGNSW) in 1950. She won the Warringah Prize in 1979 and the Lane Cove and Young Prizes in 1986. During the late 1940s and early 1950s she did freelance illustration work, producing a series of advertisements for Arnott’s Wafer Wheat Biscuits that revolve around the active delights of a utopian Australia. This work stands in contrast to her drawings of food rationing, e.g. a pen and ink sketch from 1948 showing a woman and a child hovering on the fringes of a street market.
Penglase sketched backstage with the Borovansky Ballet from their first Australian season. She also designed for amateur dramatic groups in Melbourne and Sydney. Her first extensive overseas tour was made in 1976, when she went to the UK and Europe. She returned to Europe in 1980 and visited China in 1982. A couple of her paintings were included in the Manly Art Gallery’s Newton Hedstrom retrospective.
Writers:
Kerr, JoanHolder, Jo
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
1992
- Born
- b. 11 May 1922
- Summary
- Painter, theatrical designer and teacher, Marjory Penglase married fellow artist, Newton Hedstrom, and won numerous awards during her career. In later years she travelled extensively through Europe, China and the UK.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1989
- Age at death
- 67
Details
Latitude-19.8516101 Longitude133.2303375 Start Date1920-01-01 End Date1989-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Illpili, NT, Australia
- Biography
- Ray’s first contact with whitemen was the sighting of planes overhead as a small boy. He later worked as a stockman at various cattle stations across the centre, including Haasts Bluff, before taking up painting in the early ’80s. Johnny Warangkula and his close friend Dick Pantimas taught him how to use paint and canvas. His traditional country lay around his birthplace Illpili and the site of Winparrku in this area. The stories he painted included Emu, Lightning and Rain Dreamings. His places of residence during the ’80s included Haasts Bluff, Illpili, Papunya and Mt Liebig. He was survived by his three wives, several daughters and grandchildren.
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Note: Primary biographer.
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1920
- Summary
- Pintupi/Luritja artist from Illpili who worked as a stockman before joining Papunya Tula Artists in the early 1980s. Close friend and associate of Dick Pantimas. His work is represented in major public collections.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1989
- Age at death
- 69
Details
Latitude-37.7984 Longitude144.9785 Start Date1914-01-01 End Date1989-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Fitzroy, Melbourne, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- Artist Ian Graham Bow is best known for his enduring contribution to Australian sculpture throughout the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s. He was born in 1914 in Fitzroy, Victoria, the son of Scottish immigrants, John Roger Bow, an electrical engineer, and his wife, Mary Imrie (née Graham). During the 1930s, he attended Melbourne Technical School. Bow completed his teacher training in 1934 focusing his studies on drawing and design. The following year, he married fellow school teacher Winifred Nellie Dewey. Eventually, Bow and his young family settled in the Prahan suburb of Melbourne.
The early 1940s were an artistically productive period for Bow. In 1940 his work was first represented in the annual member exhibition of the Victorian Artists’ Society, having joined the group in 1939. Originally, Bow’s creative output centred upon painting: landscapes, interiors and still-life compositions.
Bow was a regular exhibitor at Melbourne’s Athenaeum Art Gallery where he held several solo exhibitions. By May 1945 for his solo exhibition at the Athenaeum Gallery he had amassed some 45 oil paintings of wide-ranging subjects. Bow persisted with his goal of establishing himself as a painter in Melbourne’s artistic sphere. He continued to exhibit regularly as a member of the Victorian Artists’ Society (VAS) and in 1946, Bow became inaugural co-editor of the Society’s journal.
Throughout his artistic career, Bow continued to teach. During 1940, he was master at Caulfield Technical College as well as a lecturer at Melbourne Teachers College from 1942-44. Bow took the position of Art Master at Haileybury College, Melbourne in 1945, where he taught until 1971. In 1944, Bow’s passion for sharing knowledge extended to the role of art instructor for the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) of Victoria. When the WEA was replaced by the Council of Adult Education (CAE) Bow was appointed to the role of art lecturer, a position he held from 1948 until 1969. The role offered Bow great diversity, including the provision of art instruction to inmates (some serving life sentences) of Pentridge Prison.
In 1949, he remarried and was living with his second wife Andrea (nee Pitt) in Macleod, an outer-Melbourne suburb.
Bow’s career continued to gain momentum, in part fuelled by the selection of his Portrait of John Bayard, n.d., for the 1950 Archibald Prize, and by an overseas study tour he undertook during 1950-51. While overseas Bow attended the 1950 Venice Biennale, toured Italy and France, and spent time in the United Kingdom studying art-school organization and teaching. Bow also visited Henry Moore, the prominent sculptor and public figure, who advocated that sculpture, rather than painting, was the art form with greatest ties to public and social concerns.
Following his return to Australia, Bow became increasingly dissatisfied with what he saw were the conservative tastes of those passing judgment on contemporary Australian art. Bow’s passion for the modernist aesthetic put him at odds with Melbourne’s art establishment. In spite of Bow’s open criticism of the state of art-politics, a retrospective exhibition of his work was displayed at the VAS gallery in 1954. Writing about the exhibition for the Argus, Arnold Shore remarked that “[m]odernism and a desire to find a personal means to expression have impelled [Bow] from impressionism to symbolism, the abstract, and much experiment.”
Bow’s retrospective coincided with the publication of Clive Turnbull’s The Art of Ian Bow, 1954, which captured in print a selection of the artist’s paintings from his fifteen-year career. Turnbull described Bow as a “painter of our time…eager to explore ways of painting.”
In the early 1950s he also produced prints, including lino-cuts that later informed a series of wall sculptures completed by Bow in 1960 and 1961.
In 1956, while making sketches for a painting, Bow’s ideas for a sculptural series first took form. Bow remarked that up to that time he “…just did pieces of construction work and sculpture to assist the form in my painting…As it turned out…I was really a latent sculptor… .”
The 1950s Bow’s self-realization focused his creativity onto crafting in three dimensions rather than two. Bow’s early bronzes, The durable man, c.1955, and Head of Venus, 1958, were acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria. In 1958, Spencer Shier studios produced a documentary entitled: Man into Metal: Sculpture by Ian Bow. That same year Bow resigned his VAS membership, and joined the Contemporary Art Society of Australia, Victoria, until 1961.
In 1961 Bow was invited to participate in the first Mildura Sculpture Triennial event to which he sent four bronzes and a cast aluminium sculpture. Thus Bow’s life-long link with the town at the far north-west of Victoria was established.
Throughout the 1960s Bow continued to exhibit widely, including: the Mildura Sculpture Triennial events of 1964, 1967, and 1970; the ‘Transfield’ exhibition during the mid-1960s; and, the 1966 Art Gallery of New South Wales exhibition ‘Alcorso-Sekers’ Travelling Scholarship Award for Sculpture. He received numerous commissions, among them: a wall sculpture “to create a significant feature in harmony with the new interior design of Michael’s Pharmacy,” Melbourne; the 1966 bronze dedication plaque titled Man, Vision and Perception, for Mildura Arts Centre, and, in 1969 a commission for a tactile work, later titled Urban Cycle, 1975, made in bronze and tin, for the Blind Citizens’ Community Centre in Kooyong, Melbourne.
Bow lost his sight due to complications from a brain tumour. Urban Cycle was his last commission. Ian Bow passed away at Melbourne’s Austin Hospital on 17 November, 1989, aged 75. His work is represented in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, and Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane. Galleries in regional Victorian cities that boast Bow’s work include Ballarat, Gippsland/Sale, Hamilton, Mildura and Shepparton, while representation in University collections is at Melbourne University, Australian National University and James Cook University.
Writers:
Heather Lee
Date written:
2018
Last updated:
2018
- Born
- b. 6 August 1914
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 17-Nov-89
- Age at death
- 75
Details
Latitude53.4075 Longitude-2.991944 Start Date1913-01-01 End Date1989-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Liverpool, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Painter, did the undated oil, The Little Farm House Near Coffs Harbour , which was auctioned by Christie’s from the estate of the Late Frederick D. Blain at Melbourne on 2 April 2003, lot 65.
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1913
- Summary
- Painter, did the undated oil, The Little Farm House Near Coffs Harbour, which was auctioned by Christie's.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1989
- Age at death
- 76
Details
Latitude47 Longitude20 Start Date1909-01-01 End Date1989-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Hungary
- Biography
- Steven Kalmar
[excerpt from Anne Watson, “Kafka and Kalmar: two European furniture designers in post-war Sydney.” Furniture History Society (Australasia) Journal, No 2, 2004, pp 10-14] (used with permission0
Steven Kalmar was [...] born in Budapest on 23 November 1909, Kalmar trained as an architect and [...] emigrated to Australia in 1939 [1]. During the war he worked in optical munitions at Sydney University and in the second half of the 1940s began to build a career designing commissioned furniture and interiors. In 1949 he opened Kalmar Interiors in Sydney’s narrow Rowe Street (demolished in 1972 to make way for the MLC building), a fashionable enclave of art, craft and design shops, galleries and cafes frequented by many in Sydney’s European community. In this tiny studio and showroom, barely four by six metres, Kalmar operated a highly successful interior design and furniture business until 1955.
Drawing his ideas from books and magazines on contemporary Scandinavian and American design trends Kalmar created a range of furniture and homewares designed to be purchased individually or as complete room suites. Consistent with the decreasing size of houses and a shortage of imported materials in post-war Sydney Kalmar’s furniture was light, compact, functional – some of it multi-purpose – and relatively low-cost. Much of it utilised local coachwood, a honey-coloured rainforest timber, and was marketed to young home owners through catalogues and regular advertising in magazines, principally Australian House and Garden and in the Sydney Morning Herald’s ‘Shop Detective’ section:
Kalmar originals are designed to go well together, piece by piece. Faithfully built in solid coachwood they are finished in wax and can be purchased on terms if desired. [2]
The furniture was made in factories in Parramatta and later Glebe. Kalmar also operated an interior decorating consultancy and in the early years of his Rowe Street business even invited customers to get creative for themselves:
Design your own furniture! After all you are going to live with it. You know better than anyone else what you like, what you need. Put your ideas on paper in the form of a rough sketch and bring it to us. We will discuss with you the practical and functional aspects and will plan your furniture to be an individual expression of your personality. [3]
Perhaps not surprisingly this entrepreneurial marketing strategy was not repeated in subsequent advertising, but it did indicate Kalmar’s sensitivity to the individual needs and the adventurous tastes of some of his more creative customers. While much of Kalmar’s Rowe Street furniture can be identified today through a ‘Kalmar Interiors’ stamp or the line drawings of his frequent advertisements, the designer’s unpretentious seagrass-seated dining chairs and his chunky bentwood-armed easy chairs, both from the early 1950s, are distinctive records of his role in introducing a modern aesthetic to post-war Sydney.
Kalmar closed the Rowe Street shop in 1955 and opened slightly larger premises at 55 Castlereagh in the city, but in 1957 decided to end his retail business and concentrate on design commissions for interior schemes. These included, notably, the Indian Tea Centre in Pitt Street, restaurants and cafes in the city such as the Café de Paris and the Vienna Café, dining spaces for Anthony Hordern’s and the Cahill’s chain and a number of hotel interiors for businessman Len Plasto. Some of the furniture Kalmar designed for these interiors was made by Paul Kafka.
During the 1960s and 70s Kalmar became something of a design ‘guru’ in Sydney, writing a popular weekly page on interior decoration for the Sunday Telegraph from about 1959 and from 1971 to 1986 writing regularly on design matters for Womans Day.
In 1964 Kalmar published You and Your Home [4], now an important record of some of the more adventurous domestic architecture and interiors in and around Sydney in the early 1960s. Featured were houses by Douglas Snelling, Ken Woolley and Neville Gruzman as well as interiors by Marion Hall Best and Leslie Walford. Above all the book was intended as a practical and inspirational ‘how to’ for the modern homemaker, a theme consistent with Kalmar’s emphasis on functional and affordable modernity in his Rowe Street furniture enterprise in the 1950s. Kalmar died on 26 September 1989, just a few years after ceasing to write his influential women’s magazine design page.
[...]Kalmar’s [story] and those of the other European-born designers and architects with whom [he was] professionally or personally linked, contribute an important chapter to Australian history, one that has yet to be fully explored.
Drawing on [...] emerging international design trends, as with Kalmar, [he] played a significant role in the spread of modernist design concepts and helped strengthen Australia’s growing recognition of its need to connect more actively with the rest of the world in the post-war era. Inextricably linked to the beginning of Australia’s emergence as a vibrant, multicultural society, [...] Kalmar’s furniture survives as tangible evidence of the unique contribution of Sydney’s European immigrants and the cultures, skills and ideas [he] introduced.
^ Kalmar’s biographical details are drawn from an interview with Kalmar by the author in 1985 and Judith O’Callaghan’s interview with Kalmar’s widow in 1990.
^ Australian House and Garden, January 1955
^ Art and Design, first number, 1949, p 78.
^ Steven Kalmar, You and Your Home, Shakespeare Head Press, Sydney, 1964
Writers:
Michael Bogle
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 1 January 1909
- Summary
- Kalmar was an interior designer and a furniture designer. He established Kalmar Interiors, Sydney in 1949 and was an inaugural member of the Society of Interior Designers of Australia. His book, "You and Your Home" (1964), is a valuable assessment of Sydney interior design and designers ca.1964.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-89
- Age at death
- 80
Details
Latitude-19.8516101 Longitude133.2303375 Start Date1908-01-01 End Date1989-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Yarrunkanyi, NT, Australia
- Biography
- Born c.1908 at Yarrunkanyi (Mt Hardy), to the west of Yuendumu. Yarrunkanyi is associated with the Initiated Men (Ngarrka) Dreaming and the Mala (Western Hare Wallaby) Dreaming. He was one of the group of senior men at Yuendumu involved in the establishment of painting at the settlement. He collaborated with Paddy Japaljarri Sims , Larry Jungarrayi Spencer and Paddy Jupurrurla Nelson on Munga Star Dreaming, 1985, which was purchased by the National Gallery of Australia from the Yuendumu painters’ first Sydney show. He was Warlpiri and lived at Yuendumu much of the time or on his outstation at Jila.
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1908
- Summary
- Warlpiri artist Jungarrayi was one of the senior men who initiated the painting movement in Yuendumu in the mid 1980s. His work, including an early collaborative piece "Munga Star Dreaming", is held in major national art collections.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1989
- Age at death
- 81
Details
Latitude-36.7077015 Longitude144.2632351 Start Date1906-01-01 End Date1989-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Eaglehawk, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- William Archibald Constable (1906-1989) was raised with two younger brothers in the family of the Reverend Archibald Henry Constable, rector of St. John’s Church of England. Bill Constable took watercolor lessons from Meta Townsend, followed by studying at the National Gallery of Victoria School of Art, and later at London’s St. Martin’s School of Art.(1) His involvement with the most advanced experimental theaters in England set his passion for life.On his return to Australia, Constable took up several commercial design projects and was noticed after his very first theatrical commission in 1933: the cubist stage decorations for the Gregan McMahon Players’ production of Bridie’s Jonah and the Whale at the Garrick in South Melbourne featuring Coral Browne, a famous English actress. The play was directed by Alec Coppel, who later returned from London, and also included actress Kathleen Robinson. The press claimed that the “production will be notable for the unusual settings by William Constable, a young artist who recently reached Melbourne from abroad… Constable’s stage settings are great fun. They are simple and attractive.” Constable met Edouard Borovansky in the late 1940s and a lifelong creative partnership and personal friendship began. As artistic director of the Borovansky Ballet Company for 15 years, William Constable was behind most productions as artistic director, designer and painter. Frank Salter described Borovansky and Constable working together “in total harmony over his [Constable] entire Australian career.” Constable “was always fascinated by Boro’s method of working with him” and often was entertained by Boro’s comments, such as “You clever bastard, Bill; you’ve realised exactly what I had in mind”.(2) Constable created a portfolio of over 100 stage productions before departing Australia again in 1955. In England Constable designed the first ballet by Sir Noel Coward “London Morning”, and then worked mainly on cult movies such as “The Trials of Oscar Whilde”, “Taste of Fear”, “The Hellions”, “The Skull”, “Doctor Who”, “ Casino Royal” and many others.In 1963-1964 he worked in Cambodia on Lord Jim” movie and stayed there for sometime to paint. His Cambodian paintings were exhibited across Australia. He returned to Sydney in the 1970s and only then was able to dedicate himself to painting. The designer was known for his illustrations, drawings and paintings. He designed and closely supervised the production of the backdrop for the Empire Theater in Sydney that unfortunately burnt down. Just as unfortunate was the demolition of his mural for the lower foyer of the Theater Royal. However, the curtain he designed and supervised in 1972 for Her Majesty’s Theater in Melbourne was recently located in Adelaide packed inside a box. Sydney Ure Smith claimed that Constable “... has unbounded enthusiasm, and does everything with distinction.” And later: “He has imagination and individuality, which, allied to an unerring color sense, place him in the front rank as a stage designer.”(3) With such artistic abilities and taste Constable created almost 160 dramas, operas (16 of these for Sir Eugene Goossens), ballets (mostly for the Borovansky ballet) and films.The culmination of Constable’s professional and artistic career was his backdrop design for the ballet, Corroboree. Creating a rock motif, he used bold organic shapes, strong details, variation in textures, and a very successful combination of light and contrasting colors. He created a minimalistic composition that accurately translated the desert of Central Australia to contrast with the night sky. The inclusion of a full solar eclipse added drama and mystery, and possibly represented the everlasting life cycle. The highlighted top of the stone is the visual focus of the composition, where a pastel pink sandy foreground grounds the center of action during the dance. The fine lines of dried trees, a ritual pole and still sand waves make a statement of human presence and support the greatness of the rock. The rock motif became a classic symbol of the newly established Australian stage design industry.In 1948 Constable and Eugene Goossens realised that the Sydney public needed “a theater for the quadruple purpose of opera, legitimate theater, ballet, and orchestra.”(4) Goossens saw his “dream child” Opera House in the style of a Greek amphitheater built at Bennelong Point as the Australian National Theater. In April 1949 Constable completed a visual interpretation of Goossens’ idea for the Sydney Opera House, a long time before the official competition for the architectural project was announced by the New South Wales Government. The two published an illustrated article with the proposal and a promise to realise the project within 5 years at Bennelong Point.(5) With Constable’s departure for Europe and the scandalous conclusion of Goossen’s career in Australia, the project was left unfinished and the proposed design is now held in the Opera House archives. In his article for the souvenir program that accompanied the Jubilee Borovanksy ballet in 1954, Constable claimed that ballet “is a blending of three arts” and that “on the ballet stage we see a meeting of the poetry of movement, music and painting – a poem distilled of these three arts and beyond the need of the spoken word.”(6) The career of Constable is a great illustration to his motto. William Constable was significant in his contributions to Australia stage design for retaining great traditions of style and perfection that were established by the Ballets Russes and its artists. His legacy in stage decor, his input into Australian theatrical design and the establishment of the stage designer as a profession is significant in Australian theatrical history.
1 Meta Townsend, wife of Reginald Sturgess, Victorian Art Society members, Australian artists, Meta Townsend’s family lived in Malmsbury2 Salter, Frank, Borovansky, the man who made Australian ballet, Wild Cat Press, 1980 3 Sydney Ure Smith, O.B.E., President, Society of artists. Introduction to Catalogue of Exhibition4 SMH, 24 July 19475 Eugene Goossens, How Long Before Our Opera House Dream Comes True?The Sunday Herald, 17 April, 19496 Souvenir program of Jubilee Borovansky Ballet, 1954 from the collection of SL of NSW
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Olga Sedneva
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2014
- Born
- b. 1906
- Summary
- Australian film and stage designer, painter, cartoonist, printmaker, illustrator and commercial designer. Worked in Australia and UK.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1989
- Age at death
- 83
Details
Latitude51.507222 Longitude-0.1275 Start Date1905-01-01 End Date1989-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- London, England, UK
- Biography
- Cartoonist, illustrator, commercial artist and printmaker, was born in London on 11 March 1905 (acc. Roger Butler’s National Gallery of Australia [NGA] website www.australianprints.gov.au), son of the Australian artist Frank P. Mahony and his Australian wife, Mary, née Tobin. Will came to Sydney in 1916. He began his career there as a cadet on Smith’s Weekly , to which he subsequently contributed cartoons while working as a commercial artist in 1922-27. (Ward 1979, 8), claims that he studied at East Sydney Technical College 1930-31 and that his first prints were wood engravings, e.g. Shadows 1929 (tiger in bush) and The Lotus Eaters 1930.) He exhibited prints – etchings, lino-cuts, woodcuts and wood engravings – with the Society of Artists (1930-43), at Macquarie Galleries and at Rubery Bennett’s gallery.
In 1928-30 he contributed cartoons to the Sydney Evening News . His illustration An Artist’s Impressions of The Show was published in the Sydney Mail on 16 April 1930, 24. In 1931-32 he was political cartoonist on the World , e.g. Will Mahony’s Angle on Events , an editorial cartoon on the cost of federal government, published 26 August 1932, 2. He later contributed political cartoons to other newspapers, including Labor Call c.1930s-40s (see Senyard) and Labor Daily (1932-40), while teaching at Sydney Technical College. A number of his war cartoons are illustrated in King (143-51). He was sacked from the Daily Telegraph in 1945 after refusing to draw a political cartoon demanded by the editor. His replacement George Finey left soon after also but there are differing accounts over whether Finey was fired or chose to resign. Later he drew political cartoons for the Sydney Daily Mirror (1950-53), followed by a stint as a staff artist for Australian Consolidated Press [ACP] (1954-62). Then he again taught art at Sydney Tech. and contributed cartoons as a freelancer. Will Mahony died in Sydney in 1989, according to Roger Butler’s NGA website.
The Mitchell Library’s [ML] Bulletin collection holds one original cartoon by Mahoney and 19 caricatures (1933-35), including ones of Fred Leist and J.G. Watkins (“Wattie”), painter, teacher and AGNSW trustee. Other cartoons include The Waverley Wailer’s Last Walk (featuring the “red bogey”), Daily News 1939 (ill King, 125), and the undated original The Power of the Press (re newsprint monopoly) [1930s-40s?] (Josef Lebovic Galleries). He also 'carved the most stylish woodcuts’, according to Stewart (p.36) who wrote that Mahony and “George” [Aub?] Aria were 'inseparable’ mates.
Works in public collections include a good cartoon on censorship in Tomorrow 1946 (ill. Lindesay, WWW , 152). The Spooner Papers (ML PIC ACC 4899) have several original cartoons by various cartoonists featuring and collected by Sir Eric ('Neck to Knee’) Spooner, including Mahony’s Naughty Naughty [Spring as a lightly clad allegorical female being pursued by 'Purity League’ man with 'Spooner’s Patent’ neck-to-knee costume], “Here – you indecent hussy put this on!” n.d. but clearly mid-1930s so possibly for Labor Daily . Other cartoons collected by Spooner are by Tom Glover for the Sun (1937) and Sunday Sun (Oct 1934, 1935-37); by Stuart Peterson for the Sun 1934, 13 October 1938 (straight political – Spooner was also deputy leader) and 1939; by Walter Dowman (re fatmen banks etc on the back of the thin exhausted farmer, who is being whipped along by Spooner); by George Finey , EVICTED [Spooner as Landlady evicting little man in bowler hat]: “I’m not having any of your common type here” n.p., n.d., and another re Local Government Amending Bill. Brodie Mack drew Spooner as Nelson looking through telescope towards a beach of scantily clad people, Daily Telegraph 9 February 1937, et al.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Tobree
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2019
- Born
- b. 11 March 1905
- Summary
- Mid 20th century Sydney cartoonist, illustrator, commercial artist and printmaker, Mahoney was sacked from the Daily Telegraph in 1945 after refusing to draw a certain political cartoon demanded by the editor.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1989
- Age at death
- 84
Details
Latitude-38.15 Longitude144.35 Start Date1905-01-01 End Date1989-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Geelong, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- Oswald Noel Coulson
Prepared by Catriona Quinn, July 2014
O. Noel Coulson was one of the busiest and best known decorators in Melbourne, catering for with a wealthy and sophisticated predominantly Jewish business clientele in Toorak and South Yarra, on a scale sufficient to break sales records with his suppliers. Prolific, industrious and independent, Coulson’s practice took on domestic commissions of enormous ambition and detail and yet his name unrecorded in historical reviews of Australian design of the era. [...]
[...] Though not strictly a traditionalist, Coulson turned his back on international style modernism, seeking inspiration in classical motifs and furniture design, especially as interpreted in the US. Whether Coulson was directly influenced by T.H. Robsjohn-Gibbings (1905-1976) is not known, but the similarities in their work mean he may have been familiar with the American’s style. The recurrence of classical shapes in footstools, chairs and desks as well as individual motifs begs the comparison. In Sydney, comparison is warranted with cabinet maker Paul Kafka (1907-1972) and in Melbourne, Schilim Krimper (1893-1971) but neither worked on the extensive and comprehensive scale of interior design projects as O.N Coulson. [His Lipshut House, Melbourne is an outstanding example of his work. [...]
The Lipshut house at 211 Kooyong Road, Toorak was built in 1958 and the family moved in May 1959. The house was designed by Edward Billson and Partners, involving two generations in partnership, Edward Fielder Billson (1892-1986), the eminent “Melbourne Prairie School” architect and former assistant of Walter Burley Griffin, and his son, the newly qualified Ted Billson, who also undertook the structural engineering on the house. [...] Edward Fielder Billson had previously designed both the Elastic Webbing premises in Collingwood and the family home in St Kilda, both for Mary Lipshut’s father, Morris Plotkin. Billson did not get involved in the interior furnishings so Mary engaged O.Noel Coulson to design and furnish every aspect of the house.
Furniture sold by Shapiro Auctioneers in Sydney in 2009, 2013 and 2014, dates from this original scheme, which remained in place in the Lipshut house until 1996, when Mary moved and the house was sold. [...] Typical of Coulson, the interiors were the result of a single, cohesive vision for the design of the house, seamlessly blended, according to their son, Peter Lipshut, “everything worked, everything belonged, everything was functional, there was never any need for any alteration because everything in the house was as it should be and worked well.” The interiors were completed over several years, as was Coulson’s painstaking habit. [...]
[...] The furniture was custom made by S. Andrewartha, a multi generational institution in Melbourne furniture making, at their workshop in Richmond. S. Andrewartha made furniture to order, whether simple or elaborate, for most of Melbourne’s interior designers and decorating firms. [...]
Oswald Noel Coulson, known as Noel, was born in Geelong in 1905, studied architecture there at the Gordon Institute of Technology and in 1923 became a pupil of the architect I.G. Anderson, responsible for several public buildings in Geelong. During the 1950s Coulson, established his own practice and focused on the complete domestic design service, covering houses, interiors, furnishings and gardens. The firm was called O.N. Coulson and operated from an office and studio at his home at 142 Powlett St, East Melbourne. He employed only one staff member, the formidable Miss Starr, his secretary, who arranged orders and did all the administration work.
Coulson was productive and busy, running two or three house design projects at once and doing every element of the design work himself, including making copious detailed drawings for every element. [...] As a designer, he was in complete control, seen as a powerful figure and persuasive with clients.
Unusual in Melbourne at the time was his ability as a trained architect, to cope with every requirement of the client, with no need for separation between design structure, layout and the supply of soft furnishings, as was often the case at the time. His drafting skills meant he was able to design and commission carpets to be made, with intricate cut pile 'carved patterns’ and designed curtains, headings and blinds, each unique to the requirements of the house, as well as unique cast iron gates, doors and hardware. This ambitious programme of total control over design, with only Miss Starr to assist, meant that commissions sometimes took several years to reach completion, but always with the same cohesion resulting from a single design vision.
Coulson’s particular skills enabled him to establish the hallmarks of his work: bespoke, cohesively designed, unified architecture and décor with nothing extraneous or eclectic. When Australian House and Garden featured a new house in Toorak in August, 1964, they drew attention to the designer, the “noted architect Mr Coulson, who was in the pleasant position of being able to relate each piece of furniture to its room setting and determine its size, shape and function accordingly,” [...]
The variety of timbers used in this house impressed House and Garden, including teak coffee table and cabinetry with sculpted teak handles, natural maple built in TV and radiogram unit, black bean coffee table and blackwood bedroom furniture. The predominant timbers used in the house were “bleached and natural maple”. This contrasts with the more restrained, muted palette of the Lipshut house, which ranged from pale greys to light olive greens and pale gold, though the use of limed timbers and carved and gilded furniture is consistent throughout Coulson’s work.
The Sydney firm of Artistry played a key role in the development of Coulson’s style, as did Coulson contribute in turn to the growth of Artistry’s business nationally. A Sydney firm established in 1933 by Clive and June Carney, Artistry set up a Melbourne branch 1963 in Toorak Road, South Yarra. Artistry was a major importer and supplier of fabrics and carpets to the design and decoration industry. Coulson became one of their biggest customers; Artistry, through him, benefited from the large decorating projects generated by such clients as Victor and Loti Smorgon. [...] If the Melbourne showroom didn’t have what Coulson required, stock was obtained directly from Sydney. […] Commercially, Artistry sold more conservative fabrics in Melbourne than in Sydney. Coulson was seen as an exception, who demanded greater colour and richness in furnishings. His Jewish clientele drove this taste and were seen as more adventurous than others in Melbourne.
This edited version is drawn from an extended essay and research by Catriona Quinn for Shapiro Auctioneers, July 2014.
References
14 July 2014 Interview with James Fisher (employed by Artistry in Sydney and Melbourne in the 1960s)
14 July 2014 Interview with E.F.(Ted) Billson
11 July 2014 Interview with Peter Lipshut and notes from Allan Lipshut and Rae Rothfield
Built Heritage Pty Ltd, “O.N. Coulson”, Dictionary of Unsung Architects. www.builtheritage.com.au
“Coordination is the Keynote of this Melbourne Home”, Australian House and Garden, August, 1964
Loring, John, “T.H. Robsjohn-Gibbings, Reviving Classical Forms for the Twentieth Century.” www.architecturaldigest.com
Writers:
Michael Bogle
Date written:
2014
Last updated:
2014
- Born
- b. 21 May 1905
- Summary
- Coulson was a Melbourne interior designer and architect initially working with I.G. Anderson, later establishing an independent practice in the 1950s. He designed interiors and furniture as well as domestic architecture. He retired in 1970 but remained active until ca.1975.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 20-Jan-89
- Age at death
- 84
Details
Latitude-33.8777935 Longitude151.1156502 Start Date1902-01-01 End Date1989-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Croydon, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- James Arthur Murch was born in the inner Sydney suburb of Croydon on 8 July 1902. His father, James Murch, was a carpenter-builder who had emigrated from England. He attended Sydney Technical High School at Ultimo until 1916. On 7 May 1917 he waa apprenticed as a fitter to John Heine & Son, manufacturers of sheet metal. By the time he left them in 1924 he was working as an engineer’s draughtsman. He studied mechanical drawing at Sydney Techncal college, originally planning to make decorative architectural metal work. However in 1921 his uncle Harry, a glazier, was asked to make frosted glass so that the neighbours of the Royal Art Society classes would not be offended by their nude models.He enrolled in the classes, studying under Antonio Dattilo Rubbo. Later he enrolled in sculpture classes at East Sydney Technical College, under Rayner Hoff.In 1924 he abandoned engineering to study for the NSW TRavelling Art Scholarship, administered by the Society of Artists, which he won in 1925.Murch arrived in London on 14 July 1925, and travelled throughout Britain, France, Italy and Spain, studying old masters. In Paris he took classes at the Academie Julian, and in London at the Old British School in Rome, but spent most of his time at the Chelsea Polytechnic, studying under Percy Jowett. He returned to Sydney at the end of 1927, where he became studio assistant to George Lambert as the senior artist worked on his memorial for the recumbent soldier at St Mary’s Cathedral. He was elected a member of the Society of Artists in 1928 and presented his scholarship work, a portrait of his mother. He continued to live at home with his family. During the Great Depression he supplemented his painting and sculptural commissions by working with architect Frank Molony designing and making applique rugs, cushion and stuffed-toys with Greek and modernistic designs.He also hones his drawing skills by working with anatomy students at the University of Sydney.In early 1933 he visited the Lutheran mission at Hermannsburg outside Alice Springs for six weeks with the University of Sydney Physiological Research Party, and also spent two weeks on a camel trip. These Central Australian works were first exhibited at Macquarie Galleries on 30 May 1933. He returned to Central Australia in 1934, again with Professor H. Whitridge Davies. Their car ran out of petrol, and they walked for two and a half days crossing the desert. This excursion resulted in film footage showing young Aboriginal artists reproducing the kangaroo design from the reverse of pennies and re-drawing the image as side elevation view. He was subsequently awarded the Society of Artists’ Medal. In 1936, after another solo exhibition, he left again for Europe. He exhibited widely, and in 1938 he assisted in building, with about 20 others, the Australian, New Zealand and South African Wool Pavilion Glasgow Empire Exhibition. This included a 140 foot felt applique history of wool,and a colossal gilded sculpture of a ram on a rooftop.Murch was in Switzerland with fellow Australian artist Wallace Thornton when World War II was declared. The they survived a few penniless months by sketching portraits in the street before managing to travel to Italy where they boarded a ship and arrived in Sydney in early 1940. Shortly after his return he married Ria Counsell, a journalist. The young couple lived in a variety of premises in Double Bay, Mona Vale and Willoughby, where their son John was born.In April 1942 he was called up to work at the Slazengers Munitions company at Botany, where he worked on the design of the butt of the Owen gun. Soon afterwards he was reassigned as an official war artist. He travelled north to Darwin where he recorded the activities of the Australian army and the grim aftermath of the bombing of Darwin. Poor health, which had dogged him since he was ill with a fever in Rome in 1926, led to premature discharge in 1943.For the next five years the family lived at a number of addresses based around Newport Beach, before eventually buying a house at Palm Grove Road at Avalon Beach. He also taught at East Sydney Technical College. In January 1950 he was awarded the Archibald Prize for 1949.His daughter Michelle was born in 1951.Murch continued to be fascinated by Aboriginal themes and in 1950-1 painted a large corroboree themed mural for the University of Queensland. Ten years later, in 1961-63 he painted the welcome mural of European settlement at the passenger terminal at Sydney Cove. He followed this by another painting excursion to Hermannsberg, this time accompanied by his daughter. In his later years he also kept a studio at 257 Mowbray Road Chatswood, and also taught classes at the Royal Art Society.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 8 July 1902
- Summary
- Painter and sculptor, assistant to George Lambert, and in World War II the War artist who captured images of the bombed city of Darwin. Later in life became known for his constant paintings of angophoras.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 3-Sep-89
- Age at death
- 87
Details
Latitude51.6520851 Longitude-0.0810175 Start Date1901-01-01 End Date1989-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Enfield, England
- Biography
- painter and cartoonist, was born in Enfield, England on 18 November 1901. She came to Australia the following year with her mother and architect father. As a child, she studied ballet. In 1920 she was encouraged by her family and friends to attend drawing classes with John Shirlow who introduced her, through reproductions, to Impressionism and to Post-Impressionists such as Gauguin and Matisse.
An only child of a shy and self-conscious disposition, Craig was enrolled at the Melbourne National Gallery School in 1924-31. She felt overwhelmed by the older students but enjoyed the contact with people of similar interests. For a period of several months, she also had private lessons with George Bell .
Sybil Craig held her first solo show at the Athenaeum Gallery in 1932. Jessie Mackintosh , her friend at the Gallery School, encouraged her to exhibit with the Women Painters and Sculptors from 1933. As well, she was a foundation member of the New Melbourne Art Club. Craig enjoyed experimenting in her work and, influenced by George Bell, developed her interest in colour, pattern and simplicity. In 1933 she discovered the English artist Matthew Smith’s paintings, which utilised freedom of colour and line, at the 'Contemporary British Art Exhibition’ organised by Alleyne Zander . In 1935 she studied design and printmaking with Robert Timmings at the Working Man’s College (now RMIT). At the 1939 Herald Exhibition of French and British Contemporary Art, she rediscovered the work of Matisse.
During the war years Craig exhibited with the Twenty Melbourne Painters and attended meetings of the Women Painters’ National Service Group which organised activities and fund-raising for the war effort. In 1945 she was approached by the Australian War Memorial to accept the appointment of official war artist. With her parents’ encouragement she accepted, becoming the first woman to paint women working in the munitions’ factories.
She continued to work in Melbourne after the war. Her oil on paper Opening of the Women Painters Exhibition by Alan McCulloch c.1947 was auctioned by Deutscher Menzies on 22 November 1998 (cat.33). She spent the 1950s at the Victorian Artists’ Society, where Ian Bow helped her to incorporate rhythm into her design work. From the late 1950s she began to abandon oil painting, being committed to taking care of her parents.
In her work Craig was attracted to many changing ideas and continued to explore line, rhythm, colour, simplicity and design. She is remembered for her lively paintings filled with colour and light. Craig died in a nursing home in Melbourne on 14 September 1989. A large number of her works are in NGA, NGV and AWM.
Writers:
Wilkins, Lola
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 18 November 1901
- Summary
- Mid 20th century painter and cartoonist of Melbourne.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 14-Sep-89
- Age at death
- 88
Details
Latitude-37.823 Longitude144.998 Start Date1901-01-01 End Date1989-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Richmond, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- painter, ceramic and metalwork artist, cartoonist, illustrator, lecturer and art historian, was born in Richmond, Victoria, on 29 July 1901, daughter of Henry Callaway and Marguerite, née Deschamps. After attending the Presbyterian Ladies College, she studied drawing at the National Gallery School in 1916-20 under Frederick McCubbin and W.B. McInnes, then undertook an Applied Arts course at the Melbourne Working Men’s College (RMIT) and studied independently with Leslie Wilkie.
She returned to RMIT in 1930 in order to study ceramic techniques under Gladys Kelly. This was unsatisfactory, so she taught herself from books, producing her first ceramic works in 1931. They were fired in a coke kiln built by her husband, Thomas Orrock Mahood, an engineer and her 'life-long collaborator and co-worker’, whom she married in 1923. Their son, Martin, was born in 1938 but died soon afterwards.
From 1918, when she showed illustrations for a memorial volume of Adam Lindsay Gordon’s poems and other drawings, Mahood exhibited decorative art nouveau watercolours with the Victorian Artists’ Society (VAS) and produced linocuts in the 1920s. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s she had successful solo exhibitions of her ceramic plaques, masks and figures in Melbourne and one (in 1947) at the David Jones Gallery, Sydney. She identified her ceramic work with her monogram and dated it with a letter code, beginning with 'A’ for the first year of production (1931).
Mahood continued to exhibit with the VAS – now showing ceramic pieces – as well as with the Arts and Crafts Society of Victoria (1933-34) and the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors of which she was a member from 1927; she showed linocuts of animals at its exhibitions in the late 1950s. In 1956 her ceramic work was shown in the Melbourne Olympic Games Women’s Art Exhibition, including one of her masks, Splendour (Shepparton AG). All her female masks, she said, were based on Marlene Dietrich.
As 'Margot’ Mahood she also became known as a cartoonist and illustrator, beginning with a series of humorous natural history pictorial features in the 'Wild Life’ section of the Herald and Weekly Times in 1944 which continued for eight years. Bim in the Bush , Bim and His Friends and Bim at Bimbang Junction appeared in 'Wild Life’, Tim the Terrier in 'Our Women’ and The Scientific Adventures of Professor Smeebolger in 'Australian Boy’. Pinknose the Possum and The Sandmans were published in the Age . Her book, The Whispering Stone , also appeared in 1944. A primer, Drawing Australian Animals , was published in 1952.
She ran a screen-printing firm in 1947-51, and she also produced oil paintings such as a haunting image of a young urban Aboriginal woman, The Disinherited (c.1945, Deutscher Fine Art), in which the social realist attitudes that also made her a member of the Communist Party are most obvious.
Late in life (1970) she was awarded a PhD from the University of Melbourne for her thesis on nineteenth-century political cartoons, published as The Loaded Line in 1973 and still the standard reference. She also contributed entries on cartoonists to Joan Kerr’s Dictionary of Australian Artists’ project, most of which were published in the pre-1870 volume in 1992. She was working on a book on the development of Melbourne social and political life as seen in cartoons when she died in 1989, aged 88.
Writers:
Timms, PeterKerr, Joan
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 29 July 1901
- Summary
- Prolific female artist, educator and historian who produced work in a variety of media during the twentieth century. She was awarded a PhD from Melbourne University in 1973 for her work on nineteenth-century political cartoons, published as The Loaded Line.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1989
- Age at death
- 88
Details
Latitude45.28350435 Longitude34.20081878 Start Date1900-01-01 End Date1989-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Crimea, Russia
- Biography
- Aaron Bolot (1900-1989) was born in the Crimea, arrived in Brisbane from Russia at age 11 and graduated with a diploma of architecture from the Central Technical College in 1926 with the Queensland Institute of Architects Gold Medal for best student. In 1929, he was registered to practice in Queensland. After graduation, he worked with Hollinshead and Gailey, assisting on the Melbourne Comedy and Brisbane Regent theateres. He set up a practice in Sydney’s Pitt Street during the early 1930s and freelanced during the Great Depression for other architects; including working with Walter Burley Griffin on documentation of the incinerators at Pyrmont and Willoughby. His later theatre designs were also influenced by the work of another Sydney architect, Bruce Dellit. His ouevre includes numerous theatres and cinemas; apartment buildings and houses in the P&O and Tudor/Arts and Crafts styles. Before World War II, Bolot completed the Hillside apartment building, 412 Edgecliff Road, Edgecliff (with EC Pitt, 1935); the Goulburn Ritz theatre, Goulburn (1936); the Astra in Wyong (1936); Hoyts Theatre, Goulburn (1936); the Randwick Ritz, 43-47 St Paul’s Street, Randwick (by 1937); the Regal theatre, Gosford (by 1937); the Ashdown apartment building, Elizabeth Bay Road, Elizabeth Bay (1938); remodelling the Liberty (formerly Metro) Theatre, Melbourne (1939); remodelling the West’s Theatre at Nowra (1940) and the Oatley Radio Theatre (later the Mecca; 1942). During the war, he served overseas from 1941-1946. After the war, his key projects included an apartment building at 17 Wylde Street, Potts Point (1951); the Erina drive-in theatre (1957); the Goomerah apartment building, 9 Goomerah Crescent, Darling Point (1957); the Murilla units at Bellevue Hill (1960); a project for R. Pollard and the Basser wing (both 1966); a chapel at the Temple Emmanuel, Rosemont Avenue, Woollahra and the AL Poole residence, 24 Thomas Street, Chatswood (both 1966); the Moby Dick Surf Club, Whale Beach (1966); projects for S. Pearson, Allpress & Farram and Carruthers Farram (all in 1967); Belmont Chambers for Simon Green (1968); probably houses or house renovations for JB Kirk, Edward Fay, L. Poole and Mrs RG Lamb (all 1968); Undated buildings also include the Bondi Rex Hotel, the Edgecliff Motel, Edgecliff; the Riga factory, Marrickville; an office building for Automotive Components Ltd (Blaxland Rae division); townhouses at Rosemont Avenue, Woollahra; flats at McMahons Point; the Ba Ritz flats at Point Piper; flats at Balmoral; the Silverna units, Darling Point; an apartment building at 10 Etham Avenue, Darling Point; a Tudor-style house at Edgecliff; three houses in Newcastle for the Kloster family; two houses for Bill Montham; a radio station at Dubbo; the Dorchester in Macquarie Street; enlarged windows and a motel addition to Jonah’s restaurant, Whale Beach; the Ashfield RSL Club; houses at Tamworth, Cootamundra, Palm Beach, Woollahra, Beauty Point (Griffith), Vaucluse (Bend), Wahroonga, Vaucluse (Melocco) and Point Piper (Grainger) He was elected a Fellow of the RAIA in 1978 and remained active in the Jewish community. He was survived by his wife, Thelma who at 2004 still lives in his Goomerah apartment building, ph 9363 5163. His last office (during the 1980s) was at Asbestos House, 67 York Street, Sydney.Sources—Hill, Jennifer/Architectural Projects. Undated. ‘Aaron Bolot’s contribution to cinema in Australia’ on website www.teachingheritage.nsw.edu.au—Bolot, Thelma. 2004. Interview with Davina Jackson, November, and copies of her papers and photographs by Max Dupain.—Lists of undated buildings written by Aaron and Thelma Bolot; one addressed to Trevor (probably Trevor Waters), obtained from Thelma Bolot November 2004.—Press clippings archived by the NSW RAIA 20th Century Buildings Committee.—Veale, Sharon. Undated. Research report archived by the NSW RAIA’s Heritage Committee.
Writers:
Davina Jackson
Date written:
2015
Last updated:
2015
- Born
- b. 1900
- Summary
- Aaron Bolot was a Crimea-born, Brisbane-educated architect who created many notable residential and commercial buildings in Sydney from the 1930s to the 1960s.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1989
- Age at death
- 89
Details
Latitude-33.8583992 Longitude151.1807353 Start Date1898-01-01 End Date1989-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Balmain, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- painter, was born in Balmain, Sydney on 28 January 1898. She attended the Royal Art Society School under Dattilo Rubbo in 1913-14 before commencing studies at Blackfriars Teachers College (1915-19). While studying to be a teacher she took up a scholarship at Julian Ashton 's Sydney Art School then managed to divide her time between her day studies and her art training at night. At Ashton’s she was friendly with Grace Crowley and with fellow students and later Perth co-exhibitors, Muriel Southern and Florence Hall. She exhibited with various groups including the NSW Society of Artists; in 1925 she held a joint exhibition with Rah Fizelle at Anthony Horderns Gallery.
In 1921-25 Portia Bennett taught at the Teachers College then married William James-Wallace and moved to Queensland. She did little art until 1932 when, together with her family, she moved to Perth. In 1933 she joined up with Southern, Hall and Margaret Johnson to hold an exhibition in the Newspaper House Gallery. Her work was included in the 1934 Women Artists of Australia exhibition, held in the Education Department Gallery, Sydney. During the 1930s and 1940s Bennett completed some of her most powerful work, strong architectural studies of the streets and landmarks around Perth. She was fascinated by the city and drawn to modern, recently constructed buildings; her watercolours depict a fashionable and contemporary Perth.
She won the Claude Hotchin Watercolour Prize in 1952 and held solo exhibitions in 1953 and 1973. In 1986 the University of WA honoured her with a retrospective exhibition at the Undercroft Gallery. Her work was included in Western Australian Art and Artists 1900-1950 (AGWA 1978) and Beyond the Image: Western Australian Women Artists 1920-1960 (UWA 1990), the latter held after she died in Perth on 1 May 1989, aged 91.
Writers:
Gooding, Janda
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
1992
- Born
- b. 28 January 1898
- Summary
- Portia Bennett trained at the Royal Art Society School under Dattilo Rubbo and then at the Julian Ashton Art school where she was friendly with Grace Crowley. Moving to Western Australia in 1932, Bennett's subject matter became modern Perth with its recently constructed buildings and city landmarks. Her work has featured in several major exhibitions dedicated to Western Australian female artists.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1-May-89
- Age at death
- 91
Details
Latitude-37.561704 Longitude144.0040938 Start Date1898-01-01 End Date1989-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Bungaree, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- Susan Duke was born at Bungaree, east of Ballarat, Victoria, in 1898, the eldest child of John Hallyer Duke and Sarah Ann Suckling.
In 1922 Duke was appointed sewing mistress at the Bullarook State School, teaching there and at nearby Pootilla State School. During her time teaching, Duke designed a crochet pattern for a corner piece, featuring a bush hut with gumnut decorations. This was entered into a needlework competition run by the Melbourne-based Weekly Times and reproduced in their 20 October 1923 edition. 'I daresay quite a number of women will design their own laces in future,’ she wrote, 'I know that I shall try to do so’. The Bush hut triangle design was then used in the The Weekly Times Crochet Book (1924).
In 1926 Duke married farmer William Douglas Monteith and lived on a property outside Corangamite until moving to Ballarat in the 1950s.
In the late 1970s Duke’s Bush hut triangle was used in the posters and catalogue for the D’Oyley Show which was shown at Watters Gallery, East Sydney, in 1979 and then toured. Coincidentally Duke’s great-niece, Robin Eagle, later worked with the D’Oyley Show’s poster designer, Frances Phoenix, in the Adelaide Women’s Liberation Movement, while her nephew, the performance poet Jas H. Duke, also contributed to the design of feminist posters for the Industrial women project at about this time.
Susan Monteith died in Ballarat East in 1989.
Writers:
Eric Riddler
Date written:
2018
Last updated:
2023
- Born
- b. 25 November 1898
- Summary
- Schoolteacher and sewing instructor active in the Ballarat region in the 1920s. A design for The Weekly Times Crochet Book (1924) was used in one of the posters for the D'Oyley Show in 1979.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 26-Jan-89
- Age at death
- 91
Details
Latitude-33.8894781 Longitude151.1274125 Start Date1897-01-01 End Date1989-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Ashfield, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- painter and art teacher, was born on 30 August 1897 at Ashfield, Sydney, one of the three daughters in the family of five of Kate Edith (d. 22 July 1953) and Frederick Albert Coghlan, Auditor General of New South Wales (d. 22 July 1938).
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Writers:
Staff WriterNote: Heritage biography.
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 9 August 1897
- Summary
- Painter and art teacher. Resident of Sydney, New South Wales, early in her career Coghlan concentrated on oil paintings but later turned to watercolours as her principal medium.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 5-Jun-89
- Age at death
- 92
Details
Latitude-38.15 Longitude144.35 Start Date1889-01-01 End Date1989-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Geelong, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- painter, was born in Geelong on 21 July 1889, only daughter of James Durran, an architect, and Jeannie Dick, a noted concert singer. Although she commenced her career as a concert pianist and continued to teach piano for some years, Durran turned away from this field to pursue her interest in painting. Studying under Helen Peters, a well-known painter and art teacher in Geelong as well as a pianist of some standing, Durran soon achieved moderate success as an artist, winning a number of awards for her drawings and paintings.
In 1911-16 Durran was a student at the National Gallery School, Melbourne, studying drawing under Frederick McCubbin and painting under Bernard Hall. She continued to win awards, including first prizes in the 'Drawing Head from Life’ and 'Painting Still-Life’ student competitions. She participated in painting camps at Malmesbury, and she entered portraits and landscapes in exhibitions such as the 1913 Victorian Artists’ Society Exhibition. Her early success culminated in 1917 when Home from Market gained her second place in the National Gallery of Victoria’s Travelling Scholarshi
After marrying fellow student John Rowell, Eugenie scaled down her activities as an artist, preferring to support her husband’s career, not only providing moral and critical support for his work but by 1935 managing his exhibitions. Together they became increasingly involved in the art activities of the community, e.g. she was a foundation member of the McClelland Gallery, established in 1971. She did not, however, completely cease her own artistic practice but continued to paint and exhibit a wide range of subjects from portraits to landscapes. Many were executed during joint painting expeditions throughout Australia, as well as on an overseas study tour in 1937-38; others were painted while John Rowell was away on other painting excursions.
Prompted by the completion of an unfinished painting by John, who died in 1973, Eugenie’s interest in pursuing an active career as an artist was rekindled. In 1976 she held a major exhibition at the Manyung Gallery, Mount Eliza, which included works spanning several years of her painting life. It was an instant success and she continued to produce works until 1982, when she lost her eyesight as the result of a fall. Eugenie Rowell died at Mornington (Vic.) on 13 June 1989.
Writers:
Filmer, Veronica
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
1992
- Born
- b. 21 July 1889
- Summary
- Coming from a creative family and after studying at the National Gallery School, Eugenie had early success in her career as an artist. She was an active member of the arts community, becoming a founding member of the McClelland Gallery.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 13-Jun-89
- Age at death
- 100
Details
Latitude-33.8772 Longitude151.1049 Start Date1887-01-01 End Date1989-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Burwood, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- designer, was born in Burwood, Sydney, on 31 July 1887, eldest of the seven children of John Shorter, an agent for several British firms in Australia, including Doulton’s Pottery. Her mother was a gifted artist who had studied under Louis Bilton. Lucille (known as Lulu), studied art at Granville Technical College under Alfred Coffey (c.1904-08), then travelled to England with her father in 1908 for six months. After her return she studied at the National Art School, East Sydney Technical College. She revisited Britain in 1917-18 and on later occasions.
The National Gallery of Australia holds several works by Shorter, including her pen-and-ink design for a flannel flower plate border (c.1906-07) designed for the prestigious international magazine, Keramic Decoration ; it was donated by the artist in 1985. In 1988, aged 100, Shorter was able to see her work on display with the later gift of her father’s large Doulton ceramic collection at the newly-opened Powerhouse Museum (MAAS). She died at a Mona Vale (Sydney) nursing home on 12 August 1989, aged 102.
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Note: Heritage biography.
staffcontributor
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 31 July 1887
- Summary
- Shorter was a designer, was born on 31 July 1887. The National Gallery of Australia holds several works by her. She is the signed author of an illustration of a waratah (for Doulton) in R.T. Baker's The Australian Flora in Applied Art, Technological Museum, Sydney, 1915. Figure 26.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 12-Aug-89
- Age at death
- 102
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1949-01-01 End Date1988-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, Australia
- Biography
- Artist, was included in the Tin Sheds exhibition, “Dead Gay Artists”, 1-23 February 2002.
This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1949
- Summary
- An artist whose work was included in the Tin Sheds exhibition, Dead Gay Artists, 1-23 February 2002.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 24-Jun-88
- Age at death
- 39
Details
Latitude-37.8902423 Longitude145.067469 Start Date1923-01-01 End Date1988-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Murrumbeena, VIC, Australia
- Biography
- Sculptor and designer of ceramics, Guy Boyd was the third child of the studio potter Merric Boyd and his wife Doris Gough, and was born at Murrumbeena, where his parents established their studio pottery. His career developed in the shadow of that of his siblings, especially his brother Arthur. After serving in the army during World War II, he studied sculpture with Lyndon Dadswell at East Sydney Technical College. His initial career direction was as a designer and manufacturer of commercial pottery. However in 1965 he changed direction and began to make sculptures, usually based on the human form. The tactile sensual quality of his bronze pieces made them especially popular, although critics tended to regard his work as old fashioned.He was successful in being commisioned to make large sculptures for Tullamarine and Sydney international airports.He also became a passionate campaigner for conservationist causes and the preservation of historic buildings in his neighbourhood.His mother’s devout Christian Scientist faith led him to understand the way in which cultural minorities are easily misunderstood. As a result of this he was an early and passionate advocate for justice for Lindy and Michael Chamberlain after they were falsely accused and convicted of killing their daughter Azaria.
Writers:
staffcontributor
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2013
Last updated:
2013
- Born
- b. 12 June 1923
- Summary
- Guy Boyd was the sculptor of the Boyd family, taking a different direction from his brothers and parents. His humanist vision is evident in all his work, especially his cast bronzes.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 26-Apr-88
- Age at death
- 65
Details
Latitude-20 Longitude133 Start Date1920-01-01 End Date1988-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Northern Territory, NT, Australia
- Biography
- His country was Yaribilong, just north-west of Alice Springs. His Dreamings were Star and Shield. He was actively involved in the running of the Haasts Bluff settlement. Timmy was a friend of Limpi Tjapangati , an associate of the founding group of Papunya Tula 'painting men’, who also lived at Haasts Bluff.
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Note: primary biographer
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1920
- Summary
- Important community leader in Haasts Bluff (NT). He often painted with Limpi Tjapangati, one of the pioneers of the Papunya Tula movement.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- c.1988
- Age at death
- 68
Details
Latitude-33.829075 Longitude151.24409 Start Date1912-01-01 End Date1988-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Mosman, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- sculptor and commercial artist, was born in Mosman, Sydney, on 5 July 1912. Educated at the Presbyterian Ladies College, Pymble, she studied art under Miss Helen Crabbe. She entered art classes at East Sydney Technical College in February 1929 and is reputed to have completed both the introductory and intermediate courses in 12 months. Fletcher subsequently specialised in sculpture for four years under Rayner Hoff , graduating with her Diploma in Art (Sculpture) in 1935. She was one of a group of (predominantly female) sculpture students at East Sydney whom Hoff developed into the coherent 'school’ of sculptors which dominated Sydney sculptural production in the inter-war decades. Her work was exhibited in the 1930s with the Society of Artists and the Society of Women Painters.
After graduating Fletcher set up a studio in Elizabeth Street, Sydney, seeking commissions as a 'fine art sculptor’ but had to abandon this for employment in commercial art in 1937. She then worked for five years with Wilkins & Jones Pty Ltd at Fineline Studios, Rushcutters Bay. Fletcher married in 1941 and largely ceased sculpting. She died in 1988 after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease.
Despite being an active and proficient sculptor under Hoff, Marjorie Fletcher had virtually 'disappeared’ as a professional artist by 1940 and until quite recently her work was little known. Now, due largely to the efforts of her son, most of her important sculptures are held in Australian public galleries, including the hieratic Mourning Arab (1935, NGA), the Norman Lindsay style nude Fear (1936, plaster NGV, bronze AGNSW) and Self Torso (1934, plaster AGSA, bronze held p.c). Unlocated reliefs recorded in photographs include Botany Bay (1936), Knowledge (a nude woman), and the huge relief The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon (1933).
Writers:
Edwards, Deborah
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 5 July 1912
- Summary
- A graduate of the East Sydney Technical College, Fletcher studied under Raynor Hoff and was a commercial artist before marrying in 1941 and largely ceasing to work. Her work is now held in most of the major state collections thanks to the efforts of her son.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1988
- Age at death
- 76
Details
Latitude-34.9275 Longitude138.6 Start Date1909-01-01 End Date1988-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Adelaide, SA, Australia
- Biography
- painter, commercial artist, graphic and exhibition designer, illustrator, costume and textile designer, photographer and documentary film-maker, was born Dulcie Wilmott in Adelaide. In about 1926-32 she studied at East Sydney Technical College under Rayner Hoff and attended painting classes at the J.S. Watkins Art School. Her career began at Anthony Horderns in 1928, providing illustrations for the house magazine and the firm’s catalogues; she also did freelance work for other Sydney department stores, Farmers and David Jones.
In 1933 Dulcie Wilmott married Geoffrey Collings ; they had two daughters, Donna (b.1937) and the artist Silver Collings (b.1940). She and her husband worked collaboratively for most of their lives, co signing the majority of their work 'Dahl and Geoffrey Collings’, the name Dahl having been coined by Geoffrey as a term of endearment. One of their first works signed jointly was a 1934 cover design for Home .
They travelled to London in 1935, and Dahl worked as a freelance designer until László Moholy Nagy offered her a job in his studio. There she gained first-hand experience of European modernism and of Moholy Nagy’s and Gyorgy Kepes’s approach to design – which she and Geoffrey embraced wholeheartedly. With Alistair Morrison, she and Geoffrey organised the 'Three Australians’ exhibition at the Lund Humphreys Gallery in 1938 to show their British work.
In 1939 they returned to Sydney and attempted to introduce modern design to local industry. They mounted their 'Exhibition of Modern Industrial Art and Documentary Photography’ at David Jones Art Gallery and, with Richard Haughton James, established a commercial and industrial design studio, The Design Centre. Dahl was one of the very first Australian women to begin the slow process of introducing modern art and design principles to Australian industry.
During the 1940s she continued to work freelance, designing covers for Sydney Ure Smith’s new journal, Australia , and producing designs for Elizabeth Arden, David Jones, Qantas, the Orient Line and Woman magazine. She exhibited with the Contemporary Art Society and the Australian Commercial and Industrial Artists’ Association, winning (with Geoffrey) four ACIAA awards in 1940. She also painted murals for the Accountants Club, Kings Cross restaurants and a kindergarten in the Blue Mountains.
In the early 1940s Dahl and Geoffrey Collings collaborated with Alistair Morrison, Douglas Annand and Elaine Haxton to produce the 'Temple of Beauty’, Woman 's display stand at the Royal Easter Show. Dahl was costume designer for the films Eureka Stockade (1949) and The Overlanders (1946). Her paintings of Charters Towers were published in the final issue of London’s Lilliput magazine in 1950. She also designed posters for the Orient line and fabrics for SS Oronsay .
In 1950 the family moved to New York. Dahl became a design consultant to the Australian Trade Commission, in charge of the Australian Display Centre in the Rockefeller Center. Back at Sydney in 1953, she and Geoffrey established their own film company, Collings Productions. Many of the films she produced and directed won international awards. Dreaming , a film produced for Qantas about Aboriginal art, won one of the five special diplomas (the top award) at the 1964 Venice Biennale Festival of Art Films; her Opera House film, Job No.1112 , was awarded a silver medal at the 1975 Festival of Architectural Films in Madrid.
From 1971 Dahl devoted herself full time to painting. She had solo shows at the Bonython (1976) and Holdsworth (1977) galleries in Sydney and at the City of Hamilton Art Gallery (Vic.) in 1982.
Writers:
Ven, Anne-Marie Van De
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1909
- Summary
- Dahl Collings was a painter, commercial artist, graphic and exhibition designer, illustrator, costume and textile designer, photographer and documentary film-maker. Often working in partnership with her husband Geoffrey Collings, she worked in London in the late 1930s with László Moholy-Nagy
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1988
- Age at death
- 79
Details
Latitude-32.256944 Longitude148.601111 Start Date1905-01-01 End Date1988-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Dubbo, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- decorator, was born in rural NSW, one of three talented Burkitt sisters (another was Dora Sweetapple ).
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
1992
- Born
- b. 1905
- Summary
- Interior designer and decorator whose work and achievements exemplify the best of the many dynamic and significant advances that occurred within Australian modernism in the post-war years. Hailed as an interior design 'legend', Marion Hall Best was a leading local arbiter of style who was also recognised internationally for her avant-garde modernism.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1988
- Age at death
- 83
Details
Latitude-42.8339024 Longitude147.274444 Start Date1904-01-01 End Date1988-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Glenorchy, Tasmania, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 10 September 1904
- Summary
- Playwright and actor Gwen Sherwood worked as Clerk at the then National Art Gallery of New South Wales during the 1940s. In mid 1944 Sherwood, with de facto Acting Director Bernard Smith, initiated the Gallery's travelling exhibitions of Australian art.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- Oct-88
- Age at death
- 84
Details
Latitude-32.256944 Longitude148.601111 Start Date1903-01-01 End Date1988-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Dubbo, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1903
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 14-May-88
- Age at death
- 85
Details
Latitude-33.8931044 Longitude151.2040292 Start Date1902-01-01 End Date1988-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Redfern, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- painter and cartoonist, was born in Sydney. He studied with J.S. Watkins and Julian Ashton and at East Sydney Technical College. According to Rainbow, Baird, like Syd Miller , originally worked as a commercial artist at Harry Weston 's studio. In 1924 he was a foundation member of the Society of Australian Black and White Artists, along with 24 other men: Garnet Agnew , Stan Cross , F.H. Cumberworth , W. Dowman , “Driff” ( Lance Driffield ), George Finey , Cecil Hartt , Joe Jonsson , Frank Jessop , Fred Knowles , George Little , Brodie Mack , Hugh Maclean , Arthur Mailey , Syd Miller, Syd Nicholls , Mick Paul , Jack Quayle , Reg Russom , Cyril Samuels , Jack Waring , Harry J. Weston, Unk White and John Wiseman . All 25 members contributed to the Society’s first publication, commemorating the visit of the US Fleet in 1925.
Blaikie (91) states that Baird was an important freelance contributor to Smith’s Weekly in the 1930s, although he was never appointed a staff artist. An original drawing done for Smith’s was, A run for her money (girl in underwear, very straight, somewhat like Virgil ), that was held in private collection at the time of Brenda Rainbow’s 'golden age’ exhibition. He created the strip Pip and Emma for Smith’s . Josef Lebovic’s Australian Miscellany (collectors’ list 55, 1996, cat.62) lists an undated pencil drawing of a flapper. His drawing of the Black and White Artists’ Sketch Club was purchased by the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1939.
After working as a staff artist on the Sydney Evening News , Baird was employed as an illustrator for Associated Newspapers where he worked for 30 years, including being an accredited war artist for the Sunday Sun from c.1943. He was on the art staff of the Sydney Morning Herald at some stage, and Douglas Stewart says he drew for the Bulletin before becoming 'a fine landscape painter in oils’. Baird combined oil painting and illustrating in 1946 when he painted an oil portrait of 'Model of the Year’ Patricia “Bambi” Tuckwell.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1902
- Summary
- Mid 20th century painter and cartoonist. Baird was a foundation member of the Society of Australian Black and White Artists, along with 24 other men. In his forties, he became known for his oil paintings, especially for his portrait of 'Model of the Year' Patricia "Bambi" Tuckwell in 1946.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- c.1988
- Age at death
- 86
Details
Latitude-31.9559 Longitude115.8606 Start Date1901-01-01 End Date1988-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Perth, WA, Australia
- Biography
- sketcher and engraver, was born in Perth on 31 March 1901, eldest of the three children of Benjamin Harvie Darbyshire, a lawyer, and Agnes, née Campbell. She visited England with her family at the age of six. After they returned to Perth, her father engaged an English suffragette governess, Miss Hall; Beatrice drew her portrait in England many years later (1920). She showed an early talent for drawing and, from the age of about twelve, attended Saturday morning classes given by Henri van Raalte . After two years at boarding school at the Hermitage in Geelong Victoria, she returned to Perth and studied under van Raalte from 1918 to the end of 1921 when he left for Adelaide. On his advice Beatrice decided to go to England to further her art studies, departing in 1924 to study at the Slade. After a term, she left to join the School of Engraving at the Royal College of Art, under Sir Frank Short then Malcolm Osborne. Fellow pupils included Eric Ravilious, Charles Tunnicliffe and Iain MacNab.
In 1924 one of her drypoints, The Cowshed, Balingup , was selected for the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley. The following year another print, In the Blackwood Country , was exhibited there. Each was awarded a Certificate of Honour and a bronze medal. She graduated with a Diploma of Associateship from the RCA in 1927 and returned to Perth, where she had an etching press made and began to exhibit her work.
A trip to the Kimberleys in 1933 to stay with the Durack family ( see Elizabeth Durack ) resulted in many drawings and prints featuring Aboriginal people and the remote landscape. Her last exhibition in Perth was in 1937. In 1940 she joined the Women’s League of Health and went to Sydney to train as an instructor. On her return to Perth she ran the local branch of the League for about twelve years. Sadly, although she wrote articles and gave lectures on art to various groups, she never returned to printmaking. Her work was rediscovered and exhibited by Hendrick Kolenberg in 1979 (Art Gallery of Western Australia). She died in July 1988.
Writers:
Chapman, Barbara
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 31 March 1901
- Summary
- A talented artist, Beatrice Darbyshire exhibited in England and Perth throughout the 1920s and 1930s.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- Jul-88
- Age at death
- 87
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1901-01-01 End Date1988-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Painter, studied at Julian Ashton’s Sydney Art School (in 1933 retrospective exhibition with a 'landscape’). She signed an interesting, undated, oil on board painting, The Recital , showing members of an orchestra and audience that was offered at auction by Christie’s Australia at Melbourne 1-2 May 2000 (lot 229, ill. colour $3,000-$4,000). Her Mist in the Bay was no. 127 in Wynne competition at Art Gallery of NSW in 1965 (BS cats). A large number of her oil paintings, mainly landscapes of the Sydney area, were with the family in the early 1990s, i.e. Mrs (Francine) Lazarus and Mr Philip Lazarus (portrait of him as a small child). Mary Eagle thinks she may have been associated with Undergrowth .
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1901
- Summary
- Known as a painter, a large number of her oil paintings are portraits and landscapes of the Sydney area.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1-Jan-88
- Age at death
- 87
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1899-01-01 End Date1988-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- painter, etcher and art teacher, was born in Melbourne of German parents, the musicians Eduard Scharf and Olive de Hugard. A child prodigy in both painting and music (his portrait, Boy with Palette by Violet Teague , is in the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, ACT), he performed (on violin and piano?), painted and taught art in Australia and Germany. (He travelled with his parents in Germany after WWI, then was professor of painting and drawing at the Munich Academy of Fine Art in 1934-35). Not aligned with the allies during WWII, the paintings he did as a war artist for Hitler (now destroyed or lost) are believed to have been generic records of battles, rather than propaganda (see T. Ingram). After returning to Australia for six years (1950-56), he went back to Munich.
According to Ingram, interest in Scharf’s etchings was kindled in the early 1920s when Dame Nellie Melba brought a set back to Australia. His chef d’oeuvre is the series of 20 works Night in a City (1922-23), which evokes the spirit of Weimar Germany with something of the acerbic wit of Georg Grosz. (A full copy was exhibited for sale late in 1966 at Bridget McDonnell Gallery, Melbourne.) Included are: 'Restaurant I’ n.d., 'Concert’ 1922, 'Theater’ (no.12) and 'Restaurant III’. Also 'Prizefight’ 1923 (Josef Lebovic and/or Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney) and 'All Souls Day’ (old people visiting a cemetery) n.d. (ill. Lebovic & Warner, Fifty Years , cat.71).
This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1899
- Summary
- Painter, etcher and art teacher, Melbourne-born Theo Scharf was a professor of painting and drawing at the Munich Academy of Fine Art in 1934-35. He was also a war artist for Hitler, but his paintings have since been lost or destroyed. According to information given by him to this editor in 1980 in Feldafing, his main war artist work was done in German field hospitals in Russia.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1988
- Age at death
- 89
Details
Latitude53.2428332 Longitude-1.5277945 Start Date1897-01-01 End Date1988-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Wigley, Derbyshire, England, UK
- Biography
- Commercial artist, potter and painter, was born Grace Furniss in the small village of Wigley, Derbyshire. In 1902 her family migrated to New Zealand and in 1904 settled on a farm, Brooklands, near Huntly on the North Island. In her early twenties Taylor moved to Auckland and began working as a commercial illustrator, a popular career for women at the time. Her main work seems to have been advertising drawings of women’s clothing for newspapers and magazines. In 1924, she enrolled in figure drawing at the Elam School of Art. However, after six months at the school, she returned to commercial art as she could not afford to continue studying. This brief period was to be her only formal art training.
In 1926 Grace and her younger sister Amy, also an artist, travelled to Sydney in search of work. Amy returned to New Zealand in 1927-28, but Grace remained in Sydney and only returned for a brief trip in 1930 or 1931. By 1932 she was working as a commercial artist for Berlei, Sydney. In 1933 she travelled to England. On her return she moved to Brisbane and found work with McWhirter’s Department Store as an advertising illustrator.
In Brisbane Grace met and married Jimmy Taylor, who enlisted in the second AIF at the outbreak of World War II. Initially rejected because of a chronic skin condition, in 1942 Grace was accepted into the Australian Women’s Land Army (AWLA) as a field officer responsible for the administration of AWLA workers. She originated an unofficial paper for the Land Army Girls, the LAG RAG , to which she contributed humorous verse, prose and cartoons. She travelled extensively around the Queensland camps, working to improve conditions and facilities for AWLA members. Her niece recalls:
she was a dashing figure to us. When she visited on leave, there were rides in the Jitterbug, the little Austin sports car she took with her into the AWLA. It was popular with the LAGS too, who no doubt found our aunt’s driving as exciting as we did.
Soon after the war Grace and Jimmy separated and Grace returned to Sydney. In 1946 she purchased a small studio pottery in the centre of Sydney, where she produced ceramic wares under the label 'Tesmic Art Pottery’. The pottery specialised in glazed ornaments of animals, 'and as sure as we modelled an animal there was a demand for a baby animal to go with it’. In 1949 Tesmic moved to premises in Bankstown and was able to expand. During this time Taylor exhibited her work frequently, often with the NSW Ceramic Art and Fineware Association.
In 1956 she sold the pottery and returned to New Zealand. In 1958, while on holiday in England, she worked briefly as a modeller at the Spode Potteries. Returning to New Zealand, she began to sculpt large-scale figures; but increasingly she turned her energies to politics, joining the Social Credit Political League. In 1966 she married Henry Boshier, a childhood neighbour. She died in 1988 at the age of ninety-one. Her niece considers that 'the Land Army experience was probably the only major period of my aunt’s life when she didn’t earn her living from art of one sort or another’.
Writers:
Rensch, Elena
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1897
- Summary
- Grace Taylor (1897-1988) was a commercial artist and potter who grew up in New Zealand and migrated to Australia in 1926.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1988
- Age at death
- 91
Details
Latitude-33.8354519 Longitude151.2083011 Start Date1897-01-01 End Date1988-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- North Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- puppeteer, was born Edith Constance Blackwell in North Sydney on 26 February 1897. From Fort Street Girls’ High School she went to the University of Sydney, where she obtained a BSc degree in 1920. Further qualifications were a Dip.Ed. (Sydney Teachers’ College) and a Dip.Soc.Sci. (1937). In 1935 she introduced glove puppets to a class of State wards she was teaching in Glebe and was surprised by their positive response. This experience eventually led to a lifelong involvement with puppetry, not only in therapy but also as an art form.
For many years she worked with the Children’s Library and Crafts Movement (later the Creative Leisure Movement), founded by the sisters Mary Matheson and Elsie Rivett. Edith supervised puppet making and puppet shows with children and adults at the Movement’s various centres in the Sydney area. In 1949 the Movement opened the Clovelly Puppet Theatre in an ex-army hut in Burnie Park, with Edith as director. There plays were presented by children and adults using glove puppets and marionettes on Saturday afternoons in the cooler months for some thirty years.
She encouraged children to have a free approach to the making and use of puppets, although her own were painstakingly made. Some plays, notably those for marionettes, were tightly scripted, but often the young puppeteers were invited to improvise dialogue for the glove puppets. In 1950 Edith also began instructing occupational therapists in the use of puppetry.
Edith Murray brought puppeteers together. She was a foundation member of the Puppetry Guild of NSW (later the Australian Puppetry Guild) in 1948 and its secretary for many years. She initiated the first Australia-wide gathering of puppeteers in Adelaide in 1968 (when the Salzburg Marionettes visited) and this led to the formation of an Australian Centre of UNIMA, the International Association of Puppeteers, with Edith as Founding Secretary. At the UNIMA Congress in Washington DC in 1980 she was made a Member of Honour.
Edith did not usually give performances as a professional puppeteer, but in 1957 she toured a small company with her 'Moonahwarra Marionettes’ for the NSW Division of the Arts Council of Australia. She used glove puppets for a closed-circuit test of television in Sydney’s AWA Building in 1952.
Edith visited the United Kingdom in 1963-65. She taught in Scotland, worked as a puppeteer in pantomimes and attended puppet festivals in Wales, Czechoslovakia and Russia. In 1976 she was invited to Japan as a guest of the PUK Puppet Theatre of Tokyo.
She featured in two instructional films: Let’s Make Puppets (1951) and Let’s Make a Puppet Play (1954). The play in the second is about a bushfire, and Edith had a strong love for the Australian bush. For much of her later life she lived in Springwood (NSW), at the end of a steep unmade road at the edge of the bush.
Edith Murray was awarded the BEM in 1979 for her work with children and puppetry. She died in Sydney on 30 January 1988.
Writers:
Bradshaw, Richard
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
1992
- Born
- b. 26 February 1897
- Summary
- Puppeteer, was born Edith Constance Blackwell. She was a foundation member of the Puppetry Guild of NSW (later the Australian Puppetry Guild).
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 30-Jan-88
- Age at death
- 91
Details
Latitude-27.5133345 Longitude153.0117745 Start Date1895-01-01 End Date1988-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Yeronga, QLD, Australia
- Biography
- Lloyd Rees was born on 17 March 1895 in Brisbane, Queensland. He studied at the Brisbane Technical College in 1910 where F. Martyn Roberts taught him drawing. He was a full time art student in 1915 before moving to Sydney in 1917.
There Rees worked as a commercial artist with Smith & Julius Studios, where he developed his skills as a draughtsman and established friendships that continued throughout his life. He made many trips to Europe, and was particularly inspired by the French and Italian countryside. In the 1930s he depicted landscapes showing light radiating from behind the hills and through the trees; and in the 1940s he moved to depict large open vistas, painted with free, spontaneous brush stokes in a high-key palette.
From 1946 to 1986 Rees taught painting and drawing and lectured in art history at the School of Architecture, the University of Sydney, which gave him the freedom to paint without being concerned about sales. As Rees became older he became increasingly exuberant and experimental in his approach to painting and used lighter tones. In 1976 Rees began his first portfolio of prints, Memories of Europe , based on his recollections of earlier journeys. The following year he made a series of Australian Landscape prints, depicting the mountains, cliff faces, rocks and valleys of Tasmania, New South Wales and Central Australia; and in 1980 he made a series of 67 lithographs, The Caloola Suite . In the 1980s he began to suffer from poor eyesight, which led him to create semi-abstract impressions from memory improvisations. Lloyd Rees died in Hobart on 2 December 1988.
Further informationLloyd Rees (1895-1988) was a widely respected painter of Australian landscapes and an exceptionally influential lecturer on the history of art to architecture students at the University of Sydney from 1946 to 1986. Born in Yeronga, Queensland, he began studying art in Brisbane before coming to Sydney in 1917 to work in the advertising firm of Smith and Julius (working for Sydney Ure-Smith, founder of Art in Australia). where he met other artists. His Australian landscapes, while based on acute observation and deep affection, showed European traditional influences, particularly those of Italy and France. In 1923, Rees left on the first of four trips to Europe. It was after this that his palette became stronger. However, atmosphere was always combined with solidity and structure until failing eyesight made this increasingly difficult. Water, particularly Sydney Harbour and the Lane Cove River, was a favourite subject. In 1984, he was awarded an honorary doctorate of letter by the University of Tasmania, and the Order of Australia the following year. During the Australian Bicentennial, he was chosen as one of ‘Two Hundred People Who Made Australia Great’.Sources—http://www.australianprints.com/rees.htm
Writers:
Gray, Dr Anne Note: Head of Australian Art, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, ACT
Davina Jackson
Date written:
2006
Last updated:
2015
- Born
- b. 17 March 1895
- Summary
- Lloyd Rees began his career as an architectural draughtsman, and established his reputation as an artist with detailed pen and pencil drawings of around Sydney. An accomplished landscape painter for over five decades, failing eyesight led Lloyd Rees to create semi-abstract impressions from memory towards the end of his career. Rees is represented in most of the major national and state gallery collections.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 2-Dec-88
- Age at death
- 93
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1894-01-01 End Date1988-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- Named after her paternal grandmother, Caroline Barker was born in Melbourne on 8 September 1894, the eldest daughter of a family of five girls and five boys born to bookseller Arthur Barker and his wife Eliza née Stribley. Her great grandfather was Henry Bone, a portraitist who exhibited at the Royal Academy and, as her mother also painted privately, a career as an artist was encouraged. Her youngest sister Agnes (qv) became a significant craftworker. Caroline enrolled at the National Gallery School in the second semester of 1912 where she studied drawing with Frederick McCubbin and painting with Bernard Hall . Her contemporaries included Napier Waller, Sheila McCubbin, Dorothy Hughes, Marion Jones, Adelaide Perry and Enid Dickson. She was awarded a second prize for watercolour in 1917 and a year’s free tuition, completing her studies in 1919. The following year the family moved to Brisbane for the sake of her father’s health.
The Barkers, in common with parents of their generation, did not expect their daughters to earn a living and were content to support their activities until their 'expected’ marriage. Caroline was the only daughter who did not meet this expectation, instead establishing a career as a professional artist. When Adelaide Perry was awarded the National Gallery School Travelling Scholarship in 1920 she suggested that Caroline take over her position as art mistress at the Ipswich Girls’ Grammar School and she taught there from 1921 to 1922. The desired focus of artistic training at that time was Europe, England in particular. She saved enough money to finance a trip to England and sailed with her mother to London on the 'Wyreema’ in March 1923. On their arrival Barker met up with her friends from the National Gallery School, Adelaide Perry and Marion Jones and Queenslander Daphne Mayo .
Caroline Barker was accepted into the Royal Academy Schools of Art where she studied under Cayley Robinson and Sir Charles Sims. The following year she enrolled at the Byam Shaw School of Art where Rex Vicat Cole taught painting and F. E. Jackson taught drawing. She visited the continent and spent a month in Cornwall on a sketching trip with Adelaide Perry and Frances Hodgkinson. Adelaide and Caroline shared a studio before Adelaide’s return to Sydney in 1925. Caroline returned to Australia the following year after her painting Delphiniums was included in the 1926 Paris Salon (no. 104).
She initially painted in Vida Lahey 's studio in Adelaide Street, Brisbane but established her own studio in Petrie Bight in 1927 and shortly thereafter at 241 George Street, Brisbane which was to remain her studio until 1954. Her sister Agnes Richardson recalled her dedication to her chosen career. Caroline would depart for her studio after breakfast and not return until the last tram at 11.00 pm. Sundays were excepted. She would appear for the evening meal as the Barkers held open house and there was always a host of visitors.
In the 1930s and especially during the years of World War II her studio became a significant meeting place for artists. Donald Friend and Sir William Dargie attended the sketching classes. The latter [in a letter to the author in 1995] recalled: 'I had acquired a few penfriends in Brisbane and one of them – probably James Wieneke – took me along to her studio in George Street and introduced me to her. I liked her at once – who could not? – her friendly bustling Queensland manner and her open-minded acceptance of all styles of artistic expression. She offered me the use of her studio and all the models of her life classes as long as I was in Brisbane.’
She taught art to the schoolgirls at Somerville House (1935-46), Loreto Convent (1938), Clayfield College and St. Margaret’s (c1936-41). A gift shop, Bronte, was set up in conjunction with her sister Agnes at her studio in the late 1940s until she gave up the premises in 1954. At that time a student portrait (identified as a Mrs Evans) was purchased for the Queensland National Art Gallery. Subsequently she taught privately at her home on Macaulay Street, Coorparoo until 1963 when she took over the portrait painting classes at the Royal Queensland Art Society (RQAS) and then expanded her classes to include still life painting in 1966. By 1978, however, the classes had much reduced so she transferred the classes to her home and was still teaching two classes a week in 1986. Her notable students include Margaret Olley , Margaret Cilento , Gordon Shepherdson, Hugh Sawrey , Dorothy Coleman , Betty Churcher and Lola McCausland.
In 1928 she was elected to the Council of the RQAS and became one of the stalwarts of the Society. She served on the Council until 1937 and in 1943-45 and 1948-55 and acted as Vice President 1945, 1953 and 1956-73. Caroline first exhibited with the RQAS in 1921 and then between 1927-87, a total of more than 200 works. This included portraits (36%), still life or floral studies (56%), genre (5%) and landscape (3%). She exhibited infrequently in other Brisbane group exhibitions in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. She did not hold a solo exhibition of her paintings but was included in 'Six Past Students of the National Art Gallery’, Melbourne (July 1934) at Allan & Stark’s, Brisbane. (Melville and Yvonne Haysom, Charles Lancaster, Gwendolyn Grant and Enid Dickson were the other exhibitors.) A survey exhibition 'A Tribute to Caroline Barker’; was held at the RQAS Gallery, 18 November-17 December 1999.
The training she received in London established her credibility in Brisbane and it was clearly very important to her as in 1933 she described the daily life of the Byam Shaw Art School. She exhibited a drawing on one occasion (in 1941) as her 'sketches’ were drawn directly on the canvas. Her first 'brush with fame’ was in 1928 when she exhibited her portrait of Alderman W. A. Jolly (the first Mayor of Greater Brisbane 1925-30 and the first Lord Mayor 1930-32) at the Queensland Art Society. (The painting was donated to the Brisbane City Council by the Jolly family after the subject’s death.) Of particular interest are her paintings of children such as Joan Haldane as an Elizabethan doll 1931 and Lincoln Robbins in Indian headdress 1938. Most of her portraits were finely painted and were described with some consistency in the annual exhibitions of the RQAS until the early 1940s. Subsequently reviews of the exhibitions become sparse indeed and with the new agendas in art, portrait and still life paintings were largely ignored.
During the 1930s still life was established as an important genre in Australian art and became a consistent aspect of her production: the flowers from her garden filled the vases in her home to become the companion to those on the walls. In an article in Brisbane’s Daily Sun in 1986 she remarked, 'I love Queensland for the colours. The skies are such a vivid blue and the colours of the flowers are so sharp, so positive. I can’t imagine myself living anywhere else.’
The former Lord Mayor of Brisbane, Sallyanne Atkinson, commissioned Caroline to paint her portrait in 1986 (completed 1987). There was seen to be a special symmetry in Caroline painting the portrait of the first Lord Mayor then, some 60 years later painting, the first female Lord Mayor. There does, however, appear to be a marked difference in the execution of these portraits. This has been defended by Caroline herself, in the same 1986 Daily Sun article: 'You express things in a different way when you are young. As you grow up you loosen up.’ It was during this portrait session, however, that Sallyanne Atkinson became aware of the significance of Caroline in the context of Brisbane and her great contribution to the art produced here.
A substantial collection of Barker’s work was acquired by the Brisbane City Gallery and The Caroline Barker Award was given in 1987 through the joint effort of the Brisbane City Gallery Advisory Committee and the RQAS. She had been awarded Honorary Life Membership of the RQAS in 1964 and an MBE in the 1978 for her services to art. She was included as a Woman of Queensland in Don Taylor’s 1979 photographic essay and named the Brisbane Zonta Club’s Woman of Achievement in 1986. However, the 300 people who attended her 80th birthday party at the premises of the RQAS give the best indication of the affection with which she was held by Brisbane’s art community. She maintained her interest and enthusiasm for all varieties of artistic expression to the end of her life. She died at her home on Macaulay Street, Coorparoo, Brisbane on 23 July 1988 and was cremated at the Mt Thompson Crematorium four days later.
Queensland Art Gallery: Research Curator, Queensland Heritage
Writers:
Cooke, Glenn R.Note: Research Curator, Queensland Heritage, Queensland Art Gallery
Date written:
2005
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 8 September 1894
- Summary
- Caroline Barker had a long career in Brisbane as an artist and teacher and for many years, especially after the death of Vida Lahey, was regarded as the senior female artist in Queensland.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 23-Jul-88
- Age at death
- 94
Details
Latitude-27.467778 Longitude153.028056 Start Date1954-01-01 End Date1987-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Brisbane Qld, Australia
- Biography
- painter and illustrator, mainly worked in coloured pencil. Did book covers and large pictures. Included in Balance , Queensland Art Gallery.
This record is a stub. You can help by adding more detail.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 16 September 1954
- Summary
- A painter and illustrator, who worked mainly in coloured pencil, painting book covers and large pictures. She was included in the 'Balance' exhibition at Queensland Art Gallery.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 19-Jul-87
- Age at death
- 33
Details
Latitude-32.2675086 Longitude150.8905694 Start Date1936-01-01 End Date1987-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Muswellbrook, New South Wales, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1936
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1987
- Age at death
- 51
Details
Latitude-36.840556 Longitude174.74 Start Date1928-01-01 End Date1987-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Auckland, New Zealand
- Biography
- painter, sketcher and art teacher, was born on 2 March 1928 in Auckland, New Zealand, daughter of Gertrude and Leonard Goldfinch. The family arrived at Sydney on 9 June 1936. On 16 November 1951 Melba married Allan Wesley Symons. Allan worked as a 'flying dentist’ in the Northern Territory from about 1955 to 1961 and they lived there. They had four children: Suellen (b.1955), a photographic artist, Peter (b.1958), a television director and cameraman, Melanie (b.1961), a writer, and Matthew (b.1961), a printer and sculptor.
As a mature age student, Melba Symons graduated from the Canberra School of Art in 1979 with a Diploma of Fine Arts (Visual). She travelled to Europe and Britain for three months in 1981 with her sister, Shirley. The wide range of subjects she employed in subsequent works included super-real portraiture, abstracted motifs and theatrical landscapes in pastel, pencil, acrylic, oil and watercolour. She was interested in the work of Cézanne, Adami and David Hockney as well as in Aboriginal art and culture; she worked with colour and light theory. She taught art, mainly to women, at Canberra Community Centres. She exhibited rarely but was included in a major Canberra Group exhibition at the Albert Hall in 1980.
Writers:
Symons, Suellen
Note: Heritage biography.
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 2 March 1928
- Summary
- Painter, sketcher and art teacher, was interested in the work of Cézanne, Adami and David Hockney as well as in Aboriginal art and culture. She taught art, mainly to women, at Canberra Community Centres and was included in a major Canberra Group exhibition at the Albert Hall in 1980.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1987
- Age at death
- 59
Details
Latitude49.4892913 Longitude8.4673098 Start Date1923-01-01 End Date1987-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Mannheim, Germany
- Biography
- Moegel was born at Mannheim, a small town in southern Germany, where he also studied art. He served on German submarines during World War II. He married Elsie (?) (b. 1924) and migrated to Australia when they settled near Cairns where Moegel worked with the local Aboriginal community. They moved to southeast Queensland where Herbert became acquainted with Ian Fairweather and was probably influenced by Fairweather’s style of abstraction. The couple finally moved to Cabarita, NSW, where they built house which incorporated a small studio upstairs.
Moegel exhibited locally at Tweed Heads, Kingscliffe and the Gold Coast where he contributed to the Gold Coast City Art Prize from 1971 to 1975. He held a solo exhibition in Sydney during the 1970s. He taught at the Murwullimbah TAFE for two years around this time as well as conducting lessons and holding exhibitions of his work in his home. He died on emphysema in 1987 and his ashes were scattered off Cabarita Point.
Writers:
Cooke, Glenn R.
Date written:
2009
Last updated:
2010
- Born
- b. 1923
- Summary
- Herbert Moegel came to Australia after the close of World War II, like many migrants, to establish a new life. The work he produced was abstracted and influenced by the Dreaming stories of Aboriginal people.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1987
- Age at death
- 64
Details
Latitude-27.467778 Longitude153.028056 Start Date1920-01-01 End Date1987-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Brisbane, QLD, Australia
- Biography
- Donald Ross, or Don as he was usually known, Cowen was considered to be promising early in his artistic career in Queensland. However, after leaving for overseas at the beginning of 1953, nothing more was heard about him on the local art scene. Nevertheless, he is noteworthy as someone who pursued his art throughout his life, particularly in some interesting collaborations between art and science. Born in Brisbane in 1920, he received his art training in that city, first from local teacher Melville Haysom, and then at the Central Technical College. Next he served in the Australian Army, joining up in 1942 and being discharged with the rank of lieutenant in 1946. Resuming his artistic career in Brisbane, he became a member of the Younger Artists Group of the Royal Queensland Art Society. He exhibited a watercolour of 'Cape Byron’ at the 'L.J. Harvey Memorial Fund Exhibition’ held at the Finney’s Art Gallery in March 1950, was included in the 'Christmas Exhibition of Paintings’ held at the Marodian Gallery in December of that year, and then had a joint exhibition with his friend Quentin Hole at the same venue in April 1951. In response to the latter, Courier-Mail reviewer, Elizabeth Young, declared: “Don Cowen, broad and emotional in his approach, is, on the whole and unexpectedly, most satisfying in one or two of his watercolours.” (Young, 1951, pg. 2). Two of his paintings formed part of the 'Exhibition of Queensland Art’ held at the Queensland National Art Gallery in September/October 1951, and again he was a participant in the Marodian Gallery’s 'Christmas Exhibition’ for 1951. A busy year was capped off with the Royal Queensland Art Society’s 63rd Annual Exhibition (November 1951) in which three of his oil paintings were displayed. In February 1953 a 'Farewell Exhibition’ was held for Cowen at the Johnstone Gallery (the successor to the Marodian Gallery, situated in the Brisbane Arcade). The gap in Cowen’s exhibition profile in 1952 is probably explained by his involvement, in partnership with Quentin Hole, in two major commissions at the University of Queensland at its new site in suburban St Lucia. In 1951, in addition to their other work, the two artists produced a long mural, 15.24 × 0.9 m, situated high up on one wall of the Geology Museum in the recently completed Richards Building. Titled The Age of Reptiles and painted in oil on concrete, it showed the changes in animal and plant life from the Permian to the Cretaceous periods. The impetus for this commission came from Geology Department staff members, who also provided scientific advice and probably suggested artistic models. A number of surviving sketches show that it involved careful planning. The success of this work prompted a second commission in 1952, a mural for the short end wall of the museum depicting the Age of Mammals in Australia, an innovative subject for this date. It was completed in December 1952, shortly before both Cowen and Hole departed for overseas early in 1953. The 'Farewell Exhibition’ marks the end of Cowen’s artistic career in Australia and his movements in the later 1950s are uncertain. However, it is clear that Cowen had settled in the United States, in Tucson, Arizona, by the early 1960s. A 1998 history of the Unitarian Universalist Church in Tucson notes that church member Cowen was their 'first “Artist of the Month”’ in September 1962 (eds. Call and Mathews, 1998, p. 23). A biographical note used for publicity at the time is quoted, revealing that the artist studied in England as well as Australia (eds. Call and Mathews, 1998, p. 23). It is also stated that: “He has designed settings and costumes for the ballet and legitimate theater, is a mural and portrait painter and watercolorist, abstract and landscape painter in all media. He teaches painting and drawing at his Tucson studio” (eds. Call and Mathews, 1998, p. 23). From 1965 to 1983, he worked as a scientific illustrator at the Optical Sciences Center of the University of Arizona. Art works with a scientific theme produced during this time include a large painting depicting an early use of solar energy at the Battle of Syracuse when Archimedes supposedly deflected the sun by means of polished shields, thereby setting fire to the enemy fleet. A sculpture which is situated outside the Optical Sciences Center building was made after a large glass disc fractured into several pieces during the process of forming it into a lens. Cowen also painted a large mural with the theme of 'Man and the Universe’ for the Flandrau Science Center at the University of Arizona (Wright, 2010, pers. comm. 2 March and 4 March). The artist died in Tucson on 1 April 1987, aged 66.
Writers:
Heckenberg, Kerry
Note:
Date written:
2010
Last updated:
2011
Status:
peer-reviewed
- Born
- b. 28 July 1920
- Summary
- Don Cowen worked for only a few years in Australia, beginning as a promising younger artist in Brisbane in the early 1950s, before departing for overseas in 1953 and settling in Tucson, Arizona; however he did leave behind some interesting and unusual work in the form of two palaeoart murals painted (in collaboration with Quentin Hole) at the University of Queensland.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Apr-87
- Age at death
- 67
Details
Latitude-26 Longitude121 Start Date1915-01-01 End Date1987-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Western Australia, WA, Australia
- Biography
- Of the Pintupi/Wenampa tribe, Tutuma was one of the first Pintupi to own his own camels, which he used to go on extensive trips throughout his country west of Lake McDonald. An important ceremonial leader, he was one of the original group of painters at Papunya, eager to depict his Dreaming stories onto board with paint. He travelled to Sydney in 1981 with Mick Namarari and Nosepeg for an exhibition of paintings at Sid’s Gallery Darlinghurst. His country lay west of Lake McDonald across the WA border and around Lake Hopkins. He moved out to Kintore with the rest of the Pintupi at the beginning of the ’80s and continued painting for Papunya Tula Artists until the mid ’80s, although hampered by failing eyesight.
Writers:
Johnson, VivienNote: primary biographer
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1915
- Summary
- One of the first Pintupi to own his own camels and one of the original Papunya Tula Artists, Tutuma was always eager to depict his Dreaming stories in a loose energetic style.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1987
- Age at death
- 72
Details
Latitude-25 Longitude133 Start Date1910-01-01 End Date1987-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1910
- Summary
- Bandt was an automotive engineer and automobile body designer for Ford Motor Company, Geelong, Victoria. Notable for his design of the Ford Utility vehicle in 1933 integrating one of the Ford sedans and a truck, it went into production in 1934. Bronze Medal awards in motorcar designs in 1947-48. Later developed designs for Ford stationwagon and Fairlane sedan.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-87
- Age at death
- 77
Details
Latitude-36.75 Longitude144.266667 Start Date1908-01-01 End Date1987-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Bendigo, VIC, Australia
- Biography
- Roger Kemp, painter and etcher, was born in July 1908 in Bendigo, Victoria, second child of Frank Kemp, who worked at a nearby gold mine, and his mother Rebecca Kemp (née Harvey). The family relocated to the Melbourne suburb of South Yarra in 1913 after Roger Kemp’s father was seriously injured in a mining accident.
In 1929, Roger Kemp enrolled in drawing classes at the National Gallery Art School where he studied alongside fellow artists including John Vickery and Noel Counihan. During 1930-32 he attended the School’s night classes and in 1932 he enrolled in the Working Men’s College (now RMIT). Roger Kemp returned to the National Gallery School in 1933 where he studied for the next three years accompanied by students such as Clifford Bayliss, Nancy Grant and Ian MacFarlane. At the same time, Roger Kemp was largely self-taught, developing his own innovative artistic vision and becoming one of the key figures of abstract art in Australia.
Kemp’s early works of the 1930s were small in scale, figural, reflected the influence of Cézanne and were inspired by the idea of analogy between art and music. His later works drew upon both geometric abstraction and abstract expressionism and were thus composed of considered lines creating geometric shapes as well as expressive, impulsive brushstrokes. After an extended period of time working away from the public eye, Kemp held his first solo exhibition in 1945 at Velasquez Galleries, Melbourne. By the late 1940s his works had grown in size and abstraction. Squares and circles appeared as recurring motifs, often fragmented across a shallow picture plane.
Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Roger Kemp worked in factories to support himself and his wife Merle Kemp. His profile soon rose when in the 1960s he won the John McCaughey Memorial Prize (1961) and the Blake Prize for Religious Art (1968 and also in 1970). In 1966 he embarked on his first trip overseas at the age of 58 and travelled extensively throughout Europe. From the late 1960s and into the 1970s, Kemp began to experiment with working on paper, producing a series of etchings.
Roger Kemp taught at Prahran College of Adult Education in 1970 and then moved to London where he lived and worked for two years (1970-72) in the studio of the Space, Provision, Artistic, Cultural and Educational Project (S.P.A.C.E.). In 1972 Kemp returned to Melbourne and maintained a print studio with George Baldessin in Collins Street, Melbourne. (An exhibition of his etchings was held in 1972 at Rudy Komon Gallery, Sydney, while the Art Gallery of New South Wales toured ‘Roger Kemp: etchings’ during 1990-91).
In 1978, in celebration of his seventieth birthday, several exhibitions of Kemp’s work were held simultaneously across a number of locations: Monash University Gallery (Early Work c.1933-1945), College of the Arts Gallery (Metaphysical Paintings c.1945-1955), Melbourne University Gallery (Maturity 1955-1975), and the National Gallery of Victoria (Paintings on Paper: sequences 1968-1975). Ninety-one paintings selected by Professor Patrick McCaughey, in consultation with the artist, were exhibited across the four sites, with a fifth site, Realities Galleries, Toorak, showing a further 25 works.
After a substantial and prolific career spanning more than five decades, Roger Kemp died in Melbourne, Victoria, on 14 September 1987. In the same year he was awarded the prestigious honour of an Order of Australia, a significant accolade that complemented the order of the British Empire that he had previously received in 1978.
Throughout his career Roger Kemp received several awards, for example the D’Arcy Memorial Prize for Religious Art (1964), the International Co-operation Art Award (1969) and the Distinguished Artists Award presented by the Australia Council (1973).
The art of Roger Kemp is represented in numerous Australian public collections such the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; the Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide; the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth and the Castlemaine Art Gallery, Castlemaine. His work is also held in the Mertz Collection USA and the Australian Chancery, Washington, USA, as well as private and corporate collections across Australia, the UK and the USA. In the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, and on display in the NGVI Great Hall, are tapestries based on paintings by Roger Kemp and woven by the Australian Tapestry Workshop, Melbourne.
Writers:
ecwubben
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 3 July 1908
- Summary
- The Melbourne based Roger Kemp developed his angular abstract paintings and prints in harmony with his deep felt spiritual values. Although he was hailed at first for his abstract work, there was always an underlying structure, citing Christian and other religious iconography.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 14-Sep-87
- Age at death
- 79
Details
Latitude-38.228973 Longitude143.136785 Start Date1906-01-01 End Date1987-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Camperdown, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1906
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1987
- Age at death
- 81
Details
Latitude52.2928116 Longitude-3.73893 Start Date1905-01-01 End Date1987-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Wales, UK
- Biography
- Bernard Hesling, from a Yorkshire family, was born in 1905 while the family was temporarily in Wales. They returned to Yorkshire in 1907. He left school at age 15 and was apprenticed to a firm of painters and decorators. He studied art at Halifax night-school, where his teacher was the artist Joseph Mellor Hanson.
In 1928 he migrated to Australia and worked on Sydney shop-window displays. In 1929 he exhibited his abstract paintings but sold only three. He returned to London about 1930 and worked as a display artist. Later he was an art director at Elstree film studios, London, where he worked for three or four years. He returned to Sydney in 1939. During the war he did design work at Slazenger’s Munitions Annexe, Botany. In his spare time he drew political cartoons for The Daily Telegraph later joining that newspaper full time.
He left the Telegraph in 1946, moved to The Sydney Morning Herald , then to Smith’s Weekly where he decorated 'his merry writings with his own curious humorous drawings’ (Blaikie, 132). He was an art reviewer at the Sydney Observer until sacked for a critical review of a Blake exhibition he hadn’t seen.
Hesling painted wall murals from 1950 until about 1957 for commercial and business clients. In 1957 he took up vitreous enamel painting fired on steel plate – tables, ashtrays, wall panels etc – and he exhibited his vividly coloured artwork throughout Australia.
He moved from Sydney to Adelaide in 1962. At an exhibition of his enamels at Underwood Galleries in Sydney in 1965 Hesling said: 'I have expressed myself in many different ways in order to prove the validity and versatility of vitreous enamel as a painting medium. Painting in enamel is no harder than painting in oils – merely different.’(SMH 14 Nov 1965 p97)
He was awarded an OAM in 1985 for contributions to the visual, performing and literary arts and for pioneering in Australia the use of vitreous enamels. He died on 13 June 1987.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Tony Minchin
fishel
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2013
- Born
- b. 8 June 1905
- Summary
- Bernard Hesling was a mid-20th century UK-born painter who lived and worked in Sydney from 1928 until 1962, when he moved to Adelaide. He was a designer and muralist in the 1950s and later a successful vitreous-enamel painter who did much to foster vitreous-enamel artwork on steel plate in Australia. He was also a cartoonist, journalist and author of humorous autobiographical books.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 13-Jun-87
- Age at death
- 82
Details
Latitude-27.467778 Longitude153.028056 Start Date1903-01-01 End Date1987-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Brisbane, Qld, Australia
- Biography
- Mervyn Angela Jones was born in Brisbane on 6 February 1903. Her father, Captain Mervyn Jones, was responsible for the marine surveying of the New Guinea coast while her mother, Zoe Annie Clara née Pollard, had considerable artistic skills as evidenced by a large painting of Port Moresby dated 1893 (private collection). Consequently, after she completed her schooling, Jones studied at the Central Technical College under Martyn Roberts and L. J. Harvey from 1919 to 1921. (She received Honours for Freehand Drawing I and passes for Modelling I and Design I in 1919.)
Mervyn, together with friends from the college, Misses Hope McKenzie, Enid Morgan Jones and Nancy Wilson, conducted a craft shop, Artcraft Studio, from 1922 to 1939. Miss Jones was the potter of the group and had her own coal-fired kiln (one of the very few in Brisbane) at her home at 'Merrilees’, Tennyson. Glazing and firing was a 'hit or miss’ procedure as she had to learn everything from books. She ceased her association with Artcraft Studio in the early 1930s when her hands became infected and she was not able to continue potting. She exhibited pottery with Royal National Agricultural and Industrial Association 1922-24 and, together with watercolours, at the Royal Queensland Art Society in 1932.
Subsequently she gained a considerable reputation for her floral decorations in the foyer of the Wintergarden Theatre, Queen Street which she produced for a period of 14 years. Later Miss Jones became well known as a social announcer for radio 4BC. She died in Brisbane on 7 July 1987.
Queensland Art Gallery: Research Curator, Queensland Heritage
Writers:
Cooke, Glenn R.
Note: Research Curator, Queensland Heritage, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane
Date written:
2003
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 6 February 1903
- Summary
- For Miss Jones and her co-workers, the Artcraft Studio was the first outlet for hand-crafted wares in Brisbane. Jones was also a capable potter in her own right and a graduate of the Central Technical College where she studied under L. J. Harvey and Martyn Roberts.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 7-Jul-87
- Age at death
- 84
Details
Latitude-33.8961132 Longitude151.1801893 Start Date1902-01-01 End Date1987-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Newtown, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Amateur painter, businessman and collector of aviation history, was born on 18 October 1902, a descendant of 'Old’ Crome the English watercolour painter. Married to Virtie Ivery [sic apparently – from manuscript by Crome], he worked in Newtown and lived, apparently, at Maroubra. Most of his time was spent as a passionate aviation collector. His large aviation collection was given and sold ($15,000) to the National Library of Australia at the end of 1965 and he acted as a consultant to the library on aviation acquisitions as part of the deal. Included in the lifetime collection he sold to the library were several paintings by Crome himself (now NLA), including a reconstruction of the first balloon ascent in Australia.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 18 October 1902
- Summary
- Amateur painter, businessman and collector of aviation history. Resident of Maroubra, NSW.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1987
- Age at death
- 85
Details
Latitude-33.829075 Longitude151.24409 Start Date1900-01-01 End Date1987-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Mosman, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- painter, printmaker, illustrator and author, was born at Mosman, Sydney, on 3 December 1900, daughter of Herbert Joseph Birmingham, a doctor who was also a black-and-white artist, author of children’s books, a strict disciplinarian and a devout Catholic. Herbert’s wife was an alcoholic whom he had left behind in their native Ireland and Karna’s mother was Birmingham’s live-in maid, Kahn Marie Nielsen, a Danish woman who had previously born Herbert a son, Herbert Joseph junior. Karna was educated at Loreto College, Kirribilli. Encouraged by her father, she studied under Julian Ashton at Ashton’s Sydney Art School in 1914-20. Because 'of a lack of faith in myself & my Father’s dinning it into me from childhood that I’d never make a go of painting’, she decided 'to stick to my pen-and-ink’. Birmingham taught at Ashton’s in 1921, the year she and Olive Crane were mentioned in the Sydney Mail as young artists 'with ambitious ideas’. Birmingham was Hon. Sec. for an exhibition by 10 women held in Sydney, which sold well and received positive criticism. The following year Home reproduced her photograph by Judith Fletcher and called her 'one of the cleverest black-and-white young Australians’.
In the 1920s Birmingham exhibited with the Society of Artists alongside her friends Anne Dangar , Isabel Huntley and Grace Crowley . In 1922, for instance, Crowley exhibited a good pencil drawing of a head of an elderly woman while Birmingham showed a 'Pen drawing’ of a little girl by the edge of a river. For financial reasons, however, Birmingham was obliged to seek full-time employment and from 1922 worked at Farmer Bros. department store as a commercial artist, ticket writer and window dresser. In a letter to Mary Eagle dated 8 September 1976, she recalled: ' ...it was like being turned out of the Garden of Eden. “Commercial Art!” said one of my student friends [Dangar] “ I thought you were going to be a real artist!”’ She continued to exhibit with the Society of Artists and the Society of Women Painters in the 1920s and participated in the first exhibition of work by the Younger Group of Australian Artists, held at Anthony Hordern’s gallery in 1924. The Birthday , a story she wrote and illustrated, was published in the sophisticated art student magazine Undergrowth May-June 1927; her linocut of a tailor mending the wing of a small female angel appeared there in 1928.
Karna illustrated several children’s books, including her own Skippety Songs (Sydney, 1934), two editions of Amy Mack’s Scribbling Sue (Sydney, 1923 & 1925), The Fantail’s House (1928), The Flower Fairies (1928), The Gum Leaf that Flew (1928) and three editions (1924, 1925, 1928) of Amy Mack’s Bushland Stories ( Joyce Dennys illustrated the first edition, c.1921). Karna also illustrated Teens (1923, 1924, 1925 & 1927 edns) by Amy Mack’s sister, Louise. William Moore called her as an illustrator with a 'distinctive imaginative outlook… whose studies of children are very well drawn’.
In 1938 Karna contracted trachoma, a contagious disease of the eyes, and did not paint or draw again until 1974. She had married Robert Turvey in 1930 who, according to Terry Birmingham, drank himself to death. In 1949 she married again. She and her second husband, Arthur Alva Livingstone, ran a strawberry farm at Gosford then moved to Narooma where they had guest cabins. After Arthur shot himself in 1958, Karna moved to Turrumurra. According to Butler, she had a large house and studio there and, despite continuing problems with her eyesight, painted until the year before she died at Neutral Bay Nursing Home on 5 July 1987. Terry Birmingham says she lived in a small two-bedroom house and that her 'studio’ was the garage. According to her nephew, a friend moved Karna into the nursing home only days before she died.
Birmingham’s pen drawings, The Quince Tree and Creepers , were purchased for the Art Gallery of NSW in 1920. The Quince Tree was reproduced in a special Society of Artists Pictures number of Art in Australia that year. A collection of Karna’s papers, mainly of the 1920s-30s, remains in private collection. It includes over 20 drawings, largely of people and cats, albums and framed photographs, a collection of verses called Tinpot and two semi-biographical, manuscript novels. Birmingham also produced many exquisitely drawn bookplates; her own was given to the DAA by Mary Eagle.
IMAGES: mysterious b/w illustration (ML); Myra Cocks’s bookplate (NGA); In the Wake of the “Cheerio” 1937, linocut cover of book (NGA, ill. Butler SBD 1991, 25); 'The Quince Tree’ (AGNSW); Undergrowth linocut. Her (Four Children Fleeing from a Bat) n.d. (1920s), ink and watercolour 30.1 × 21.5 cm, Dixson Galleries, SLNSW, is clearly an illustration to a children’s story though no book using it has been located. Karna Birmingham illustrated several books for children, including her own Skippety Songs (1934) and Scribbling Sue by Amy Mack (1928). Other illustrations tend to be less intricate, suggesting that this was an early work made before her eyesight began to fail. Yet all her known illustrations are well drawn, lively and unsentimental. Even her 1920s bookplate for Myra Cocks , which shows cherubs attending the artist, is by no means saccharine; it is as much a joke about Cocks’s youthful angelic looks and far from angelic behaviour as a reference her penchant for illustrating fairy tales.
Other images establish a quite sinister atmosphere with minimal means, including a pen-and-ink illustration (ML) of three adults in early Victorian costume standing in a doorway, a woman with a warning finger to her lips facing a man shielding a young dishevelled woman from the view of anyone inside the house. Birmingham’s ability to create atmosphere, whether of pleasure, distress or the up-and-downs of contemporary childhood life, is as evident in this delicate drawing as in her 'lovely fluid line’ drawings for the 1920s reprint of Louise Mack’s Teens (first published in 1897), admired by Marcie Muir. As Muir comments, 'given greater opportunity, she would have been an outstanding children’s illustrator’.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
1992
- Born
- b. 3 December 1900
- Summary
- Karna Marie Birmingham was an illustrator of children's books and arguably may have been more widely acknowledged if she had not contracted an eye disease in 1938 that limited her artistic career.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 5-Jul-87
- Age at death
- 87
Details
Latitude-30.9554038 Longitude148.3885885 Start Date1899-01-01 End Date1987-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Coonamble, NSW, Coonamble?, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- silversmith, painter, textile designer, mural artist, window dresser, interior designer, journalist, lecturer and teacher, was very active from the 1920s to the 1970s.
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Note: Heritage biography.
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1899
- Summary
- One of the three Burkitt sisters, who were active practitioners, teachers and patrons in the promotion of twentieth-century design in Sydney. Through her teaching and Marion Best's shop, she had a pivotal role in nurturing the growth of young artists such as Ann Gyngell and Marea Gazzard. Her influence extended to art criticism and she served on the editorial board of the magazine "Architecture and Arts and the Modern Home".
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1987
- Age at death
- 88
Details
Latitude-42 Longitude147 Start Date1899-01-01 End Date1987-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Tasmania
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1899
- Summary
- Hammerstein opened an interior design practice in New York in the early 1930s working as Dorothy Hammerstein Inc. After practicing in the United States, she retired in the mid-1950s. She initially worked as an actress/singer in the USA and later married Oscar Hammerstein, the composer in 1929.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1-Jan-87
- Age at death
- 88
Details
Latitude-37.3536857 Longitude144.5341381 Start Date1897-01-01 End Date1987-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Woodend, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- cartoonist, illustrator and painter, contributed to the Bulletin circa WWI, e.g. The Payment of Salome (re German head on a platter) 27 April 1916, 13; The Expression Celestial . '[Aussie digger in France] 'BILLJIM: “Say, Gustave, tell me something nice to say to her.”/ GUSTAVE: “Say 'Vous etes ange!’”/ BILLJIM (doubtfully): “But what does 'ange’ mean?”/ GUSTAVE: “Oh, he mean – er – blankee bonzaire!’” 18 November 1917; Diagnosis (re sadistic doctor) 28 February 1918, 10.
Colahan illustrated The Heart of the School: An Australian School Story (Melbourne, J. Roy Stevens, 1920) by Eustace Boylan, an Irish Jesuit priest who was Prefect of Studies at Xavier College, Melbourne, during the period his novel for boys is set. Colahan’s illustration in Niall (p.163) is a line drawing very like a cartoon.
This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1897
- Summary
- Mid 20th century Melbourne meldrumite painter and a cartoonist.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1987
- Age at death
- 90
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1896-01-01 End Date1987-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1896
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1987
- Age at death
- 91
Details
Latitude-36.8554763 Longitude174.7805576 Start Date1895-01-01 End Date1987-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Parnell, Auckland, New Zealand
- Biography
- caricaturist, cartoonist, painter, sculptor and collage artist, was born in Parnell, a suburb of Auckland, NZ, on 16 March 1895 (Renniks). He was selling drawings to local Auckland newspapers at the age of 14. While apprenticed as a lithographer on the New Zealand Herald from 1914 he studied for two years at the Elam School of Art, sharing his Auckland studio with the cartoonist Unk White , among others. When war broke out Finey served with the NZ Expeditionary Force in France as an under-aged private for three and a half years (Caban, 41, says with New Zealand Transport Corps), then was appointed an official war artist.
Sergeant Finey spent his post-Armistice leave studying at London’s Regent Street Polytechnic School of Art for three months then had to leave for Wellington on the Tainui . Finding, he said, 'After four years and 50 days in the N.Z.E.F. in Egypt and France, there was no work for me at home’, he left for Sydney in November 1919, penniless. He also felt stifled by New Zealand’s strait-laced conformity. In Sydney he contributed joke cartoons to Aussie and the Bulletin until 1921 when Alek Sass, art editor of Smith’s Weekly , engaged him as a staff artist at £9 a week (annually increased until he was finally paid £2,000 p.a.). Cartoons done during his 10 years at Smith’s include: The Spirit of Anzac 28 April 1928, 3; Asking for it (man with bum as target, in set of drawings called 'Finey’s Outlook on Life’, 12 January 1929, 23; St. Peter announces the 10 per cent. cut in Paradise 20 September 1930, 1; They Struggle On, and On, and On! 4 April 1931, 22; two original cartoons collected by Thomas Finch Roy Ottaway (ML PXD 619/13) connected with Mercantile Rowing Club, presented 1994. An outstanding caricaturist, he initiated the popular 'Man of The Week’ feature in 1922, his first subject being Archbishop Mannix of Melbourne (ill. Blaikie, 73). Many others followed (originals ML?). Many of Finey’s cartoons also appears in Salt ( e.g. Vol. 8, No. 13, 28 August 1944, p 2) but there is some speculation that these were reproduced from other papers.
Finey became known around Smith’s as 'the Bolshie’ after drawing a cartoon of the NSW coalminers’ strike, Mass Picketing . Editor Frank Marien put off publishing it until Virgil Reilly bet him £2 that he wouldn’t, so he did (acc. Blaikie?). It led to recriminations. Finey considered his left-wing sympathies 'truthfulness’ (Caban 42-43), especially in the light of increasing lack of editorial freedom for cartoonists. Vane Lindesay states that he was sacked from Smith 's for wanting to hold an exhibition of his originals, which the paper claimed it owned. He took Smith 's to court, won, and was given his originals along with his dismissal notice.
In the late 1920s he contributed caricatures of NZ politicians based on photographs to Pat Lawlor’s NZ Artists’ Annual . Other freelance contributions were to the Australian Budget , e.g. (two dandies) 'HAROLD: “This dashed depression is too simply awful”/ ETHELRED: “Yes; I have deprived myself of bath salts, but when I think of the vast army of unemployed who have done likewise, I don’t feel the blow so much”’, 12 December 1930 (see file); '[MAN]: “What’s the trouble with my wife, doctor?”/ [FAT DOCTOR]: “I don’t know – she’s not dead yet!”’ 7 November 1930, 18. A strongly political cartoon of a fanged gorilla holding weapons and money , Sitting on Top of the World-War Debts , appeared in Ure Smith’s society magazine Home in March 1931, 23. Finey was one of the founders of the New Theatre in 1932 (when it was known as the Workers’ Art Club). He was its first president and when new clubrooms were acquired at 36 Pitt Street, held the first exhibition there, opened by Dame Sybil Thorndike, showing paintings, cartoons and other works (Fox).
Finey freelanced for a while, then accepted a job drawing political cartoons for the Sydney Labor Daily , though this meant taking a pay cut of £30 a week from his Smith’s salary, to £10. It was here, however, that he is considered to have best captured the mood of the Depression, e.g. (Coleman & Tanner, ills 38-39, 41-44, 70, 108, 174), Basic Wage February 1931, Dole Queue September 1931 (which Mary Eagle says prefigures similar representations by Bergner, Counihan and Vic O’Connor by more than a decade); The Most Reverend Michael Kelly DD, Catholic Archbishop of Sydney ; The Illegal Gift 16 May 1932; The Branding Iron 1932 (ill. King, 120); and (after Governor Game dismissed the Lang government) Plutocracy/ Autocracy May 1932 (ill. Caban 46-7).
He had free reign on Labor Daily for about six months, then found his cartoons were increasingly being rejected. A year later he was sacked, which he blamed on the influence of Albert Willis, a Jack Lang offsider, Lang being one of Finey’s major targets. Again unemployed and on the dole, he was surprisingly offered a job on Truth by Ezra Norton, but it did not last long either (there is some speculation it was only two years). Perceived anti-British sentiments in a cartoon about the departing Governor of NSW, Sir Phillip Game, whom Finey had been caricaturing for years (e.g. when he’d sacked the Lang government in 1932), was said to have lost the paper advertising revenue and Finey was reprimanded by Norton and editor Mark Gallard. (Game, on the other hand, sent him a letter inquiring whether he could purchase the original, stating that he had a scrapbook of cuttings of the many caricatures Finey had drawn of him: Caban 42-46.)
He contributed to Saga: A protest in linocuts by the Worker Artists , published by the Worker newspaper in 1933 [c.1932-35 acc. JH] (ML F7741/W) (ill. Coleman & Tanner, 106), e.g. lino block depicting a skeleton head with a factory crown spewing/eating workers, with a splash of red blood for effect.
About the same time Finey contributed 'Armistice Day’, a bleak illustration to Geoffrey Cumine’s poem 'The Crimson Path’, Railroad 10 November 1933 (ML, ill. Kirkpatrick, 251), which ends:
“Remember such as set the path
Whereon the soldiers died…
Unheedful of the aftermath,
They lied, my Lord, they lied.”
Original Bulletin cartoons (ML) include six drawings of 1920 and 1934, and 11 caricatures of 1930, 1940, 1945 (including one of Bruce Dellit). He drew cartoons for the left Red Leader (21 August 1931-July 1935) and for the capitalist Daily Telegraph , where he was political cartoonist from at least 1936: three originals, Signs of the Times published DT October 1936, Non-aggression pacts – Portugal, Germany, Italy, Spain – scraps of paper , published 1 October 1936, and another published 17 March 1937, are at ML PXD 619 (collected by Thomas Finch Roy Ottaway and presented in 1994). An original c.1940s cartoon is at ML PXD 764, while EVICTED [showing Sir Eric Spooner as a landlady evicting a little man in a bowler hat] “I’m not having any of your common type here” [1940s?] and another about Local Government Amending Bill in the Spooner Papers (ML mss) were evidently also for the DT . A 1941 cartoon is illustrated in Coleman & Tanner (p.130).
Finey and Will Mahony left the Telegraph in 1945 after refusing to draw an anti-Labor propagandist subject demanded by the editor. Mahony was fired but there are differing accounts about whether Finey, as his replacement, was fired or resigned. Finey then drew for the Federated Miners’ newspaper the Common Cause , often producing versions of his Worker prints, e.g. Daily Press , 20 July 1946, 3 (acc. Graeme Byrne). He ended his newspaper career producing political cartoons for the communist weekly Tribune .
Finey was especially admired in his lifetime for his caricatures. An issue of Art in Australia devoted to them was published on 15 June 1931 (they alone are numerous in ML). A lifelong bohemian, he always wore a white shirt and white trousers and was coatless, hatless and sockless whatever the weather. His photograph at the Artists’ Ball in Pix (23 April 1938, 34) is captioned: 'George Finey, famous Australian caricaturist and cartoonist, arrived in full evening dress – except trousers. Startling effect was enhanced by Artist Finey doing a wild dance. Moustache is false.’
He was equally dedicated to the fine arts. His 1935 solo exhibition was the first exhibition of 'modern art’ to be held at David Jones Gallery. It included The Milky Way , a cluster of coloured marbles set in wood decorated with whorls of oil paint direct from the tube and framed in corrugated iron. Late in life he held exhibitions of his paintings and collages in Japan, London and New York. From the late 1970s until his death in June 1987, aged 92, he lived in a humble cottage at Warimoo in the Blue Mountains. At his last painting exhibition, held in the Blue Mountains when he was in his eighties, he accepted the tag 'the last of the great bohemians’ (there’s a good description of his 'bohemianisms’ in Caban, 40), although during the 1920s he lived with his wife at Mosman (see Joe Lynch ). By 1940 he was long married (to Nellie) and living at Turramurra, an outer Sydney suburb, then utterly rural and non-bohemian (Unk White, 'My rendezvous with reminiscence’, Second Laugh Anthology 1940, 19). In his eighties in the Blue Mountains he continued to experiment with avant-garde ideas that combined art and music. A retrospective was held at the Sydney Opera House in 1978.
Finey was an inaugural member of the Australian Black and White Artists’ Society in 1924. All 25 (male) inaugural members contributed to 'the first publication issued under the auspices of the Society of Australian Black and White Artists’, The U.S.A. Fleet Souvenir , published in July 1925 to commemorate a visit of the American Fleet to Sydney (ill. Lindesay 1994, 7). The 48-page book, which cost 1/-, included cartoons and comic strips by: Garnet Agnew , Jack Baird , Stan Cross , F.H. Cumberworth, W. Dowman, “Driff” (Lance Driffield), George Finey, Cecil Hartt, Joe Jonsson, Frank Jessop, Fred Knowles, George Little, Brodie Mack, Hugh Maclean, Arthur Mailey, Syd Miller, Syd Nicholls, Mick Paul, Jack Quayle, Reg Russom, Cyril Samuels, Jack Waring, Harry J. Weston, Unk White and John Wiseman , while the writer and poet Will Lawson contributed verses. 'A major contribution… was the wonderful series of caricatures of American high-ranking naval officers drawn by George Finey, then working with Smith’s Weekly ', says Vane Lindesay (1994, 9). He remained a lifelong member of its successor, the Australian Black and White Artists’ Club, attending the 1986 presentation of the Bulletin Stanley awards only a few months before he died.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 16 March 1895
- Summary
- Mid 20th century Auckland and Sydney left-wing caricaturist, cartoonist, painter, sculptor and collage artist. Infamous for his bohemian lifetsyle.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 8-Jun-87
- Age at death
- 92
Details
Latitude-37.8576088 Longitude145.0350666 Start Date1894-01-01 End Date1987-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Malvern, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- painter, printmaker, art teacher, writer and collector of child art, was born in the Melbourne suburb of Malvern on 15 November 1894. For a few years c.1903-6 her family lived in New Zealand then in Ireland where she attended classes at the Belfast School of Art. The Andersons returned to Australia in 1906 and Frankie (as she was known) spent her teenage years in rural Victoria, where she taught herself drawing and sculpture. At the age of sixteen she went to Melbourne to study at the National Gallery School (1911-13). There she met her lifelong friends Ethel Spowers and Mary Cecil Allen . She took additional classes in sculpture and design at the Eastern Suburbs Technical College, finally qualifying as an art teacher from Swinburne Tech. In 1916 she was appointed foundation art teacher at the Junior Technical School for Girls. Because government policy forbade the employment of married women, this career ended after her marriage to Alfred Plumley Derham in 1917.
Derham took an active interest in the Arts and Crafts Society (Vic.). Inspired by Baldwin Spencer, she began to incorporate Aboriginal motifs into her designs from 1925, particularly in her linocuts of the 1930s. Her interest in Aboriginal art was no passing phase. In 1938 she visited Hermannsburg Mission in Central Australia and taught art to the young children there. She collected more than 200 drawings on this visit, which she showed in numerous exhibitions in Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Perth and Hobart. In 1948 she travelled to the Aurukun Mission in far North Queensland and once again taught art to the children of the settlement. She visited Papua New Guinea for five days in 1960 and again in 1967.
From 1928 to 1963 Derham was an art teacher at the Melbourne Kindergarten Training College at Kew, where she influenced several thousand teachers. She also taught in the teacher-training program at Mercer House Associated Teachers Training College. Much of her energy was devoted to the reform of art education in Victoria through her many publications and by serving on numerous committees in the 1950s-70s. In the 1960s she represented Australia at congresses held by the International Society for Education through Art (InSEA) at Manila and Montreal.
Derham was also involved in many community activities, including war relief work during World War II. In 1950 was awarded the MBE for services to the community. Despite a steady output of paintings and drawings Derham never practised full time as an artist. Nevertheless, she continued to expand her skills. In the 1930s she studied printmaking with Ethel Spowers and Eveline Syme and painting, sporadically, with George Bell from the 1930s until he died in the 1960s. She rarely exhibited, preferring to give her work away. The most comprehensive exhibition of her art was held at Jim Alexander’s Important Women Artists’ gallery in 1986. She died in Melbourne on 5 November 1987 and was buried at Kew.
Frances Derham donated her personal papers to the University of Melbourne and her children’s art collection of some 7,000 paintings and drawings to the National Gallery of Australia in 1976. A few of her own prints are in public collections, but her paintings and collages are held privately.
Writers:
Piscitelli, Barbara
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 15 November 1894
- Summary
- Frances Alexander Mabel Letitia Derham (née Anderson) was a painter, printmaker, art teacher, writer and collector of child art. She was the Australian representative at congresses held by the International Society for Education through Art (InSEA) at Manila and Montreal in the 1960s.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 5-Nov-87
- Age at death
- 93
Details
Latitude-27.467778 Longitude153.028056 Start Date1893-01-01 End Date1987-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Brisbane, Qld, Australia
- Biography
- CHECKhis pink and purple paintings of serene river landscapes were keenly sought in the 1980s, often nudging six-figures. But his prices have since fallen dramatically making his paintings less profitable to forge. Refunds, however, were paid on two dubious paintings by Bennett sold at Lawson-Menzies on 20 November 2001, while Noon Day Campsite sold at Goodmans on 19 November as by Bennett was declared a fake by artist Colin Parker (son of the owner of Parker’s Gallery, The Rocks, where Bennett had shown his work), Edward Craig and Vi Bennett, the artist’s widow. Both carried labels from Artlovers Gallery, Artarmon (Artarmon Gallery), now run by Philip Breckenreg who said his father, John, sold only about 20 works by Bennett, usually resales. Bennett, who was also an art dealer, sold most of his paintings himself. Macquarie Galleries labels have also appeared on suspect works.
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
zauthor
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 1893
- Summary
- William Rubery Bennett was an artist and art gallery owner from Brisbane who lived and worked in Sydney for much of his career.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1987
- Age at death
- 94
Details
Latitude-34.188889 Longitude142.158333 Start Date1893-01-01 End Date1987-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Mildura, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- Harold Hughan, called “Buzz” by his close friends, was born in Mildura, the second of ten children born to Emily (née Clayton) and Randolph Hughan. He spent most of his childhood in Hamilton. It was here that he was first apprenticed as a mechanical engineer. In 1910 he moved to Geelong where he completed a correspondence course to qualify as an electrical engineer.In 1915 he enlisted in the AIF and subsequently served on the Western Front, being commissioned as a lieutenant in 1918. In 1919 he married Lily Booth. The couple returned to Australia the following year. He subsequently worked as an electrical engineer until his retirement in 1963.Hughan had always been interested in crafts especially woodwork and weaving. In 1940 his wife Lily and son Robert introduced him to pottery. As with many in the English speaking world, he was profoundly influenced by Bernard Leach’s studio approach in 'A Potter’s Book’. In 1941 he put his engineering skills to good use by designing and constructing a Leach style potters wheel from the crankshaft of a motorcar engine. He also designed and built a kiln at the studio he established at his Glen Iris home.
His son, Robert, became a ceramic technologist with the CSIRO. Both men collaborated on developing stoneware bodies and glazes. As a result, Harold was able to create the effects he had envisaged using stoneware, porcellaneous stoneware and earthenware. These were decorated with celadon, tenmoku, oatmeal and gold metallic glazes with slip decoration, sometimes incised.
Harold Hughan was honoured with retrospective exhibitions in 1969 and 1983, both at the National Gallery of Victoria, both curated by Kenneth Hood.
Writers:
Ross Barnard
Joanna Mendelssohn
7write6
Date written:
2019
Last updated:
2021
- Born
- b. 11 July 1893
- Summary
- Although Harold Hughan admired the genius of the Song and T’ang dynasty potters, his own practice as a studio potter was devoted to developing a distinctive Australian idiom.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 23-Oct-87
- Age at death
- 94
Details
Latitude40 Longitude-100 Start Date1947-01-01 End Date1986-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- USA
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. c.1947
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- c.1986
- Age at death
- 39
Details
Latitude53.7975 Longitude-1.543611 Start Date1925-01-01 End Date1986-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Leeds, England, UK
- Biography
- Laurence Collinson was born in Leeds, England in 1925, the only child of David and Sarah Collinson. After moving first to New Zealand, the family came to settle in Brisbane while Laurence was still a young child. David Collinson was an importer/exporter and the family lived in comfortable circumstances in a Kangaroo Point flat, although their fortunes fluctuated as David Collinson also gambled. Collinson was educated locally and, together with fellow students Barrie (later Barrett) Reid and Cecel Knopke, established the Senior Tabloid of the Brisbane State High School in 1943. In 1944 this student literary journal made the transition to a national bi-monthly magazine for youth. Under the name Barjai , the journal survived until 1949. After the famous Ern Malley hoax involving the Adelaide publication Angry penguins in 1945, Barjai became more directly involved with the visual arts.
Collinson’s interests were artistic as well as literary. During this time he took private art lessons and, as he became aware of the various modern art movements, produced paintings in different styles. A junior section of the Royal Queensland Art Society (RQAS) had been established in 1941 and members exhibited in the annual exhibitions of the parent body. A watercolour painting by Collinson, View from Oxley Memorial Library , was included in the junior section in the Society’s 1944 annual exhibition. The junior members decided that they would hold an independent exhibition following that of the senior members in 1945 and received the approval of the Council to do so. They became the Younger Artists Group of the RQAS, and held their first exhibition 29 Oct. – 1 Nov. 1945. Earlier in the year Collinson briefly attended the Julian Ashton Art School, Sydney, where he lodged in a room above the Studio of Realist Art. The socialist concerns of that group probably inspired Collinson to become the polemicist of the group as reflected in his catalogue foreword to the Younger Artists Group exhibition:
Queensland art today is practically sterile. Year after year the same pretty still-lifes, the same pretty landscapes, the same pretty figure studies are disgorged in their hundreds. Technically pleasing many of these paintings are, but the ability to make a good representation of a natural object on canvas is no proof that the craftsman is also an artist. It would seem the discoveries and re-discoveries in art over the past fifty years, the wars, the revolutions, the terrible events that have taken place in that time, have made little or no impression on our local painters: they are working with their eyes closed.
This provocative statement caused considerable offence to the parent body so the RQAS Council imposed a 20 year upper age limit on group members, effectively removing Collinson from participation in the Younger Artists Group. This sparked the formation of the Miya Studio, which held its first exhibition in the basement of the School of Arts in Stanley Street on 12 December 1945 and was opened by Dr Gertrude Langer. The Miya Studio shared key members, including Collinson, with the Barjai literary grou
Collinson moved to Melbourne in the early 1950s and lived with his family in East St Kilda, where he began an extensive literary production that eventually included ten plays and books of poetry. It seems Collinson’s career as a painter did not extend much beyond his time in Queensland. After he returned to England in 1964 he became a prominent gay rights activist.
Research Curator, Queensland Heritage, Queensland Art Gallery
Writers:
Cooke, Glenn R.
Date written:
2002
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 7 September 1925
- Summary
- Laurence Collinson was a significant youth activist in Brisbane in the early post World War Two period both as a member of both the Bajai literary group and the Miya Studio painters.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 10-Nov-86
- Age at death
- 61
Details
Latitude-37.8334603 Longitude144.9570188 Start Date1913-01-01 End Date1986-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- South Melbourne, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- painter, printmaker, cartoonist and caricaturist, was born in South Melbourne. Although he attended evening classes at the National Gallery School in 1930, he was mostly self-taught as an artist. He did a linocut cover for the second issue of Proletariat (organ of the Melbourne University Labor Club) vol.1 no.2, July 1932 and drew weekly caricatures for the Melbourne Argus from 1935. He also did caricatures for the Bulletin , Table Talk and Sun News-Pictorial during the Depression years. As 'Cunningham’ he did the cover 'Port Kembla Solidarity’ for the Trade Union Leader (Central organ of militant unionism), vol.1, no.8, March 1936 and the linocut Tycoon , 1931 (initialled 'C’ for Cunningham; copy owned Pat Counihan lent to S.H. Ervin black and white show). The Art Gallery of Western Australia has an original 1937 caricature of H.M. Jackson done for the Bulletin (957/0D54) and the Mitchell Library also owns original caricatures of various prominent men, now mostly forgotten.
Influenced by George Finey , the German Simplicissimus artists and the full-page cartoons of the American William Gropper in the left-wing journal New Masses , Counihan contributed to publications in London, Melbourne, Sydney, New Zealand (gallery of prominent New Zealanders, NZ Observer 1939-41), Warsaw and Prague. He began painting in 1941; he also made lots of prints. In Melbourne he was a foundation member of the Workers’ Art Club and of the Print Council of Australia (later president); for a time he was chairman of the Victorian Printmakers’ Group. He was one of ten artists in the 'Melbourne Popular Art Group’ who produced a folio of fourteen linocuts, Eureka 1854-1954 (Melbourne 1954), paying tribute to 'the stand of the Ballarat miners in the Eureka Stockade’ (copy Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery); numbers 2 (“Joe! Joe! The Traps are coming”), 4 ('The Magistrate’) and 5 ('On Bakery Hill’) are his.
Counihan’s contributions to Overland included writing and illustrating 'Scenes of Venice’, no.9 (autumn 1957), 20-21, 'Russian Scenes’, 10 (spring 1957), 20-21, etc.
IMAGE: 'Albert Namatjira’ 1959, linocut edn 50 (copies at Queensland Art Gallery [QAG]; Art Gallery of New South Wales; National Gallery of Australia; et al.). Counihan first met Namatjira in February 1954 and sketched his portrait. Five years later, when Namatjira was being prosecuted for providing liquor to his extended family, Counihan organised a letter of protest to the Menzies Government. In 1959, the year of this linocut, Counihan wrote passionately in Namatjira’s support in Tribune (1 April). Namatjira died three months after his release from prison (see Bernard Smith biog.). The print was included in Sotheby’s Fine Australian Paintings 22-23 April 1996, cat.344 with this information (estimate $500-800).
He also drew a caricature of Mick Armstrong of the Age with his nose being manipulated by the bosses to draw cartoons (ill. King, 1st edn, p. 136).
Worked for Worker or Common Cause cartoon of the 1930s? “An Important Conversation” (man and woman in street) and “In a Foundry” (working men in foreground and two bosses on other side of wall) are two of the six lithographs in his 1948 folio done in Simplissimus style (QAG). A folio of six linocuts (1959) includes “Peace means Life”, “Strontium 90”, “Hunger” and “An Old Man”. The Broadsheet (8 issues, QAG; donated Pat Corrigan) was a large single sheet of relief prints, screenprinting and printer’s type on contemporary social issues, produced in six issues at Melbourne from October 1967 to July 1971. No.1 (1967), screenprint with typset text on paper, edn. 372/1000, 63.5 × 50.5cm, anti-Vietnam 'Napalm Sunday – Coming next year – Ash Wednesday’, was illustrated by Noel Counihan et al. Counihan was also in no.4, 'Up You Cazaly’ (the football issue), 1968, and in no.6, 'A Time for Peace’, 1979. In 1998 Josef Lebovic was offering Counihan’s 'The Good Life’, 1968, pen and wash, for $7,500.
The 1999 S.H. Ervin b/w show included 9 works by Counihan from the Pat Counihan collection: the linocuts 'Tycoon’ (1931), 'Albert Namatjira’ (1959), 'Laughing Christ’ (1970) and 'Demonstrator’ (1978), the original ink cartoon 'The Crisis Facing Us – From the “Land of the Golden Fleece” to Monopoly Capitalism, Censorship and Repression’ (not dated), and three bronze cartoons done late in life (1970s?), 'Laughing Christ’, 'Rabelais’ and two versions of 'On the blower’, depicting a capitalist on the phone, one naked.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1913
- Summary
- Important mid 20th century Melbourne political painter, printmaker, cartoonist and caricaturist.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1986
- Age at death
- 73
Details
Latitude-41.441944 Longitude147.145 Start Date1911-01-01 End Date1986-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Launceston, Tas., Australia
- Biography
- painter and advertising artist, was born in Launceston on 3 April 1911; he studied commercial art in Melbourne and worked in advertising 1930-34, then as a newspaper artist for the Launceston Examiner . Enlisted in AIF 1940 and spent 1942-45 as a POW in Timor, Java and Japan. Sketches done as POW are his best-known works.
Returned to Launceston and taught at Launceston Tech. Later he went back to advertising art and painting. Member Tasmanian Group of Painters, Launceston Art Society and Victorian Artists’ Society.
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
stokel
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 3 April 1911
- Summary
- Mid 20th century Launceston art teacher, painter and advertising artist. Known for sketches made while a Prisoner of War during WWII.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1986
- Age at death
- 75
Details
Latitude-37.823 Longitude144.998 Start Date1908-01-01 End Date1986-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Richmond, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 11 February 1908
- Summary
- Painter and art teacher, trained at the National Gallery School. Nephew of pottery glaze specialist Jack Gare.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1986
- Age at death
- 78
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1907-01-01 End Date1986-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1907
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 14-Dec-86
- Age at death
- 79
Details
Latitude-31.95 Longitude141.466667 Start Date1906-01-01 End Date1986-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Broken Hill, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- caricaturist and cartoonist, son of a newspaper linotype operator, was born in Broken Hill. He moved to Adelaide with his family at the age of two and was educated there. After leaving school, he became a cadet reporter on the Adelaide News in 1923. Inspired by May and Low’s cartoons in the Bulletin , he taught himself to draw and changed his job, becoming the first black-and-white artist employed by the Adelaide Register . His first cartoon was published there in 1928 then reproduced in London’s Evening Standard , according to Germaine. The Register expired during the Depression and Coventry freelanced, mainly doing 'art deco’ portrait caricatures for the Bulletin in the 1930s and for several Adelaide newspapers. During WWII his blocky, simple line strip Alec the Airman was featured in the Mail (1941 example ill Lindesay 1979, 278). In about 50 years of newspaper work Coventry is said to have had over 30,000 caricatures and cartoons published in over 100 newspapers and magazines, including the Bulletin , the Adelaide News , Mail , Advertiser , Register and Register Pictorial , as well as in book anthologies and overseas. His cricket cartoons on A. P. Chapman’s England touring cricket team were published in London’s Evening Standard in 1928-29. He was, however, best known as a caricaturist.
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1906
- Summary
- Prolific mid 20th century Adelaide caricaturist and cartoonist.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1986
- Age at death
- 80
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1906-01-01 End Date1986-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Born in Sydney in 1906, Harold Frederick Abbott was a portrait painter and teacher of art by profession. From 1923 he began studying art part time at the Sydney Art School under Julian Ashton and Henry Gibbons. In 1931, after being awarded the NSW Society of Artists Travelling Scholarship, Abbott moved to London where he spent the next two years studying at the Royal Academy, returning to Australia in 1933. Having years of academic training behind him, Abbott became highly accomplished in portraiture and still life studies, as well as genre paintings and in 1940 Abbott won the Sulman Prize for his painting Vaucluse interior . Portraiture was of particular interest to Abbott, and the influence of Old Masters such as Velazquez, Rembrandt, and Goya is evident in the portraits he produced. Of portraits, Abbott wrote in an article in Art in Australia in 1939 “...that welling-up of the unconscious that we call inspiration only appears in a portrait when the artist understands his subject intuitively as well as consciously”. His dedication to depicting his subjects with great honesty and likeness is evident in all of the portraits he produced throughout his career. Characteristics of his style were his simplicity in approach, his awareness of compositional balance, his use of light to create depth and shadow, and his narrative painterly style.
In 1941, Abbott enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force, and in 1943 he was appointed acting lieutenant as a war artist in 2/9 Australian Field Regiment. Abbott spent the next two years serving as an official war artist for Australia, during which time he produced a large body of works documenting scenes and portraits that reflected his experiences and encounters from the Second World War. As a result of his commission, the Australian War Memorial holds 180 of these works in their collection.
Abbott’s skills in genre painting were well suited to his duties as a war artist; he constructed highly balanced scenes with a strong underlying narrative that provided a comprehensive and truthful documentation of Australia’s involvement on the home front, in the Pacific Islands, and in Singapore during the Second World War. On the home front, works such as Main Street , Atherton (AWM collection, ART22293) emphasise the effect that the military presence had on the rural town of Atherton, Queensland – impacting both physically and visually upon the otherwise sedate backdrop. Abbott did not often portray the horrific events of war; rather he focused on those specific elements that formed a part of every soldier’s day to day life. His genre works evoke a sense of calm tranquillity, and provide eyewitness accounts of everyday life at war – ranging from hygiene and recreation, to machinery and repairs, as well as general camp scenes which incorporate the local flora, fauna, and surrounding landscapes. In a marked departure from the relatively calm documentation of daily activities, Abbott produced a highly confronting and dramatic triptych depicting the fall of Singapore and prisoners of war working on the Burma-Thailand railway. In a triptych of suffering ( Defeat, Singapore ; On the Thailand Railway, 1 ; On the Thailand railway [all 1946]) Abbott is no longer concerned with the subtler elements of war and portrays the traumatic and deeply disturbing devastation he witnessed in Singapore. Sombre images of emaciated prisoners of war disintegrating under the weight of hard labour and destruction confront and shock the viewer. Abbott’s natural colour palette is replaced by bold reds and yellows that serve to heighten the dramatic representation of torment and suffering. These works are demonstrative of Abbott’s engagement with emotion and drama – a theme that he again touches upon later in life.
As a war artist Abbott also produced many portraits, each one reflecting his skill in being able to capture an individual with great honesty and likeness. His subjects ranged from high-ranking officials and officers to local natives and Japanese prisoners of war. For all those of whom he made portraits, Abbott endeavoured to collect as much information as possible; he would spend time talking with them and observing their behaviour, consequently producing works of a very sincere and personal nature.
In the 20 years following the war, Abbott did very little painting and exhibiting. He instead applied himself to teaching at the National Art School in Sydney, where he later became the head and State Supervisor of Art. In the late 1960s, when he was in retirement, he resumed painting again – however his style was markedly different. Narrative and figurative works in oils and watercolours gave way to bold abstract compositions in acrylics. Abbott ventured away from much of his academic training towards explorations in form, colour, design, technique, and mood. Starting with the use of bold colours and semi-abstract configurations, his works became increasingly non-figurative, eventually discarding all familiarity in form to develop purely abstract expressions in art. Prior to his death in 1986 in Sydney, Abbott held eight solo exhibitions and his work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, as well as various regional art galleries across Australia.
Assistant Curator, Australian War Memorial
Writers:
Dimcevska, VickyNote: Assistant Curator, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, ACT
Date written:
2011
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1906
- Summary
- An official war artist during the Second World War, Harold Abbott was an accomplished portraitist who had studied at the Royal Academy of Art in London before returning to Australia and enlisting in the Australian Imperial Forces. After the war he returned to teaching, working at the National Art School in Sydney before becoming the State Supervisor for Art.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1986
- Age at death
- 80
Details
Latitude-36.8590029 Longitude143.7337931 Start Date1906-01-01 End Date1986-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Dunolly, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- painter, graphic artist and writer, was born in Dunolly (Victoria). He studied at the National Gallery School’s evening classes in Melbourne 1927-28 and won many student prizes; two of his prints were purchased for the National Gallery of Victoria. A colleague of Buzacott and Counihan, he made strong 1930s linocuts, many as book illustrations. Inspired by Norman Lindsay, he also painted many watercolours of pirates and produced a sumptuous book, Pirates (Sydney: Frank C. Johnson, 1931), introduced by Blamire Young , in an edition of 50 with 6 full page colour linocuts the largest colour linocuts produced by an Australian artist in Australia until then (cf Napier Waller 's linocuts). His total output of prints, however, was relatively small (30 images).
The Collegiate Etchings and Fine Arts Company of Melbourne and Sydney issued a series of postcards after Flett’s black and white drawings of well known Victorian explorers such as Lonsdale, Batman, Henty and Fawkner. Later, he devoted himself to writing historical books, e.g. a history of Dunolly (see McCulloch).
This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1906
- Summary
- A painter and graphic artist whose book of pirates featured the largest colour linocuts produced by an Australian artist at that time. He also produced a series of drawings of well known Victorian explorers.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1986
- Age at death
- 80
Details
Latitude-31.9559 Longitude115.8606 Start Date1905-01-01 End Date1986-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Perth, WA, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1905
- Summary
- Perth born artist John Brackenreg trained at the Julian Ashton School in Sydney. His friendships with older artists led him to being the conduit directing major Australian works into public collections. However he is best known for his acquisition of Albert Namatjira's copyright.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 27-Dec-86
- Age at death
- 81
Details
Latitude-43.53 Longitude172.620278 Start Date1903-01-01 End Date1986-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Christchurch, NZ
- Biography
- This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Date written:
Last updated:
- Born
- b. 1903
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1986
- Age at death
- 83
Details
Latitude-36.840556 Longitude174.74 Start Date1900-01-01 End Date1986-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Auckland, New Zealand
- Biography
- cartoonist, illustrator and painter, was born in Auckland, New Zealand. He came to Sydney with Joe and Guy Lynch in 1922 and was soon one of Sydney’s best-known cartoonists and bohemians, leading a colourful but impoverished existence (Kirkpatrick) – a great friend of Phil Lindsay . He was married three times: to Mabel (their daughter is Leiba Stewart), to Kath McShine (brief and disastrous) and to Nancye (Nance) for 35 years (who helped Kirkpatrick with his book, when she was in a nursing home).
“Unk” White contributed to the Bulletin , Melbourne Punch , Beckett’s Budget – including various covers – Aussie and other papers, especially Smith’s Weekly in its early days (examples of 2 April 1923, 16, and 2 June 1923, 6). An original drawing in the Sue Cross collection, evidently done for Smith’s , shows a lot of feet beside a rowing boat labelled 'What happened when the beer fell overboard./ A suggested solution of the Marie Celeste mystery’ (ill. Rainbow, p.56). Three other originals – 'Jus’ put yerself in my shoes lady, an’ yer won’t 'ave a care in the world’, 'Hey! Who th’ell yer shovin’ and 'Now then, that’s just wher you put your foot in it’ – were donated to the Mitchell Library (ML PXD 840)in 1999 by the wife of a former Smith’s reporter along with c.20 other originals and 2 copies of the final issue (28 October 1950) signed by all the cartoonists.
Unk White was the inaugural secretary of the Black and White Artists’ Club, founded in 1924 (see Harry Weston ). When living in Europe for 'study and experience’ c.1927-30 (France then London), he sent illustrations back to the Sydney Mail , eg 'Unk White, Sydney Artist, in Paris’, 30 July 1930. He drew for the Tatler , Sketch and Bystander in London, apparently mainly doing animal drawings. An original 'Unk’ White dated 1932 – when he was back in Australia, mainly drawing for the Bulletin – is at ML PXD 764. In 1936 he revisited Europe and made a sketching tour of Mexico.
White drew a comic strip, 'The Adventures of Blue Hardy’, for Pix (e.g. 10 September 1938). He also contributed to the Sydney Morning Herald at some point when he was freelancing. A 'brilliant penman’, he contributed many cartoons to the Bulletin as a freelance from the 1920s, although he never became a staff artist (Blaikie, 91). At the Bulletin office he was 'always conspicuous for his height and his continual uproar’, said Douglas Stewart (p.36). He was known for the glamour girls he drew, e.g. And Safer Too. 'Birdie’s gentleman friend: “Why ever did you coax your husband to buy such a small car?”/ Birdie: “Oh, it’s more comfortable – you see, there’s no place for private detectives to hide in the back”’ 1929 (ill. Rolfe, 182); (very large original, ML PxD478/44) '“Sure you know about any bad habits your boy might have.”/ “I ought to. I taught him all he knows”, published 21 May 1934. Others include domino-playing men, Bulletin 1935 (no ML original) and Unk’s popular 'moo cows’, e.g. 1939 (ill. Lindesay 1994, 24).
WWII Bulletin cartoons include: “Jus’ sharpenin’ up Cleopatra’s Needle in case any of them paratroops arrive”, 1940; (two servicewomen) “May I borrow your lipstick for a moment, general?” 1940; (heavily tattooed male soldier) “Well, if a man’s got t’ be vaccinated, do it where it won’t show”, 1940; (two old fellows knitting) “Forget the club tonight, John – we must do all we can for the brave girls defending us”, 1941; (female general) “Don’t call ME sweetie!” 1941; (woman naval officer re swearing parrot) “I bought it to teach me the language”, original ML (PxD 548/169) published 25 June 1941; '“Gott in Himmel! I’m sure someding hit me”’ 1941 (Aussie digger 'disguised’ as a classical statue biffs Nazi officer); (two artists with portfolios labelled 'Van Gogh’ and 'Gaugin [sic]’ roller-skating down the [National] Art Gallery of New South Wales’ courts with Poynter & Riviere evident of the walls) “We’ll get through the old stuff much quicker this way” 3 December 1941, 14 (original ML Px*D548/105 included in Artists and Cartoonists in Black and White ); “Blime, them Russian blokes are doin’ good-oh!” (male ballet dancer reading of 'Russian Victories’), 1942.
Unk became an accredited war artist in 1944 and saw active service in New Guinea and the Pacific Islands. The collection of originals in the Frank Johnson papers (ML PX*D68) includes 'Darwin “Tit-Bits” [boobs] and a very racist 'Dutch New Guinea’ of 1944, showing a woman with boobs to her knees captioned, 'this is no Dobell exaggeration mark you’. The Henry Lawson collection of 14 drawings and cartoons 1899-1948 (Pic Acc 1444 vol.2) includes work by Unk White.
From the late 1960s Unk White drew many of the architectural drawings in the Rigby Sketchbook series, e.g. John Bechervaise, Ballarat and Western Goldfields Sketchbook (Adelaide, 1970). He also painted in watercolours. Indeed, Kirkpatrick believes that his Paddington landscapes from the 1960s and his late Spanish watercolours are his 'crowning masterworks’ (p.358). He died in March 1986.
Portraits of Unk White: good self-portrait head from the Artists’ Atomic Ball program 1946 (illus. Lindesay 1994, 26); small younger one (ill. Stone, 9); very good Ted Scorfield cartoon of Unk White and “family” (i.e. wife) as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Bulletin 1 April 1936, 14; 'Unk White Caught in the Act [of drawing a glamour girl] by Ron Broadley’ (large Frank Johnson original, ML Px*D69/no.702) with poem, the second verse of which reads:
“So here’s to Unk’s glamorous pin-up
A joy that has beauty forever
With a figure that’s fine, & her chin up
Who the Hell cares if she’s clever.”
H. A. (Henry) Hanke did a painting of Unk White 'in fencing togs’ (unlocated; it is mentioned in Unk White, 'My rendevous with reminiscence’, Second Laugh Anthology 1940, p 22, and was possibly the portrait exhibited in the 1935 Archibald Prize). Photo at the 1938 Artists’ Ball, Pix 23 April 1938, 34, titled 'Artist Unk White’s famous cow took the Trocadero floor to be slain by his creator, in Panamanian rig, after an hilarious “bull fight”. Unk White recently returned from Central America, has been to Spain.’ Another photograph, Pix 6 May 1939, 21, is captioned: 'Turkish Delight! Unk White, with false nose on chin, wonders whether he will remove his necklet of frankfurts and set up a hot-dog stand. He is a well-known artist.’
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1900
- Summary
- Popular mid 20th century Auckland and Sydney cartoonist, illustrator and painter.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- Mar-86
- Age at death
- 86
Details
Latitude-26.6257326 Longitude152.959953 Start Date1898-01-01 End Date1986-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Nambour, Queensland, Australia
- Biography
- needleworker of Nambour, Qld, exhibited needlework and handicrafts from the 1920s to the 1970s at agricultural shows and Country Women’s Association competitions throughout Australia. In 1980 she donated a collection of her work to the Queensland Museum – 129 pieces of needlework and handicrafts, prize certificates and sashes, her embroidery needles, a needlework encyclopaedia and photocopies of her scrapbook of undated press clippings. A significant figure who achieved a national reputation in her lifetime and won some 10,363 prizes and awards.
This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Kleinschmidt, Kerry
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1898
- Summary
- Needleworker of Nambour, Qld, exhibited needlework and handicrafts from the 1920s to the 1970s at agricultural shows and Country Women's Association competitions throughout Australia. She won some 10,363 prizes and awards.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1986
- Age at death
- 88
Details
Latitude49.8268798 Longitude24.03341884 Start Date1896-01-01 End Date1986-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Lvov, Poland
- Biography
- painter, teacher and lecturer, born Lvov, Poland; came to Australia in 1950. Several nudes were included in Josef Lebovic Collectors’ List 56 (1996).
This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1896
- Summary
- Polish-born painter and lecturer who came to Australia in 1950. Several of his nudes were included in Josef Lebovic Collectors' List 56 (1996).
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1986
- Age at death
- 90
Details
Latitude-42 Longitude173 Start Date1894-01-01 End Date1986-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- New Zealand
- Biography
- painter and illustrator, was born in New Zealand. He served at Gallipoli in WWI and came to Sydney after the war (1920). From 1941 he worked as a newspaper and magazine illustrator and exhibited his paintings in the Archibald, Wynne, Sulman and Blake Prize exhibitions. From 1952 he was a committee member of the Contemporary Art Society.
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1894
- Summary
- Mid 20th century painter and illustrator originally from New Zealand. He came to Sydney in 1920 and from 1941 he worked as a newspaper and magazine illustrator and exhibited his paintings in the Archibald, Wynne, Sulman and Blake Prize exhibitions.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1986
- Age at death
- 92
Details
Latitude47.687609 Longitude17.6346815 Start Date1884-01-01 End Date1986-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Győr, Hungary
- Biography
- Painter, teacher. Although he liked to describe himself as self-taught, Desiderius Orban was very much a part of the Central European modernist tradition that had a significant influence on Australian art in the mid-20th century. His other claim, that of being the Western world’s oldest living artist, was verified by the Guiness Book of Records shortly before his death at the age of 101.He was born with the name Orbán Dezső at Győr, Hungary on 26 November 1884. After graduating in arts at the University of Budapest in 1904, he enrolled in art classes with János Pentelei Molnár.In 1905 he enlisted in compulsory military service. On completing this service he , like many other young artists of his generation, travelled to Paris where he studied at the open classes of the Academie Julian in 1906.On his return to Budapest in 1909 he joined with other young artists to become Keresők (The Seekers), who consciously rejected the popular academic realism that was mainstream taste. In 1911 the group renamed themselves The Eight.It was not possible for a young man to stay an artist in the years leading up to World War I. In 1912 he was called up to serve in the Balkan wars, and these evolved into World War I. His wife, Alice Vajda, was a doctor serving in the army.After the war he returned to painting, and also to teaching. In 1931 he started his own art school, the Atelier, in Budapest. Neither his painting nor his Jewish cultural background found favour with the rising Nazi tide of the 1930s. One of his paintings was exhibited in the 1937 exhibition of Degenerate Art. The attacks on his art meant that he had an earlier wake up call than many of his fellow Jewish citizens, and he left continental Europe for London before the outbreak of war. Subsequently he relocated to Australia and on arriving in Sydney modified his name to be Desiderius Orban. Even though he was no longer young, he enlisted in the Australian army as a private. By the end of the war he had started his own school, and work had been purchased for the Art Gallery of New South Wales. His long Australian career was marked by many solo exhibitions, and some prized. However his greatest impact was not so much in his art as in the impact of his teaching on generations of Australian artists as he helped free their approach to paint and materials and to dare to experiment.
Writers:
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2013
Last updated:
2013
- Born
- b. 26 November 1884
- Summary
- Desiderius Orban came to Australia from Hungary as a refugee from Hitler's European invasion. His intuitive modernist approach was especially reflected in his practice as a most influential teacher. in his later years he became known as the oldest living Australian artist.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 4-Oct-86
- Age at death
- 102
Details
Latitude-23.8530869 Longitude131.8260046 Start Date1930-01-01 End Date1985-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Mereenie, NT, Australia
- Biography
- Born at Mereenie near Haasts Bluff c.1930, Limpi Tjapangati was one of the pioneer painting group at Papunya who developed a distinctive 'striped’ style, which remained constant over a long period of time, and influenced other artists, especially those also working out of Haasts Bluff. Warlpiri artists like Paddy Carroll and Two Bob Tjungurrayi adopted the striped style for a period, and Turkey Tolson also experimented with it. Until his dramatic death in 1985 – he collapsed while addressing a Land Council meeting – Limpi lived with his family at Haasts Bluff. His traditional country Mereenie Bore was the site of a rich find of natural gas. He painted Wild Tomato, Magpie, Bush Onion and Crow Dreamings.
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Note: primary biographer
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1930
- Summary
- One of the pioneer painters of Papunya whose distinct aesthetic ('Haasts Bluff') style influenced the work of his artist colleagues. An Arrente and Luritja speaker, his traditional country was at Mereenie Bore.
- Gender
- Unspecified
- Died
- 1985
- Age at death
- 55
Details
Latitude51.507222 Longitude-0.1275 Start Date1916-01-01 End Date1985-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Gravesend, London, England, UK
- Biography
- Douglas Snelling (1916-85) was born in England and grew up in New Zealand. He taught himself commercial art and window display techniques in the early 1930s, then spent six months in Hollywood (1937-38) as a freelance cartoon illustrator of actors on movie sets. On return to NZ, he became a nationally celebrated Hollywood commentator on radio and in entertainment magazines, then a publicity manager for Warner Bros in Wellington, 1939. In 1940, he toured the Indonesian archipelago by ship, then disembarked in Sydney — where he worked first as a publicist with J. Walter Thompson, then for Otis Waygood and Kriesler, a Newtown electronics factory, where he was involved in designing a new style of surround-sound radio. Near the end of the war, he was commissioned to paint murals and redesign interiors for the Roosevelt restaurant and US Navy Enlisted Mens Club at Potts Point. From the mid 1940s to the mid 1950s, he designed two nationally retailed ranges of furniture called 'the Snelling line’ (chairs and tables) and 'the Snelling module’ (storage), as well as many commercial interiors in the American ‘Googie’ style. In 1947-48, he completed his first building, a factory for Functional Products Pty Ltd, at St Peters, then spent another six months in California, including a few months working for Beverly Hills architects Douglas Honnold and John Lautner and a visit to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West camp in Arizona. On return to Sydney, Snelling continued designing commercial interiors and began private study towards the NSW Board of Architects’ exams. He was registered to practice in 1952 and joined the Royal Australian Institute of Architects in 1953. His oeuvre of more than 70 projects included several of Sydney’s largest houses of the 1950s and 1960s, two apartment blocks, several notable commercial buildings in central and suburban Sydney, two large houses in Noumea and detailed schemes (unbuilt) for 'indigenous modern’ holiday resorts in Fiji and Vanuatu. He retired to Hawaii in 1977, travelled regularly to the US and Europe as a collector-trader of Khmer antiquities and died on a visit back to Sydney in 1985. His one work of architecture after 1975 was 1979 additions to his own house, designed by Honolulu architect Vladimir Ossipoff.Sources—Original Snelling plans lodged with the NSW State Library by Peter MacCallum and Christopher Snelling.—Sydney: State Library of New South Wales, 'Davina Jackson’s research on Douglas Snelling’ MLMSS 8801, including the PhD thesis 'Douglas Burrage Snelling: Adventures in Pan-Pacific Modern Design and Architecture’.—University of Technology, Sydney B.Arch theses on Snelling by Gary Pemberton, Andrew Kovacs and James Trevillion.
Writers:
Davina Jackson
Date written:
2015
Last updated:
2015
- Born
- b. 24 February 1916
- Summary
- Snelling created more than 70 residential and commercial buildings in Sydney and Noumea. He was born in England, moved to New Zealand (1924), practised design and film promotions in Wanganui and Wellington (1935-1940), worked in Los Angeles (1937-38 and 1947-48), became a leading Sydney architect (registered 1952) and designer (1940-1972) and retired to Hawaii (1977).
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 4-Sep-85
- Age at death
- 69
Details
Latitude-37.805278 Longitude145.035833 Start Date1914-01-01 End Date1985-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Kew, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1914
- Summary
- Dean was initially employed in engineering but turned to racing cars producing three Maybach special vehicles. He established the REPCO Research Centre in Victoria where he designed and tested automotive concepts and products. After 1973, he began development work on electrical vehicles as the "Electrodrive" business, an area he had begun to explore as early as 1940 when he produced an electric-powered delivery van.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-85
- Age at death
- 71
Details
Latitude51.0575 Longitude-1.3075 Start Date1912-01-01 End Date1985-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Hampshire, England, UK
- Biography
- poster designer and cartoonist, designed Orient Line Cruises 1937 (NGA).
He contributed to Australia: National Journal and Australia Week-end Book 2 (1943), p.111: 'The art of being rude: Cairo impression’ – Egyptian man poking out his tongue.
This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1912
- Summary
- Beck practised as an industrial designer and graphic artist in the UK and Australia. He designed travel posters for the Orient Line, London Transport, stamps for Australia Post and the 1956 Melbourne Olympics among others. His package design work is illustrated in R. Haughton James, The Arts in Australia series, "Commercial Art", Longmans, 1963.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1985
- Age at death
- 73
Details
Latitude-31.9559 Longitude115.8606 Start Date1910-01-01 End Date1985-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Perth, WA, Australia
- Biography
- painter, printmaker and teacher, born Perth. Came to Sydney and studied with Desiderius Orban c.1948. Married painter James Sharp. Inspired by Japanese woodblock prints, she made her first linocuts and woodcuts in 1956; in 1964 she began to teach at the Willoughby Art Centre. From 1961 she exhibited with the Sydney Printmakers’ Group (of which she was a founding member)and had work included in many international exhibitions. Prizes: Maitland 1969, Berrima (shared) 1974. Most works seem to be abstract and symbolic.
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1910
- Summary
- In 1964 she began to teach at the Willoughby Art Centre and was founding member of the Sydney Printmakers' Group.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1985
- Age at death
- 75
Details
Latitude-33.283333 Longitude149.1 Start Date1909-01-01 End Date1985-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Orange, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1909
- Summary
- Painter and historian based in Sydney
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1985
- Age at death
- 76
Details
Latitude-31.9559 Longitude115.8606 Start Date1908-01-01 End Date1985-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Perth, WA, Australia
- Biography
- painter, photographer, garden designer, theatrical designer and producer, was born in Perth. She came to Sydney with her family in 1924, where she practised photography with her twin sister, Jean. (Jean Ramsay won a prize in a photographic competition conducted by Home in 1931.) The two subsequently became involved with the Turramurra Wall Painters. Together they painted murals from 'top to toe’ on the bedroom walls of their home, Oakwoods, at 17 Water Street, Turramurra, and won a prize for 'Reproduction of existing mural panel’ in a special exhibition held by the Sydney Society of Artists in 1929. Both were pupils of their cousin, Roy de Maistre , and both exhibited with the Contemporary Group in 1932. Several of Gwen’s painting are extant (private collections).
Gwen Ramsay married Tommy Brooke in the mid-1930s and lived in India and England. In India she was very involved with stage production and design for the Mannar Club. In England she was instrumental in persuading Sir John Rothenstein to donate de Maistre’s colour wheels, charts and colour exercises to the Art Gallery of NSW.
Writers:
Johnson, Heather
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1908
- Summary
- Gwen Ramsay, painter, photographer, garden designer, theatrical designer and producer was greatly influenced by her cousin, Roy de Maistre. She travelled extensively and lived in India and England whereby she was involved with stage production and design. Most significantly, she was instrumental in the donation of de Maistre's colour wheels, charts and colour exercises to the Art Gallery of New So
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1985
- Age at death
- 77
Details
Latitude54.31536155 Longitude-1.918023495 Start Date1906-01-01 End Date1985-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Britain
- Biography
- Richard Haughton (Jimmy) James. (1906-1985). Known as “Jimmy” to acquaintances, Jimmy James was a key figure in shaping the practice of Australian industrial and graphic design in the 1940’s. Emigrating from England (born in Sussex) in 1939, he joined the Army Education Corp During the 1939-45 war and taught art appreciation. As a designer, he practised in Sydney and Melbourne from 1939. He became one of the founding members of the Society of Designers for Industry in 1948 in Melbourne and served as President. From the security of a partnership with the Melbourne advertising firm Briggs, Canny, James & Paramour, he wrote and lectured tirelessly on the necessity of Modernism and the importance of the Bauhaus-derived concepts of design. He edited Australian Artist from 1947-48. He retired in 1966 and devoted himself to painting. He played a key role in establishing credibility for the design profession in Australia. He later moved to Melbourne where he worked for advertising agencies and ultimately established his own business in partnership with John Briggs and others. According to an interview with Harold Mitchell, a former employee, in August 2012, James was the first advertising executive to insist of formalising “The Rationale” as the core idea in developing a brand identity and promotional strategy. He is a key figure in the creation of the professional associations of designers in Australia. He wrote and published widely on graphic design, industrial design and art. His son, John James is a architecture teacher, architect and writer.
Writers:
Michael Bogle
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2015
- Born
- b. 1 January 1906
- Summary
- R. Haughton ["Jimmy"] James's first local practice, the Design Centre, Sydney, was with Geoff and Dahl Collings. His first known designs in Sydney were radio cabinets for AWA. During the 1939-45 war, he joined the Army Education Corp and taught art appreciation. He later moved to Melbourne where he worked for advertising agencies and ultimately established his own business Briggs and James (est.1958).
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-85
- Age at death
- 79
Details
Latitude51.507222 Longitude-0.1275 Start Date1906-01-01 End Date1985-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Walthamstow, Essex England, UK, Walthamstow, Essex (Greater London), England, UK
- Biography
- Ernest Sidney Philpot was a painter, signwriter and poster artist. Born in Walthamstow in Essex, he arrived in Western Australia in 1913 with his parents. Schooling was undertaken in Toodyay and Northam. He was apprenticed to a painter, decorator and sign writer in 1921 and started his own business in 1926, moving to Perth in 1929. He studied art part time in the evenings. In 1930 he joined the West Australian Society of Arts and exhibited with them from 1934 to 1953. His exhibits in 1934 were the watercolours Old Comrade and The Blue Bowl. In 1936 he exhibited eight oil paintings including a portrait. In 1937 Philpot won a share in a lottery and moved to Melbourne to study at the National Gallery School under Charles Wheeler and W. B. McInnes. While in Melbourne he exhibited an oil painting The Garden Path with the Victorian Artists Society. During WWII he enlisted in the Survey Corps. After the war he exhibited with the Western Australian Society of Arts in 1949. He was a member of the Perth Society of Artists and President exhibiting with them from 1946. His 1950 exhibit was an oil painting titled Ballet Fantastique. In 1953 he had four paintings hung. In 1948 he won the Hotchin Prize and in 1952 the Inaugural Perth Prize for Landscape at the Art Gallery of Western Australia. He was commissioned to undertake murals at various hospitals. In 1957 he became Art Master at Wesley College following Wim Boissevain. He taught until 1968 and was art critic for the Sunday Times between 1961-1965. In 1959 he exhibited in London with five others and in 1960 he held a solo show in London.
Writers:
Dr Dorothy Erickson
Date written:
2010
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1906
- Summary
- Painter, signwriter, poster artist and muralist who exhibited internationally and had a long association with art societies in Victoria and Western Australia.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1985
- Age at death
- 79
Details
Latitude-28.2163204 Longitude152.0327039 Start Date1906-01-01 End Date1985-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Warwick, Qld, Australia
- Biography
- Gladys Emilie Fell was born in Warwick on 17 July 1906, the daughter of a nurseryman, John Barlow Fell and his wife Emilie Katrine Edvardine née Sundstrup. Her sister Elsie Maud (1904-89) and she were encouraged in their artistic pursuits by their parents. They were among the first students of the pottery classes at the Warwick Technical College and High School, which were instituted by Charles Astley in 1920.
Fell’s work is a typical of the product of Astley’s pottery school as it is press moulded – the students added the carved decorative details. The restricted colour range is typical too; mulberry, brown, red and green. The use of three colours in the glazing of the poppy vase in the Queensland Art Gallery Collection is highly unusual as all other items from the school identified to date have a single-colour glaze. Low, very shallow float bowls are extremely typical of the school.
Her work was included in a display the Warwick Technical College contributed to the Royal National Agricultural and Industrial Association Exhibition, Brisbane in 1923 before it was forwarded to London for inclusion in the Technical College Section of the British Empire Exhibition, Wembley Stadium, London in 1924.
Fell taught art to primary school students. She married Albert Reginald Palmer on 1 January 1955 and died in Brisbane on 18 June 1985.
Queensland Art Gallery: Research Curator, Queensland Heritage
Writers:
Cooke, Glenn R.
Note: Research Curator, Queensland Heritage, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane
Date written:
2003
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 17 July 1906
- Summary
- The pottery of Gladys Fell is representative of the experimental work produced under Charles Astley's tutelage at the Warwick Technical College and High School in the early 1920s.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 18-Jun-85
- Age at death
- 79
Details
Latitude-31.9559 Longitude115.8606 Start Date1906-01-01 End Date1985-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Perth, WA, Australia
- Biography
- painter, cartoonist, commercial artist and singer, was born in Perth, eldest of six children. His father, an ardent supported of the Labor Party, worked for most of his life as a wood engraver; his mother loved music, and his uncle was Alexander McClintock (1869-1922), a part-time painter associated with the Heidelberg School. In 1912 the family moved to Adelaide, then to Heidelberg, outside Melbourne. Herbert began his career as an apprentice process engraver and sign writer. His commercial art included doing the process engraving for The Art of Harold Herbert . He later worked as a signwriter, then got a job where a condition of employment was to study at the Melbourne NGV School. He studied painting under Bernard Hall and William McInnes (1925-27, acc. McCulloch). Fellow students were George Bell , Eric Thake and James Flett . The four met together in the bohemian Fasoli’s Cafe in King Street on Friday nights, with Roy Dalgarno , Judah Waten, Dominic Leon , Bill Dolphin etc.
McClintock left Melbourne in 1927 and found a job as a commercial artist on the Sydney Morning Herald . He joined a Neitschean group of social protest artists in Sydney (including Ray and Phil Lindsay and George Finey ) before returning to Melbourne late in 1929 to re-enrol at the National Gallery School and revive old friendships, especially at the Swanston Family Hotel where he met Noel Counihan and Nutter Buzacott. He also joined the Communist Party. In July 1930 he first exhibited his art in a show of work by young bohemian gallery students including Flett and Thake called The Embryos , held at Melbourne’s Little Gallery. His painting called Me was reproduced in the Illustrated Tasmanian Mail .
In October 1930 McClintock was art editor of Strife (with Judah Waten as literary editor), a magazine advocating immediate revolution and the violent overthrow of moribund institutions, including art galleries. The magazine’s artists were Counihan, Flett and Buzacott; the writers, Bernard Burns, Brian Fitzpatrick and Colin Wills as well as Waten; financial assistance was provided by Pat Stanley. Published in support of unemployment relief, it consisted of one number only – and police seized most of the copies as they were handed out. McClintock and Waten were given a day to leave Melbourne and when they didn’t go were arrested for vagrancy. (The charges were later dropped.) 'Mac’ finally left Melbourne in 1931. After two years wandering the country looking for work, he ended up back in Sydney. There he met Pat, who was working in a legal office. They married in Brisbane on 8 September 1933, then moved to Perth (later they divorced). While he worked in advertising at the Daily News Pat organised exhibitions for him and his friends. His painting flourished in Perth, changing from constructivism to surrealism. He used the pseudonym 'Max Ebert’ for these paintings because he already had a promising career as a singer as 'McClintock’. His paintings became notorious in the late 1930s when surrealism was the subject of heated debate – which 'Ebert’ loved.
After holding his first solo show in 1939, McClintock returned to Melbourne in 1940 with the writer John Hepworth. He stayed at Warrandyte with his sister Winnie and his new brother-in-law Buzacott, met Vassilieff, helped with the CAS then returned to Sydney, presumably via Perth. (His oil painting Strange Oversight signed 'Max Ebert’ 1940, p.c., reproduced in Merewether, was exhibited at Newspaper House, Perth in July 1940.) He showed surrealist work at Sydney’s Macquarie Galleries in September 1940. The show was opened by George Finey and a feature article on it, 'Dreams Inspire Australia’s Art’, appeared in Pix on 28 September 1940, 7.
During WWII McClintock was rejected for active service on medical grounds and conscripted into an iron foundry. Later he was moved to camouflage. In July 1943 he began work with the Allied Works Council and Civil Construction Corps, painting images of labour beside William Dobell. He used a new, far more social-realist style and his own name. A 1944 series of paintings of labouring men used rhythmic repetitions suggestive of musical harmonies. He also painted images of the suburban street and the monotonous domestic life of the cities, eg Street Scene 1944, oil on board exhibited SORA July 1947, now AGNSW (repro. B. Smith, Place, Taste and Tradition and in Merewether). A founding member of SORA (1945-50), he gave art lessons to members; Len Fox was among his oil painting students in the late 1940s (Fox, 133).
Throughout the 1930s and ’40s McClintock was a prolific cartoonist for trade union and communist publications, including the Maritime Worker , The Boilermaker and Building Workers . He held his second solo exhibition in 1947, by which time he had moved out of the city and was living at Freeman’s Reach, later at Kurrajong. He continued to contribute cartoons to trade union papers and especially to the Communist Party’s Tribune , for which he drew a weekly cartoon in the late 1940s-50s, eg “Quick, wire Mr Menzies and have that man declared!” Tribune 1950 (man painting a post box red, ill. King, 162, & attributed to 'McLintock’ [sic]; also p.166). Len Fox notes (p.133):
he used to come in to Tribune office every week to get instructions for next week’s cartoon. I felt sorry for Mac; it seemed to me that every week we gave him dull instructions that could only lead to a dull, stereotyped cartoon, and yet we expected him by some miracle to produce something new and startling. But he never complained; he always turned up with a well-executed drawing – the best that he could create.
Crib Time 1970 (used on the cover of Len Fox’s 1996 book) was first published in Common Cause [of the Coalminers] , where he did regular illustrations from at least 1949 (when Graeme Byrne has identified a cartoon). Len Fox got to know him there from 1958, when Fox joined the paper. Edgar Ross and Fox got to know him well since he regularly dropped in to discuss possibilities for the next week’s cartoon once more.
Sometimes, instead of asking Mac to draw a narrowly political cartoon, we would ask him to do a drawing to illustrate a scene in Australian history, Australia’s first May Day procession in 1891 at Barcaldine in Queensland, for instance, when more than 600 of the shearers and other workers in the procession were on horseback, or the NSW South Coast miners and their womenfolk stopping a train-load of strikebreakers headed for the Mount Kembla mine back in 1887. Mac put a lot of work into these; some of them, I am sure, will live as part of the record of Australian working class history. (As I write this, his 1891 May Day drawing is being exhibited at the “Artists and Rebels on the Waterfront” exhibition at Sydney’s Tom Nelson Hall; it is also included, with other McClintock drawings, in the booklet May Day – 100 Years of Struggle published in 1986 by the Sydney May Day Committee. One of his drawings in this booklet is a call for peace in Vietnam in 1968; McClintock’s drawings and cartoons were an important part of the campaign to end the Vietnam war.) (Fox, 135)
For some years 'Mac’ produced banners for May Day marches as well as continuing to paint landscapes. After a trip to the NT, Aboriginal subjects dominated his late work. He did illustrations for Overland , e.g. Burning the Licences, 1854 , cover of Eureka Centenary Issue no.2 (Summer 1954-55). In 1960 he was one of four Australian artists whose work was shown in the USSR (Fox). Late in life he returned to singing, now in duets with his second wife, Marie, a singer with the Australian Opera Company. He also wrote on music and art for Tribune .
'In mid-1976 he spent two months with his son and daughter-in-law Malcolm and Vivienne who were working at the Amata settlement among the Pitjintjara Aboriginals. He did much drawing and painting there’ (Fox 134), e.g. Old Man and His Dog, Amata . A large retrospective of McClintock’s art was held at 27 Niagara Lane Galleries, Melbourne, in September 1980 (see review by Andrew McKay, Australian 16 September 1980).
There are two original McClintock cartoons in the SLNSW ML Bulletin collection, one of 1936 and another of 1930 showing two unemployed men in the Botanic Gardens, captioned If he were king! '“If you was Mussolini, Bert, what’s the first thing you’d do?”/ “Up’olster the blanky park seats”’ (ML PX*D488/128). His more schematic, propagandist cartoon of the unemployed in the Botanic Gardens in Strife became better known (although artistically inferior), being reproduced in left-wing publications both in Australia and abroad, according to Merewether (I think). He also did a good cartoon of the censor banning a film about peace, published in the Guardian (Melbourne) on 21 February 1952 (ill. Senyard, 83).
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1906
- Summary
- Mid 20th century political and surrealist painter, cartoonist, commercial artist and singer.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- c.1985
- Age at death
- 79
Details
Latitude-31.9559 Longitude115.8606 Start Date1905-01-01 End Date1985-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Perth, WA, Australia
- Biography
- Wildflower painter and embroiderer, Violet Easton was born in Perth. Her father was a postmaster and she lived as a child and young adult in Roebourne, Perth, Ora Banda, Gwalia and Coolgardie. In 1948 she painted a jarrah screen with a bouquet of wildflowers. This was a wedding present to her brother and remains in the family. In 1950 she became the second wife of her childhood sweetheart, whom she had first met when the family lived in Gwalia during World War I. He worked on the railways and they lived in Ravensthorpe, Hopetown and other country places. During this time she filled notebooks with paintings of wildflowers, pressed specimens and notes on their habits and habitat. She designed and embroidered table linen. Her husband left her in 1960 and she lived in a cottage in Bullsbrook. She was partially supported by her family and earned a meager living painting on wooden artifacts such as bowls for Boans department store and also engaged in china painting. In 1962 for the Empire and Commonwealth Games she mounted a display of her work in an Aherns Department Store window. Her family hold a number of pieces of her work. These range from oil and watercolour paintings of wildflowers, china painting featuring Geraldton Wax and gum blossom, embroidery and the fire screen.
Writers:
Dr Dorothy Erickson
Date written:
2010
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1905
- Summary
- Wildflower painter and embroiderer. The family hold a number of pieces of her work and these range from oil and watercolour paintings of wildflowers, china painting featuring Geraldton Wax and gum blossom, embroidery and the firescreen.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- c.1985
- Age at death
- 80
Details
Latitude51.507222 Longitude-0.1275 Start Date1903-01-01 End Date1985-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- London, England, UK
- Biography
- George Alexander Needham (1903-1985). Also known as George Robb (pseudonym).
George Alexander Needham was born in London, England, on 3 May 1903. He emigrated to Australia in 1915. At the age of twenty-one he married Ada Mary Needham, and had two children, Mary and John Christopher (d. 1976). There was a divorce and George brought the children to Sydney, New South Wales. They lived with him during their schooling, and later returned to their mother.
In 1946 Needham married Elmer Noeline Roberts (b.1922) in Sydney. They had one daughter, Penelope. They lived in East Roseville (a Sydney suburb, later named Roseville Chase). Needham died in Sydney on 29 January 1985, aged eighty-one.
Needham studied at the Prahran Technical College in Melbourne, Victoria, and got a job at the Art Department of Union Theatres in Melbourne. In 1923 he was Head Artist for Victory Publicity. In the late 1920s, he created the comic 'The Dwight Family’ for the magazine Table Talk Magazine (Melbourne). In the 1930s he drew cartoons for the first Melbourne Age newspaper.
In the 1930s Needham also made illustrations and paintings, which were exhibited in a one-man show at Margaret McLean’s Gallery in Melbourne in 1938. That same year he moved to Sydney. During World War II, he made propaganda art. After the War, he created the black-and-white comic series 'The Bosun and Choclit’ using the pseudonym George Robb. This comic series ran until the late 1950s.
Writers:
Rost, Fred
Date written:
2009
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 3 May 1903
- Summary
- Graphic artist, best known for comic strips, particularly The Bosun and Choclit'.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 29-Jan-85
- Age at death
- 82
Details
Latitude49.9112146 Longitude19.007564 Start Date1902-01-01 End Date1985-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Dzieditz, Poland
- Biography
- professional photographer, was born on 6 April 1902 in Dzieditz, Poland. She studied at the Graphische Lehr und Versuchsanstalt (Institute of Graphic Arts and Research) in Vienna in 1917-21 and began her photographic career working in various Viennese studios, initially as a retoucher and later as a photographer. She lived in Prague in 1928 and the following year moved to Berlin with Rudolph Michaelis, whom she married in 1933.
Following Hitler’s rise to power and their brief imprisonment as a result of separate incidents, the couple moved to Barcelona in late 1933. There Margaret opened a studio 'foto-elis’ on the Avenue Republica Argentina. She worked closely with a group of progressive architects associated with Jose Luis Sert and produced the photographic documentation for a proposed redevelopment of a slum area in Barcelona.
In November 1937 Rudolph and Margaret Michaelis divorced. She left Barcelona, travelling first to France and then to Bielsko, Poland, to see her parents. On this visit she visited Cracow and took a group of photographs in the Jewish ghetto (NGA). In December 1938 Margaret was granted a visa to take up employment in the UK. She worked briefly in domestic service in London before being granted a visa to enter Australia. She arrived at Sydney on 2 September 1939 and in 1940 opened her 'Photo-studio’ on the seventh floor of 11 Castlereagh Street, where she specialised in portraiture and dance photography (principally of the Bodenwieser company).
Michaelis joined the Professional Photographers Associations of NSW and Australia in 1941 and was the only female member of the Institute of Photographic Illustrators. Failing eyesight forced the closure of the studio in 1952, and she subsequently found employment as a typist with Richard Hauser and Hephzibah Menuhin, then involved in social research. In 1960 she married Albert George Sachs and moved to Melbourne. She assisted her husband in his framing business until his death five years later.
During the late 1960s and ’70s Margaret Sachs travelled extensively in Europe and Asia. She continued her involvement in the arts, studying painting with Erica McGilchrist and contributing a drawing to the Women’s Art Forum Annual in 1978. Her photographs were included in the 1981-82 touring exhibition, 'Australian Women Photographers 1840-1950’, organised by Barbara Hall and Jenni Mather, and in their book of the same title published in 1986.
After her death in 1985 the photographic archive of Margaret Michaelis-Sachs was donated to the National Gallery of Australia. A selection was presented in a solo exhibition held at the Jewish Museum of Australia in 1987. Michaelis’s Spanish photographs were exhibited in Margaret Michaelis, Fotografia, Vanguardia y Politica en la Barcelona de la Republica held at the IVAM Centre Julio Gonzalez in Valencia, Spain in 1998 and subsequently shown in Barcelona.
Writers:
Ennis, Helen
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 6 April 1902
- Summary
- professional photographer who also dabbled in painting and drawing later in her career, migrated to Australia from Europe, specialised in documentary photographs, portraiture and dance photography.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1985
- Age at death
- 83
Details
Latitude-37.7867587 Longitude144.9193668 Start Date1901-01-01 End Date1985-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Flemington, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- painter, commercial artist and art teacher, was born in Flemington, Victoria, second eldest of the eleven children of Richard Wilson, co-founder of Wilson Brothers Engineering in North Melbourne. After leaving Essendon High School in 1924, she studied art at Melbourne Technical College (1925-26) then worked with the Griffin Shave Advertising Service (now George Patterson Pty Ltd) before going to London in 1928. There she studied drawing and lithography at the Central School of Arts and Crafts and worked at Brockhurst Studios as a commercial artist. She returned to Melbourne in 1929 but was back at London in 1931 where she worked for Levers (Lintas) Pty Ltd and studied drawing, painting, lithography and etching at the Central School (1931-32) and painting and drawing at St Martin’s (1933-35). She exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1935 and 1936 and at the Royal Academy in 1936.
The designer and film maker, Geoffrey Collings (widower of Dahl Collings ), remembers that Nell was much sought after as a commercial artist in London, reputedly able to command 100 guineas a drawing. She worked through advertising agencies, lived at Earls Court with another Australian commercial artist, Lyndon Miller, and took painting holidays in Spain. She returned to Sydney in 1937 by the overland route. In the mid-1930s Nell was married for a short period to the artist and cartoonist Strom Gould . She lived at Elizabeth Bay, Sydney.
During the late 1930s-40s she was among Australia’s most sought-after commercial illustrators, one of the few professional women to travel regularly by aeroplane to clients and agencies in Melbourne and Sydney. These included Levers (Lintas), J. Walter Thompson, George Patterson, Paton Advertising Service and the Commonwealth Advertising Division. She produced advertisements for Trans Australian Airlines, Cadbury Chocolates, Pelaco, Lux, Shell, British Nylon Spinners, Government War Bonds and Mazda electric globes.
During the war, Nell was retained by the Commonwealth Government to work on national campaigns for recruiting, war loans and rationing. In 1947-49 she did the artwork for the campaign opposing the nationalisation of Australian banks. She was sponsored to study in 1951-52 at the Art Students League in New York, where she also worked for J. Walter Thompson—for the Canadian firm in 1952. Then she moved to London (1952-55) and back to Sydney (1955-56) where she won the Australian Commercial and Industrial Artists Association bronze medal in 1956. In 1955 she was the first Australian to be admitted to the New York Society of Illustrators and in 1957 became a foundation fellow of the ACIAA.
Nell’s advertising style was very emotive and is characterised by naturalistically rendered, almost photographic portraits, usually of women or children. Many of her advertisements appeared in the Australian Women’s Weekly in the 1940s. She also painted a mural on the wall of the home of Sir Harold White and her sister Elizabeth in Mugga Way, Canberra. In the mid 1960s she put her age back to about sixty to obtain a teaching position at East Sydney Technical College. She also taught art at a private school in Sydney. Just before she died, she moved to Melbourne. Some of her artwork survives with family members; that for Prestige Ltd advertisements is held by the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences.
Writers:
Ven, Anne-Marie Van De
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1901
- Summary
- Nell Wilson was a painter, commercial artist and art teacher. She was one of the Australia's most sought-after commercial illustrators in the late 1930s-40s. Wilson made advertisements for Trans Australian Airlines, Cadbury Chocolates and Shell, amongst others.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1985
- Age at death
- 84
Details
Latitude46.9570611 Longitude8.3661026 Start Date1897-01-01 End Date1985-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Stans, Switzerland
- Biography
- Swiss-born artist and designer, who was responsible for (or contributed to) the interior design of the Hydro Majestic, Medlow Bath; Civic Theatre, Auckland; Anzac Memorial, Sydney; Paragon Cafe, Katoomba; Luna Park, Sydney, and many other Art Deco buildings in Australia and New Zealand.
'Modern in the extreme, without the slightest suggestion of the bizarre, is the keynote of the design [of the (Parramatta) Civic Theatre] which has been carried out by Arnold Zimmerman’, _Cumberland Advocate _[Parramatta], 18 May 1938.
Writers:
Eric Riddler
Date written:
2014
Last updated:
2014
- Born
- b. 1897
- Summary
- Swiss-born artist and designer, who was responsible for (or contributed to) the interior design of the Hydro Majestic, Medlow Bath; Civic Theatre, Auckland; Anzac Memorial, Sydney; Paragon Cafe, Katoomba; Luna Park, Sydney, and many other Art Deco buildings in Australia and New Zealand.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1985
- Age at death
- 88
Details
Latitude-29.6694129 Longitude152.9571882 Start Date1894-01-01 End Date1985-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Clarence River, Grafton, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Bird painter in watercolours, was the eldest of the five children of Thomas Robert O’Grady of 'Tristania’ on the Clarence River and his wife Villette, a school-teacher and amateur painter who was the only child of Thomas Flintoff (the son of the colonial painter and photographer Thomas Flintoff and his first wife) and Harriet Hearn, Flintoff senior’s retoucher and tinter, who settled at Grafton. Gladys painted watercolours of birds.
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Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1894
- Summary
- Watercolour painter of birds, descendant of the artistic 'Thomas Flintoff' family from Grafton, NSW.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1985
- Age at death
- 91
Details
Latitude-36.0538594 Longitude146.4601363 Start Date1891-01-01 End Date1985-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Rutherglen, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- embroiderer, was born of English parents, Frederick William Field and Hannah ('Annie’) née Cutler, at Rutherglen, Victoria, and grew up an only child in rural Australia. Her life work was embroidery, and when she died in 1985 she left behind her a legacy of excellence and an enormous body of work which ranged from exquisite lacy Richelieu mats and Hedebo tablecloths to Elizabethan blackwork cushion covers and tiny flower trimmed felt rabbits. She began to sew as a rather solitary small child who preferred making dolls clothes to playing games with friends. She was educated at convent schools in Rutherglen and Temora (NSW), where she studied both books and piano with characteristic dedication.
What might have been disaster struck when Roma was 17 and she became ill. Confined to bed off and on for the next 15 years of her life, with periods in hospital and sanatorium, Roma turned her undivided attention and very strong will to the serious study and practice of embroidery. Gathering to her what little scattered information she could find about the topic, and depending to a large extent on mail ordering for periodicals, patterns and instructions, as well as for materials and threads which were unavailable in Australia in the early part of the twentieth century, she experimented and persevered with different stitches and materials, slowly obtaining command of a range of traditional European embroidery skills. While her work is in itself of quite extraordinarily fine quality, the number of techniques at which she excelled is equally exceptional.
Roma began to enter competitions during this period of her life. She was very often successful and found the prize money a boon as it enabled her to plunder the mail order catalogues anew for different materials and threads with which to work and experiment. Ultimately, she exhibited widely in Australia, as well as in London, Denmark and Holland. Her most notable overseas success was probably the exhibition held in the 1920s by the Old Bleach Linen Company of Randaltown in Ireland at which, among a wide international field, Roma won second and fourth prizes with her two entries. The piece which won second prize (a medal, a silver cup, a goodly sum of money and a precious parcel of linens) was a Hedebo table cloth.
Roma Field’s dedicated focus on embroidery gave her long life purpose and direction and attracted a wide range of friends with similar interests. She met many through the societies she joined: the Arts and Crafts Society of NSW, the Industrial Arts Society, and the Country Women’s Association for which she helped found a Handicrafts Committee. She travelled for the CWA committee throughout New South Wales in the 1930s and 1940s, teaching the wide range of handcraft skills at her disposal. They included glove and toy making, cane seating and leather work as well as needlework and embroidery.
When she met Margaret Oppen, founder of the Embroiderers Guild of NSW in 1957, Roma Field was invited to join the new committee and to teach. Her long-term involvement with the Guild was thus under way, leading her from committee member to life member, trustee and president. She continued to teach, always in a voluntary capacity, until shortly before she died, and she frequently served as a judge at country shows, as well as twenty nine times for the Royal Easter Show in Sydney between 1940 and 1978. In June 1981, she was awarded the Order of Australia Medal for service to the community.
Writers:
Sumner, Christina
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1891
- Summary
- An accomplished self-taught embroiderer, Field experimented with different stitches and materials and also mastered traditional European embroidery skills. A lifelong member of the Embroiderers Guild of New South Wales, Field was awarded the Order of Australia Medal in 1981 for services to the community.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1985
- Age at death
- 94
Details
Latitude-33.25604115 Longitude139.0634707 Start Date1887-01-01 End Date1985-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Wonna, South Australia, Australia
- Biography
- lacemakers and needlewomen, were all native South Australians eminent in their art. Jessie Rebecca Cowley was born on 2 March 1862 at Reynella, south of Adelaide. As a young girl she was accomplished at the keyboard and had a talent for design and a seemingly natural skill with a needle, being particularly noted for her fine embroidery and needlepoint lace. In the nineteenth century, these were considered desirable accomplishments for young women of marriageable age.
In 1885, in her twenty-third year, Jessie Rebecca married Frederick I’Anson, a farmer ten years her senior. They first farmed at Wonna, district of Burra, in the mid-north, then moved south to Kadina where Frederick farmed with his wife’s father, Thomas Cowley. Frederick and Jessie had three children: Rebecca Maria, born at Wonna on 28 October 1887; Jessie Cowley, born 13 May 1889 at Wonna, and Thomas Leonard, born in 1891. Jessie taught her two daughters needlework and lacemaking from a very early age: they received their first instruction at the tender ages of three and four. The girls were first taught to work needlepoint lace borders on muslin handkerchiefs, then progressed through the full range of whitework embroidery, needlework and needlepoint lace.
Needlework skills were often taught to girls in the hope that they could be advantageously used in unexpectedly straitened circumstances but few ever had to test the rationality of this notion. The I’Anson women, however, were among the few to test the principle, when in 1898 Frederick I’Anson’s over-strained heart caused his death at the age of forty-five. Their only son died a few months later, aged seven. The thirty-six year old widow was considered 'frail in health’, but her needlework talents and the skills she had imparted to her daughters were put to practical use, providing a means of financial support for herself and her two young daughters, then aged nine and eleven.
The diminished family continued to live in Kadina, Mrs I’Anson giving Saturday afternoon needlework classes, charging pupils two shillings a lesson, and mother and daughters making and selling fine needlework. In about 1920 they moved to a small row cottage in North Adelaide, where they remained for decades, continuing to support themselves by giving classes in needlework and from commissions for and sales of needlework items ranging from d’oyleys and handkerchiefs to tablecloths and bedspreads.
Mrs I’Anson continued to execute fine needlework; even in her eighty-eighth year, when confined to bed, she still managed to use her needle to make gifts for friends. She died in 1958, aged ninety-six. Her daughters continued teaching and producing commissioned needlework and special pieces for sale. Their lives had been dedicated to their mother and to the craft at which she excelled, one which had provided a means of support for them for most of their lives.
The discipline and patience required for fine needlework had been instilled in them from early childhood. Later in life they saw these as 'a form of character building which could help equip a girl for life’. In their terms this meant supporting themselves by dedication to fine, traditional whitework in an era when most young women saw needlework as a leisure pursuit. Jessie Cowley died in 1976, aged eighty-seven; Rebecca Maria in 1985, aged ninety-seven.
Writers:
Heaven, Judith
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 28 October 1887
- Summary
- Daughter of Jessie Rebecca Cowley, was taught needlework and lacemaking from a very young age. Along with her mother and sister, helped support the family after the death of her father by teaching and selling work.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1985
- Age at death
- 98
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1887-01-01 End Date1985-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- Stella Marks was a painter of portraits and is chiefly known as a portrait miniaturist. She studied at the Melbourne National Gallery School of Art under Bernard Hall and Frederick McCubbin. There she met fellow student, Montagu Marks, whom she married in London in 1911. She exhibited with the West Australian Society of Arts in 1913 and the Atheneum Hall Melbourne in 1914. She lived in New York from 1914 until 1934, when she moved to the UK. In 1916 she was commissioned by the Governor General of Canada to paint a portrait miniature of his daughter HRH The Princess Patricia of Connaught. Over 30,000 copies were sold to raise money for the Canadian Red Cross.
Stella was member of the Royal Miniature Society (as it was then known) and the American Society of Miniature Painters. In 1934 she was invited to become President of the latter, but had to decline owning to her move to the UK. In 1925 and 1926 Stella visited Australia, at which time her portrait miniature of Maud Allen was purchased by the National Gallery of Melbourne (Felton Bequest). In 1931, 1936 and 1937 Stella’s works were exhibited at the Royal Academy, London. In 1937 and 1938 Stella made another visit to Australia and a second portrait miniature, of Mr Justice McKenna, was purchased by the the National Gallery of Melbourne (Felton Bequest).
In 1948 Stella was commissioned by HRH Prince Philip to paint a miniature portrait of HRH The Princess Elizabeth, the future Queen. There followed commissions of all member of the Royal family. In 1979 H.M. Queen Elizabeth II awarded Stella the Honour, Member of the Victorian Order.
Writers:
Dr Dorothy Erickson
antandart
Date written:
2010
Last updated:
2015
- Born
- b. 27 November 1887
- Summary
- Stella Marks, portrait miniaturist. Born Melbourne 1887; studied at the Melbourne National Gallery School; exhibited 1913 with the West Australian Society of Arts. Lived in New York 1914 to 1934. The National Gallery of Melbourne purchased 'Maud Allen' and 'Mr Justice McKenna'. Following numerous commissions from the Royal Family was awarded the MVO in 1979.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 18-Nov-85
- Age at death
- 98
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1962-01-01 End Date1984-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Cartoonist, was born in Sydney. Wanting initially to be a vet, he attended Hurlstone Agricultural College but developed an interest in being a cartoonist after publishing gags in the school newspaper. After completing his School Certificate and having some cartoons published in the National Review , he was employed as a cadet artist with the Sydney Fairfax group and was a graded artist within three years, Aged 18 he became editorial cartoonist with the Sydney Sun . He claimed his major influences varied from the American Mad magazine cartoonists to contemporary editorial cartoonists (eg. Paul Rigby ) and even Walt Disney and Warner brothers. He hid a Gladstone bag in every cartoon and often featured a ginger striped cat and a budgerigar that commented on the news. His first book, Pracy: Draw Your Own Conclusion… , an anthology of his Sun cartoons, includes a self-portrait (inside back cover). A second collection, Hawke, Line and Sinker , was endorsed both by Neville Wran and Nick Greiner.
Pracy died suddenly at work on 19 September 1984, aged 22. He had not long returned to Sydney after some weeks in the US on a travelling art scholarship. His last Sun cartoon, drawn on 19 September 1984 and published the following day, was a comment on Peacock being banned from a TV show. It shows a couple in front of a television set watching a program featuring Bob Hawke, with the wife saying: “… Personally, I think it’d be a good idea if ALL Pollies were banned from ALL T.V. shows” [caption in caps].
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1962
- Summary
- Late 20th century Sydney newspaper cartoonist. Pracy began as a cadet artist with the Sydney Fairfax Group before becoming an editorial cartoonist at the age of 18. He published two anthologies of cartoons before his sudden and premature death at the age of 22.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 19-Sep-84
- Age at death
- 22
Details
Latitude47.4925 Longitude19.051389 Start Date1932-01-01 End Date1984-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Budapest, Hungary
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1932
- Summary
- Joseph Szabo was part of a new generation of European artists who helped transform Australia's cultural life in the decades after World War II.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1984
- Age at death
- 52
Details
Latitude-22.5216511 Longitude132.7344955 Start Date1930-01-01 End Date1984-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Napperby Creek, NT, Australia
- Biography
- Born in Napperby Creek, probably in the ’30s, he grew up around Napperby station, on his traditional Anmatyerre country. Like his younger 'brother’ Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri , he had such skill at wood carving that his name was already known in Central Australia as a brilliant craftsman before the painting movement began in Papunya. From Narwietooma station, where he had worked as a stockman, he moved to Papunya with his wife Daisy Leura , and their young family when the construction program for the new settlement began. When painting started up, he presented himself to Geoff Bardon and asked to paint. The two men became friends, and from this position Tim Leura played a leading role in the emerging painting enterprise, including his enlistment of his 'brother’ Clifford to the group of artists. Geoff Bardon’s 1991 book, Papunya Tula: Art of the Western Desert , contains a detailed map drawn by the artist showing his Dreaming area and the sites of the Possum, Yam, Fire, Blue Tongue Lizard, Sun, Moon and Morning Star and other Dreamings which were the subject of his paintings. His 27’ (8.2 m) Napperby Death Spirit (Possum) Dreaming (painted in 1980 with assistance from Clifford Possum ) was the centrepiece of the Dreamings: Art of Aboriginal Australia exhibition which toured the USA in 1988-9, and is increasingly cited as one of the greatest paintings of the movement. The painting of Warlugulong , 1976 (Art Gallery of NSW) with his brother Clifford is documented in the BBC documentary Desert Dreamers of that year. He died in 1984 after a long illness.
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Note: primary biographer
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1930
- Summary
- Anmatyerre artist who was renowned for his wood carving skill before beginning to paint in Papunya at the beginning of the 1970s. As a close friend of Geoffrey Bardon, he was a key figure in the beginnings of the painting movement at Papunya and one of Papunya Tula's leading artists over the company's first decade.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1984
- Age at death
- 54
Details
Latitude-31.9559 Longitude115.8606 Start Date1916-01-01 End Date1984-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Perth, WA, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 14 July 1916
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- c.1984
- Age at death
- 68
Details
Latitude-35.5302183 Longitude144.9597178 Start Date1913-01-01 End Date1984-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Deniliquin, New South Wales, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1913
- Summary
- Hazel de Berg trained as a photographer at Paramount Studios, Sydney, later working in the studio of Noel Rubie Pty Ltd., illustrative photography, Sydney. She took up voice recording in the 1950s becoming a notable 'oral historian' undertaking over 1200 voice recordings for the National Library of Australia.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1-Jan-84
- Age at death
- 71
Details
Latitude48.2 Longitude16.366667 Start Date1908-01-01 End Date1984-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Vienna, Austria
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 July 1908
- Summary
- In 1939 Karl and Gertrude Langer came to Australia as refugees from Vienna. Her subsequent career as both a critic for the Courier-Mail, a collector, a purchaser for the Queensland Art Gallery and as a mentorled to her becoming a major force in art in Queensland
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 19-Dec-84
- Age at death
- 76
Details
Latitude-33.829075 Longitude151.24409 Start Date1908-01-01 End Date1984-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Mosman, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1908
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1984
- Age at death
- 76
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1908-01-01 End Date1984-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Painter, illustrator and cartoonist, studied with Dattilo Rubbo in evening and weekend classes at Sydney’s Royal Art Society from the late 1920s, while working as a commercial artist and cartoonist during the day. By 1930 he was regularly drawing cartoons for the Bulletin , earning two guineas for every one published. A large collection of original cartoons by Johnston, mostly done for the early 1930s Bulletin , is in the Mitchell Library [ML] (possibly also works signed 'Harry Johnston’). Examples include an undated cartoon of two young men in front of a line of chorus girls: '“I saw Mae out with John last night. Thought she’d thrown him over.”/ “She did; but you know how a girl throws”’ (ill. Rolfe, 281); undated waiter and diner joke (ill. Rolfe, 289).
Large Bulletin originals in ML signed 'Johnston’ with the first 'n’ crossed and initial letter mixture of 'G’ (or 'H’?) – which seems to be George’s signature – include an orchestra and flimsily clad singer joke: '“She seems to have a break in her enunciation tonight, Mr. Leader”/ “Say, you keep your eye on your music”’ (Px*D37/32), published 25 October 1933; *salesman asking man if he wants stockings for wife or 'something better’ (Px*D437/23), published 20 December 1933; 'Manager: “Are you never fired with enthusiasm my boy?”/ Boy: “Oh yes – sir every job I get”’ c.1933 (PXD 437/26: included in 1999 State Library of New South Wales [SLNSW] black and white exhibition under 'workers’, cat. 201); librarian and fat man image with joke missing (at least in photocopy, Px*D437/50) published 14 March 1934; two men in dinner suits in a library (joke missing in photocopy, Px*D437/40) published 26 December 1934; *couple in bed with woman asking if 'sport’ likes milk in his tea (Px*D437/25) published 9 Jan (or June) 1935 (included in 'Sex’ in SLNSW exhibition); and '“The press would like to have your lordship’s views on this country.”/ “Certainly boys, certainly. Which country is it?”’ (PXD 437/33), published Bulletin 1 January 1936, 18, and used in 'Royals’ in 1999 SLNSW b/w exhibition.
In 1934 George Johnston married the painter and illustrator Thora Ungar at St John’s Anglican Church, Glebe. They rented a Griffin house at the Parapet, Castlecrag (the Moon House), next door to Walter and Marion Mahony Griffin , and both freelanced, with George also illustrating for small tabloids. Like many cartoonists, he really wanted to be a fine art painter and did bushland views at Castlecrag, which he exhibited and sold. The Art Gallery of New South Wales owns two portraits.
In 1937 the pair decided to go to London and sold up everything in order to afford the cheapest route, via China and across Russia on the Transcontinental Express. They had been in Shanghai for about six weeks when the Japanese invaded on 13 August 1937 – six days before they were booked to leave. George remained in Shanghai throughout the occupation and later had a job in charge of silkscreen work with the China branch of the cigarette company W.D. & H.O. Wills. In 1941 he and Thora returned to Sydney – just before Pearl Harbour. He then seems to have served in New Guinea, was wounded and repatriated to Croydon Hospital in Sydney after Milne Bay. He was in Croydon when Thora’s Kokoda Trail drawing appeared on the cover of the Women’s Weekly , an event which strained their marriage . George and Thora eventually divorced and both subsequently remarried, George to Norma. Late in life he is believed to have mainly executed courtroom drawings. He died in 1984.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 7 November 1908
- Summary
- Mid 20th century Sydney painter, illustrator and cartoonist who contributed drawings to the Bulletin and Sydney Morning Herald. Johnston's first wife was the well-known painter and illustrator Thora Ungar.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1984
- Age at death
- 76
Details
Latitude-37.560833 Longitude143.8475 Start Date1908-01-01 End Date1984-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Ballarat, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- painter and theatrical designer, was born in Ballarat and studied art with Archibald and Amalie Colquhoun in Melbourne. With her sister Kathleen, Florence exhibited watercolours of fairy-tale subjects at Melbourne in the mid-1930s. The sisters’ first exhibition was held at Margaret MacLean’s Gallery in Kodak House in 1935, and they exhibited with MacLean again in 1937 and 1939 at her Riddell Galleries.
By then they were also designing for the theatre. In 1936 they designed a production of The Lower Depths for the Ribush Theatre Company. This was followed in 1937-38 by designs for Chekov and Gorky plays and for a starkly modern Murder in the Cathedral . La Lutte Eternelle represented their debut as ballet designers in 1940, and in the same year they submitted a scenario and designs for an Australian ballet, Flagstaff Hill , in a competition run by Colonel de Basil. In 1942 the sisters went to the USA, where Florence underwent some years of treatment for the paraplegia which had resulted from a car accident in 1928.
In 1945 Florence began to exhibit her paintings—many inspired by theatrical fantasies—at the George Binet Gallery in New York. She continued to design for the theatre and joined the United Scenic Artists of America. Over the next three decades she was to exhibit regularly in Australia, London and New York. With her sister she travelled widely. In 1952 they went to live in London, remaining there until the 1970s.
Writers:
Sayers, Andrew
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1908
- Summary
- Painter and theatrical designer who worked in theatre in Melbourne, New York and London with her sister, despite suffering paraplegia from a car accident.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1984
- Age at death
- 76
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1904-01-01 End Date1984-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 4 February 1904
- Summary
- When John Passmore returned to Sydney from an extended stay in Europe in 1951 he galvanised a generation of young painters. They were led to understand that paintings need not be smooth and precious, but could be rough, tough, but still have an underlying structure – inspired by Cézanne.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 9-Oct-84
- Age at death
- 80
Details
Latitude-27.4498447 Longitude153.0600915 Start Date1903-01-01 End Date1984-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Bulimba, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1903
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1984
- Age at death
- 81
Details
Latitude-32.05423 Longitude115.74763 Start Date1901-01-01 End Date1984-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Fremantle, WA, Australia
- Biography
- Alex Matier was born in Fremantle, Western Australia on April 7, 1901. He attended drawing classes at Fremantle Technical School and taught himself to paint with watercolours later in life. In 1949 he exhibited Fair Weather in the Claude Hotchin Art Prize. In 1952 he exhibited two watercolours titled Fishing Boats and Winter Sky with the Perth Society of Artists, though he was not a member of the Society. In 1958 he won the Claude Hotchin Prize for Watercolour with A Calm Departure. This is now in the City of Fremantle Art Collection. Matier won the prize a further two times, in 1968 with In the Halls, and in 1970 with Pastoral. Both of these works are now in the collection of the Royal Perth Hospital.
Writers:
Dr Dorothy Erickson
Date written:
2010
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 7 April 1901
- Summary
- Western Australian painter who was awarded The Claude Hotchin Prize for Watercolour three times in 1958, 1968 and 1970.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1984
- Age at death
- 83
Details
Latitude-22.1646782 Longitude144.5844903 Start Date1900-01-01 End Date1984-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Queensland
- Biography
- painter, printmaker, journalist and publisher, was born in Queensland on 25 May 1900, younger son of the three children of George(?) and Harriet Wallace-Crabbe. The family moved to provincial Victoria, where Ken completed school and enrolled in a mechanical engineering course. His brother Keith was killed in WWI and Ken, aged 17, enlisted in 1918(?). He served briefly in the air flying corps, then became a journalist on the Sunraysia Daily at Mildura after the war. By the 1930s he was living in Melbourne, a motoring writer on the Herald and a 'distinguished dilettante’, friend of many leading artists and encourager of many younger ones (acc. McCulloch).
Wallace-Crabbe was a great admirer of Norman Lindsay 's nudes and pirates, according to Robin Wallace-Crabbe [R. W.-C.], who states in his autobiography, hostile to his father ( A Man’s Childhood , p.185):
“Kenneth based his drawing style on that of his hero, Norman Lindsay. Without trying too hard, he absorbed the two principal characteristics of a Lindsay image of a woman, and learnt to replicate them in his own work. He mastered the Lindsay idea that the features of the human face are stuck like a mask in front of where the face should properly be, and he got the feel of anatomical discontinuity between the torso and the neck and the head. Also, come to think of it he was able to draw breasts so that they didn’t fit naturally over the rib cage.”
Wallace-Crabbe did a large number of cartoons, illustrations and paintings in the course of his career, especially in the 1920s and 1930s, e.g. A Divorce Suit , original cartoon (Mitchell Library Px*D457/105) published in the Bulletin 20 April 1922 (re clothing available in shop for every role in a divorce), signed 'K. Wallace-Crabbe/ 1922’, address Box 269, PO Mildura, Vic. He contributed cartoons to Smith’s Weekly , according to Robin Wallace-Crabbe ( Australia Australia ). During the three years of its existence he was publisher, editor, story writer and illustrator of Cross Roads , a magazine for girls and boys published fortnightly, price 3d. Cover of 1/21 (14 November 1939), a cavalier/pirate with a sword signed 'asole’, is presumably by him (ill. Lindesay, Way We Were , 123).
His art prints include a colour linocut, Kava c.1936 (ill. Josef Lebovic Gallery, 20th Anniversary Exhibition Collectors’ List 1997 No.63 , 12 April-17 May 1997, no.129), and an etching, Peacock (nude Indian woman with peacock feathers) 1925, edn 10/15, (ill. R. W-C, 1997). Also a keen photographer, he took lots of images of Asian women with his Leica during WWII.
Wallace-Crabbe was working as a motoring journalist at the Melbourne Herald at the outbreak of WWII, when he tried to join the RAAF but was considered too old (according to Robin Wallace-Crabbe). Accepted as a pilot by the British RAF, he was lost, believed dead, in the jungles of Burma for over a year. After being found he worked in India for Lord Mountbatten and was awarded the OBE. Then, still in the RAF, Group Captain Wallace-Crabbe worked at the Australian army barracks on St Kilda Road, Melbourne. After he left the RAF, he returned to the Melbourne Herald as sub-editor. Later he became public relations’ officer with General Motors in Victoria, where he edited and wrote much of its in-house magazine, People . From 1955 he hand-printed 22 books, including many of his own.
Wallace-Crabbe married Phyllis Vera May Cox Passmore (who predeceased him). They had two sons: Christopher (Prof. English, University of Melbourne, born 1934?), and artist, writer, lecturer and farmer Robin Wallace-Crabbe (born 1938).
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 25 May 1900
- Summary
- Mid 20th century Melbourne painter, printmaker, journalist and publisher.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1984
- Age at death
- 84
Details
Latitude-18.90206605 Longitude143.1816644 Start Date1899-01-01 End Date1984-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Croydon, North Queensland, Australia
- Biography
- photographer and painter, was Brisbane’s leading society photographer between 1935 and 1960. She was born in Croydon, in the Gulf Country of North Queensland, on 9 January 1899, to Owen Duffy, a red-haired American gold-miner then aged sixty-one, and his wife Henrietta, who had formerly run a hotel in Croydon. Her father owned a crushing mill outside Croydon; the family, which included a younger brother and sister, lived in a corrugated iron cottage on site until 1908 when her parents separated. Her mother managed various hotels in Queensland until purchasing a guest house at South Brisbane in 1912. Dorothy completed her education in Brisbane, studied painting with Oscar Fristrom, then got a job at the age of fifteen in Thomas Mathewson & Son’s photographic studio, North Quay, where she became an expert retoucher.
In 1920 she married John Coleman. Dorothy’s talents were in such demand that she mainly did freelance retouching from her home until her daughter (b.1921) went to boarding school in 1927. Then, after working for two Brisbane studios, 'D.C.’ (as she was known to her staff) opened her own studio in Ascot Chambers, on the corner of Queen and Edward Streets, in 1935. Portraiture in all its forms, including miniature painting, made the Dorothy Coleman Studios famous. She had a staff of about ten, largely women, including retouchers, colourists, darkroom assistants, finishers and receptionists. Clients were charmed when they visited the studio, which was always filled with bowls of roses.
When World War II was declared in 1939, business boomed. With General MacArthur’s headquarters across the street, portrait commissions for soldiers on leave and war weddings flooded in. Dorothy’s energy and artistic flair was surely the reason for her success at a time when all her contemporaries were men. She could remove a moustache from a soldier’s portrait intended for his mother, or enhance an image from a war widow’s faded snapshot. The Manpower Office praised the work done by the studio.
Publicity photographs for balls, beauty quests, and all shots of Twelfth Night Theatre productions were taken by D.C. herself. She also covered the smartest weddings, christenings and other social events: 'to be photographed by Dorothy Coleman was itself an accolade’, stated the Sunday Mail (23 April 1978).
Dorothy closed her studio in 1960. Colour film had arrived and her husband died that year. Having studied painting with Josephine Muntz Adams , Caroline Barker and Martyn Roberts, she now had time to pursue her love of painting, working from a small studio in her exquisite garden at Everton Park (where she reared many a stray dog and cat). She became a member of the Royal Queensland Art Society. Her first solo painting show was held at the Galloway Galleries, Bowen Hills, in 1978, when she was seventy-nine. It consisted of flower studies and landscapes, popular for their almost photographic detail. Her exhibition the following year sold out before the opening.
Dorothy Coleman died on 1 January 1984, survived by her daughter, Denise Thorpe. Rhoda Felgate compiled a history of Twelfth Night Theatre, complemented by a wealth of photographic evidence by Dorothy, and donated it to the Fryer Library (University of Queensland) before her death in 1990.
Writers:
Robins, DeborahNote: Heritage biography.
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 9 January 1899
- Summary
- Photographer and painter. She was Brisbane's leading society photographer between 1935 and 1960.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1-Jan-84
- Age at death
- 85
Details
Latitude-37.864 Longitude144.982 Start Date1896-01-01 End Date1984-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- St Kilda East, VIC, Australia
- Biography
- Best known as the author of Picnic at Hanging Rock , Joan Lindsay began her creative life as a painter in Melbourne. Despite her adult fame as an author and being married to a prominent member of the Lindsay family of artists, her own artistic life has been overlooked by many art historians, including those with a special interest in womens’ art.
Joan Lindsay was born Joan a’Beckett Weigall on 16 November 1896 in St Kilda East, Melbourne. She was the daughter of Sir Theyre a’ Beckett Weigall and Annie Sophia Henrietta Hamilton. Her parents socialised with many of the National Gallery of Victoria’s early trustees including Professor Sir Baldwin Spencer. Joan’s father was a well respected lawyer (later a judge) and was involved in the establishment of the National Gallery of Victoria’s, Felton Bequest. Joan was related to the Boyd art family, and the potter Martin Boyd was her cousin.
After leaving school she enrolled in art classes at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV). From 1916 to 1918 Joan was a pupil of Frederick McCubbin at the NGV’s, School of Drawing. Under his instruction she copied endless antique plaster casts of classical origin mostly using charcoal, this being a compulsory requirement before being allowed to enter the life and painting class. In 1919 Joan studied life drawing and painting under the head of the art school, Bernard Hall .
While she barely mentioned her art career in her memoirs, Joan wrote of her art training in a posthumously published article in the magazine, Overland . This article, based on a 1960s lecture, offers a fascinating insight into Australian art education during the early years of the twentieth century, although rarely mentions her own artistic achievements. As her art school training was undertaken during World War I nearly all her fellow students were women although things changed at the end of the war. One notable male student at the School of Painting in 1919 was the artist Godfrey Miller .
By early 1920 Joan had a studio in Bourke Street, Melbourne and she had a solo exhibition of her landscape work at the Decoration Company’s gallery in Collins Street, Melbourne in July 1920. This exhibition of oils and watercolour was positively reviewed in The Argus (12 July 1920, p 9):
'A strong feeling for the beauty of panoramic views is conveyed in some sketches of subjects of this character painted in the neighbourhood of Greensborough and Warrandyte. Some pictures in which the human figure, and in others ducks and geese are introduced, add variety, and show a decided interest in the decorative placing of figures, and also have much charm of colour… In water-colour, Miss Weigall shows several examples notable for breadth of handling united to charm of colour.’
During 1920 the artist shared her studio with her close friend Maie Ryan (later Lady Maie Casey ). This shared studio was described by Joan in her memoir Time Without Clocks (p 206):
'Before either of us was married we had shared a studio in Bourke Street somewhere near Spencer Street Station – not a party giving studio but a big dusty room – it never entered our heads to dust it – where in frenzied bursts of amateur energy we really worked away at our drawing. We even wrote a book together about the ballet dancer called Anna… When we got bored with the illustrations for Anna or painstaking drawing of Miss Minty – a professional model who only consented to sit if the poses were not what she called 'rude’ – we would take our 'Greyhounds’ (packets of cheap coloured chalks) and go off somewhere by tram sketch out of doors.’
Around this time Joan and Maie Ryan held an exhibition titled, 'The Neo-Pantechnicists’. This portentous title was, according to Maie Ryan, a 'leg-pull’, but with the support of Rosemary Reynolds and Ethel Spowers the exhibition was a sell out with prices between two shillings and five guineas.
Soon after leaving the art school Joan met Daryl Lindsay at M.J. MacNally’s Melbourne studio in Bourke Street, and Daryl soon became a regular visitor at her studio. By this time Daryl Lindsay (a member of the large family of artists) had become interested in art and the couples shared interest led to an emotional attachment. Joan and Daryl were married on Valentines Day 1922 in London. After returning from their European honeymoon Joan and Daryl continued to paint together although she soon stepped back from art in favour of writing short stories, novels and memoir.
Joan Lindsay exhibited some of her work at exhibitions of the Victorian Artists’ Society (VAS) in the early 1920s. Two works were mentioned by the prominent critic J.S. MacDonald in his review of the 1922 VAS exhibition published in Art in Australia :
'Joan Weigall Lindsay exhibits two Riviera watercolours. The larger of the two is attacked with boldness and decision refreshing to see, and the decorative impression of the steep face of the hill on which all the values “close” has been well maintained. Mrs. Lindsay has plenty of courage and enterprise.’
Joan Lindsay held a joint exhibition of her watercolours with her husband in 1924 at the Fine Art Society Gallery in Melbourne. The only (known) published image of her work was a watercolour titled 'Gum Tree’, which was reproduced in black and white in the June 1925 'Daryl Lindsay’ issue of Art in Australia .
Daryl only mentions Joan’s art practice once in his own autobiography ( A Leafy Tree , p 128), and this comment is rather derogatory:
'Hers [Joan Lindsay] was only a minor talent but she had much more intuitive and mature judgement than most of the other students [at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School], and a lively inquiring mind.’
From 1941 to 1956 Joan’s husband was the director of the National Gallery of Victoria and during much of that time she worked as his part time administrative assistant. In 1957 Daryl was knighted and Joan became known as Lady Lindsay.
Although a well known writer Joan continued to paint in oil and watercolour after abandoning her short lived professional career. Popular themes with the artist were beach scenes and landscapes. In late 1972 Joan Lindsay and her old friend Maie Casey held a joint exhibition of their painting at the McClelland Gallery, Langwarrin near Mulberry Hill . This was described in Maie Casey’s biography, Glittering Surfaces , as 'a historical rather than a commercial exhibition’. During the early 1980s artist Rick Amor lived on her Mulberry Hill property and he illustrated her last book, Syd Sixpence (1982). Joan Lindsay died on 23 December 1984, at Frankston, Victoria.
Writers:
Clifford-Smith, Silas
Date written:
2008
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 16 November 1896
- Summary
- Best known as the author of 'Picnic at Hanging Rock', Lady Joan Lindsay was also also a talented oil and watercolour painter.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 23-Dec-84
- Age at death
- 88
Details
Latitude-37.247494 Longitude144.4552171 Start Date1894-01-01 End Date1984-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Kyneton, VIC, Australia
- Biography
- printmaker and painter, born Kyneton (Vic.). Enrolled NGV School 1926, then went to England where she painted near Cornwall and Devon with various artists. On her return she was associated with the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors, with whom she exhibited continuously (see Peers).
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Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1894
- Summary
- Printmaker and painter, trained at NGV School in late 1920s then lived and worked in England. On her return, she exhibited continuously with the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1984
- Age at death
- 90
Details
Latitude-33.8342887 Longitude151.2182049 Start Date1892-01-01 End Date1984-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Neutral Bay, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- painter, was born at Neutral Bay, Sydney, second of the five children of Ernest Augustus Smith, a solicitor, and Grace, née Fisher, daughter of the rector and squire of Cossington, Leicestershire, who had studied music in Germany. Grace junior was a boarder at Miss Connolly’s school at Point Piper, Sydney then attended Abbotsleigh, Wahroonga, where she was taught art by Albert Collins and Alfred Coffey . She was also encouraged by the headmistress, Marian Clarke, herself a talented watercolourist. In 1910 she began drawing lessons with Dattilo Rubbo ; her early sketchbooks consist of realistic pencil drawings of familiar household articles. On a two-year trip to England with her sister in 1912, she attended drawing classes at Winchester School of Art, and also at Stettin, Germany.
In 1914 Cossington Smith rejoined her family in their newly acquired home in Turramurra, built by a previous owner to accommodate Quaker religious meetings and renamed Cossington by its new owners. It was Grace’s home for 65 years. She also returned to Dattilo Rubbo’s classes. With the help of overseas magazines and books and reproductions brought from England by a former pupil, Norah Simpson, Rubbo encouraged enthusiasm for modern art. Cossington Smith absorbed modernist ideas quickly and in 1915 exhibited The Sock Knitter – 'perhaps the first fully Post-Impressionist work painted in Australia’, Daniel Thomas states. Although several of her paintings depict social conditions – Troops Marching , Strike , Crowd at the Races and Rushing – she described her work at this time as being primarily concerned with technical issues such as how to bring forms up to the picture plane and the effects of colour.
In 1928 she held her first solo exhibition and had her work reproduced in Art in Australia . She was interested in religious subjects in her paintings and was loosely involved with Ethel Anderson 's Turramurra Wall Painters. The construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge inspired a major series of paintings and pastel drawings depicting the bridge as a symbol of modernism. She also painted landscapes and streetscapes on excursions with artist friends or family, and native flowers.
In 1938, following the death of her father, the artist moved from her garden studio to one added inside the house beside her bedroom, an environment that resulted in the dominance of interior subjects in her later paintings. Juxtaposed pure colours, applied with a distinctive broad brushstroke, depict intimate views of her home, light-filled and spiritual. She described her work as 'expressing form in colour, colour vibrant with light – but containing this other, silent quality which is unconscious, and belongs to all things created’.
Cossington Smith never married; she was 'wholly interested in painting’ and one of a close family group. She had a private income, but taught art for several years at two small private schools and to private pupils. She held 18 solo exhibitions at the Macquarie Galleries between 1932 and 1977 and showed her work in many group exhibitions in Sydney and overseas. The many awards she received included the OBE and AO. She is represented in all state and major regional galleries. Daniel Thomas held a retrospective exhibition of her work at the Art Gallery of NSW in 1973. She died on 24 December 1984.
ADDITIONAL MATERIAL FROM JOAN KERR’S BLACK AND WHITE FILES:
Late in the war and/or in the immediate post-war period (c.1919-20) Cossington Smith drew a set of anti-German propagandist cartoons, The Great Illusion (originals NGA), showing how Germany had underestimated Britain’s military capabilities and ending in a plea for conscription to foil German expectations once more. They feature the British Lion nonchalantly licking his paw while German officers mock him, '“HE won’t do anything – he’s decadent”’, ’1913/ (The Wowzers) [disaffected Englishmen in bowler hats] “Boo-hoo – the poor animal – he’s going to the dogs’', ’1914/ '“Bah! you contemptible little thing – what can you do against my beauty”!’; ’1916…(Chorus) Conscription! – NEVER!! he’s too conservative!’; ’1917… – “If only we humbug him enough, he will fall in” -’ and '(Knowing one) “He can’t hold them any longer – they’re waiting for the chance to break loose“–’. In the last the lion’s ranks have swelled to include an army of cubs (the Commonwealth countries) who, despite contentedly licking their paws, are believed by the Germans to be about to desert Britain. These may be the drawings War Phrases shown in the Royal Art Society annual exhibition in October 1919, alluded to by Bruce James in his monograph on the artist. An apparent addition to the series, The revival of German music 1920 (copy in Joan Kerr Archives, NLA), comments on the dangers of underestimating German post-war economic rebuilding. A choir of blonde-haired, blue-eyed boy singers wearing leiderhosen – labelled 'mercantile navy’ (sporting a naval cap labelled 'DEUTC[H?]’ [ sic ]), 'trade’, 'commerce’ and 'industry’ – are being conducted by an elderly gentleman '(Herr Professor)’, who is saying: “Quite a nice little class again – now, altogether my children”.
Cossington Smith also drew caricatures of some leading, international, wartime figures c.1919. They include the American President, Woodrow Wilson, and a double-page spread featuring, on the left, Field Marshall General Sir John French, commander-in-chief of the British Expeditionary Forces at the beginning of the war, and, on the right, Lord John Fisher, First Lord of the Admiralty. Cossington Smith’s Wilson as The Idealist looks ineffectual as, with his hands clasped in front of him and his feet together, he says: 'I am an Idealist/ -it’s my Temperament/ -I can’t help it./ During the/ Great War I/ helped by writing/ Notes./ When Peace came/ I helped by pointing/ out “14 Points”, & by/ making acute/ situations more acute./ I invented the League/ of Nations. Another of/ my high ideals is “to/ make the world safe/ in Democracy” -/ I am “too proud/ to fight”. When others/ have done the fighting/ I step in & say/ what should be done./ This is my Chief Role/ -I love it -it makes/ me feel so/ acutely idealistic’. French, who resigned as commander-in-chief of the British Expeditionary Force after a series of military defeats in France and Belgium, is pictured at his writing desk, proclaiming '“I am really/ a Great Soldier/ – but lately I’ve/ taken to writing/ books about/ things that needn’t/ be written about”’. The reference is to his book 1914 (1919) in which he revealed details of his protracted, wartime quarrel with General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, an account described in The Dictionary of National Biography as ill-judged and deplorable. Cossington Smith seems to have been more enamoured of Lord Fisher (there is some speculation he may have been a relative of her mother’s.), who holds a book labelled 'MEMOIRS’ and states: ''I have also taken to/ writing books, but my real/ business is THE NAVY./ -I am the Creator/ of the Navy as it is To-day.’'
Her cartoon, The Davis Cup goes home , is stylistically similar to her war drawings and was presumably drawn in 1920, the year the Cup was won by the United States after being retained by Australia from 1914 to 1919 (no competition was held in 1915-18 because of the war). Australia is represented by a kangaroo holding a tennis racquet looking back at his 'Uncle Sam’ competitor who strides off, cigar in mouth, holding the Cup and saying: '(The Yank) – “I guess this little trinket belongs to me again”-’.
Two pencil drawings that parallel May Gibbs’s gumnut babies, Xmas Belle and ''What a Xmas Belle you are’' , were presumably drawn c.1930; the undated NGA sketchbook 51 in which they appear contains a flier for the 1930 Empire Fête, held at St James’s Church, Turramurra.
Daniel Thomas held a retrospective exhibition of her work at the Art Gallery of NSW in 1973 and a drawing exhibition at the NGA in 1993 (see Grace Cossington Smith: A Life from drawings in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia , Canberra, 1993).
Writers:
Johnson, Heather
Note: Heritage entryKerr, Joan
Note: On Smith's cartooning
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
1992
- Born
- b. 20 April 1892
- Summary
- Painter, born in Neutral Bay, Sydney. A student of Dattilo Rubbo, Cossington Smith was quick to absorb modernist ideas and in 1915 exhibited 'The Sock Knitter', described by Daniel Thomas as 'perhaps the first fully Post-Impressionist work painted in Australia'.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 24-Dec-84
- Age at death
- 92
Details
Latitude-33.827964 Longitude151.1782693 Start Date1937-01-01 End Date1983-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Northwood, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1937
- Summary
- Photographer who worked as an assistant to Max Dupain and had a number of photojournalistic articles published in Australian magazines in the 1950s and 1960s.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1983
- Age at death
- 46
Details
Latitude-20 Longitude133 Start Date1935-01-01 End Date1983-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Northern Territory, NT, Australia
- Biography
- Dick Pantimas’ country was Yippa, north of Sandy Blight Junction, near NT/WA border. Like his older brother Johnny Warangkula , his Kalipinypa (Water) Dreaming was often the subject of his paintings when he began painting for Papunya Tula Artists in the late ’70s. Dick was a close observer of the older artists for many years before beginning to paint himself. He was a close friend of Ray Inkamala . Until his unfortunate death in 1983, the artist was one of the most promising of the second generation of painters which began to emerge in Papunya in the early ’80s. He was survived by his wife Wendy and their several children. In 1990 the central Water Dreaming iconograph from one of his paintings was used as the design for a mosaic in the new Alice Springs Airport.
Writers:
Johnson, Vivien
Note: primary biographer
Date written:
1994
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1935
- Summary
- Dick Pantimas was one of the second generation of painters which began to emerge in Papunya in the early '80s and before beginning to paint had been a close observer of the older artists for many years, including his big brother Johnny Warangkula.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1983
- Age at death
- 48
Details
Latitude-33.690833 Longitude117.555278 Start Date1934-01-01 End Date1983-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Katanning, WA, Australia
- Biography
- Revel Ronald Cooper was born of Nyungar descent, probably in 1934, at Katanning, Western Australia. Cooper was one of six siblings; their mother died in 1940. As a young boy Revel and his sister Maude were declared wards of the state and placed in Carrolup Native Settlement (now known as Marribank), established in 1915 as a place of internment for Aborigines. The 'Carrolup School,’ as it became known, developed through the significant contribution made by Noel White who was appointed head teacher in 1945 and remained at Carrolup until its closure in 1951. White, together with his wife Lily, developed educational programs in art, music, dance and story telling to encourage the children’s imagination and creativity. Inspired by this interest and support, a number of children produced drawings, pastels and watercolours evocative of their Nyungar heritage: complex geometric designs, dramatic landscapes and animated figures engaged in dance. Cooper worked alongside a number other children many of whom went on to forge a career as an artist: Parnell Dempster, Reynold Hart, Milton Jackson, Ross Jones, Claude Kelly, Allan Kelly, Simpson, Greg and Goldie Kelly, Barry Loo, Cliff Ryder, Alma Toomath, A. Ugle, Primus Ugle and Vera Wallam. The children’s art was widely exhibited and generated considerable interest, winning a number of awards in Australia and overseas. Following an initial invitation to exhibit at the Katanning Agricultural Show (1946) drawings and paintings by Carrolup children were exhibited at the Lord Forrest Centenary Exhibition in Perth (1947); Boans Ltd. department store, Perth (1947); Albany, WA (1948); Sydney (1948) and at a UNESCO sponsored seminar in Mysore, India (1949) (Stanton 1992: 29). The Carrolup School also attracted the attention of a visiting Englishwoman, Florence Rutter, and she arranged for a selection of work to tour Australia, New Zealand, Britain and the Netherlands. The 1952 publication by Mary Durack and Rutter Child Artists of the Australian Bush contributed to national and international recognition for the Carrolup School. Providing a detailed history of the Carrolup movement, photographs and documentary evidence and over fourty reproductions of children’s artwork, Child Artists of the Australian Bush went some way towards redressing assimilationist attitudes by drawing attention to the significance of children’s art for social cohesion and cultural maintenance. The closure of Carrolup in 1951 thrust Cooper into a wider world where he experienced both isolation from his friends and the expectation of success imposed by assimilation. Cooper initially gained employment with J. Gibbney & Son Pty Ltd, a commercial art firm in Perth, before returning to the Katanning area where he worked as a farm labourer and as a railway fettler. Cooper’s struggles with alcoholism were already in evidence when, in November 1952, he was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to four years’ imprisonment. From the mid 1950s onwards Cooper lived 'on the road’, travelling extensively. In Victoria he worked for a brief period at Aboriginal Enterprises, the tourist outlet established in 1952 at Belgrave by political activist Bill Onus. A photograph from this period shows Cooper and Onus holding a boomerang made in the workshop and painted by designer Paula Kerry (1923-2008) in what she termed the 'Carrolup’ style (Kleinert 1997: 90). It has been acknowledged that Cooper was a formative influence on the young Lin Onus, the son of Bill Onus, who went on to achieve recognition as an artist (Onus 1990: 15; 1993: 290). During the 1960s and 1970s Cooper painted prolifically. While he continued to paint the corroborees and landscapes familiar from his Carrolup childhood, his subject matter expanded to include Aboriginal myths and the recurring image of a bitumen road winding through a settled landscape – like the Waugul serpent of Nyungar legend. Stylistically his work is characterised by the vivid, rich colours typical of the south west region and became progressively more expressive. Although Cooper served a number of prison sentences in Western Australia and Victoria he had the opportunity to exhibit regularly in Victoria and interstate through the assistance provided by art collector James Davidson who worked in association with the Victorian Aborigines Advancement League. At the time the attention of the art world remained focused on the bark paintings of Arnhem Land as a paradigm for an authentic and traditional Aboriginal art. By contrast, Davidson broke new ground by exhibiting the work of Cooper, a city-based artist, alongside bark paintings from east Arnhem Land, Arrernte watercolours from Hermannsburg and woven rugs from Ernabella. While Cooper was in prison, Davidson provided encouragement and support through regular correspondence and the supply of painting materials. The publicity achieved by these exhibitions began to create a wider audience for Cooper’s work: artist Noel Counihan wrote appreciatively in Melbourne’s communist weekly, the Guardian (28 March 1963), of Cooper’s 'strongly original artistic talent’. During a period of prison reform in the 1960s and 1970s, prison provided a productive site of cultural practice for many Aboriginal artists including Ronald Bull, Gordon Syron, Kevin Gilbert and Jimmy Pike. In Fremantle prison well-established Nyungar artists like Cooper, Goldie Kelly and Lewis Jutta were able to pass on their skills and techniques to a younger generation of artists who included Graham Taylor (Swag). During the 1970s Cooper’s repertoire widened to include sculpture, at least one portrait – of Gundidjmara man, Captain Reginald Saunders (1973) (Croft 2003: 25-26) – and several murals (located in Fremantle prison and the Aboriginal Medical Service, Redfern) (Croft 2003: 36). While in Geelong training prison Cooper published writing and in Fremantle prison he made and painted guitars and he completed several commissions including illustrations for a second edition of Durack’s book Yagan of the Bibbulmun (1976). In 1962, whilst Cooper was an inmate of Pardellup Prison Farm, he was commissioned by the then chaplain Father James McCarthy to paint twelve Stations of the Cross as part of the restoration of the Sacred Heart Church in Mount Barker (WA). At the consecration of the rebuilt church Cooper’s Stations of the Cross attracted considerable attention described in the parish newsletter, The Record, as 'realistic and challenging’. Under the leader 'Pardellup prisoner paints Stations of the Cross’, The Record added: 'Portrayal of the various scenes is vivid and imaginative. A new approach was used in the expression of the face of Christ and the facial lines are said to be provocative of deep thinking by the viewer’ (The Record 8 June 1962). These observations suggest that this was indeed a very significant project for Cooper. Regrettably the Stations of the Cross painted by Cooper were replaced at a later, unknown date and all attempts to ascertain whether the Stations of the Cross are still extant and, if so, where they are located have proved unsuccessful. This very significant subject would benefit from further research. Cooper’s struggles with alcoholism and his itinerant lifestyle created both opportunities and difficulties. He died tragically at the age of 49, bludgeoned to death in his car at Buxton, Victoria, sometime around April 1983. His body was not found until several years later after Matthew De Carteret confessed to the murder. Cooper was buried on 30 January 1987 in the Catholic section of the Fawkner cemetery. Later that year on 1 September 1983 Cooper featured posthumously in the Encounters program 'The Broken Covenant’ produced by David Thompson for ABC Television. In the film Cooper protests vociferously against his experiences of injustice and inequality. As Cooper makes clear, 'painting the country of his heritage’ is a means of redressing this problem: he is painting 'for whites not himself.’ The film is also testimony to Cooper’s considerable musical talent concluding with a spirited performance by Cooper, accompanying himself on guitar, of Black American Big Bill Broonzy’s 1951 protest song 'Get Back (Black, Brown and White)’. Cooper is today regarded as one of the key figures in a distinctive Nyungar landscape tradition that is the heritage of the Carrolup School. Through the role model he provided, Cooper contributed to cultural renewal and was influential on a later generation of Nyungar artists including Troy Bennell, Tjyllyungoo (Lance Chadd), Christopher Pease and Shane Pickett. The rediscovery in 2005 of almost a hundred drawings and pastels by Carrolup children in the collection of the Picker Gallery in Colgate University (NY) has given new momentum to the Carrolup School, resulting in several exhibitions, including 'Koorah Coolingbah – Children Long Ago’ at the Western Australian Museum and the Katanning Shire Gallery, WA, and a major publication by Tracie Pushman (2006). Cooper’s work is represented in the National Gallery of Australia, Berndt Museum of Anthropology (University of Western Australia), Art Gallery of Western Australia, Fremantle Prison, Fremantle Hospital, the Aboriginal Medical Service in Redfern, the Holmes à Court collection and Colgate University, (NY).
Writers:
Kleinert, Dr Sylvia
Date written:
2011
Last updated:
2011
Status:
peer-reviewed
- Born
- b. c.1934
- Summary
- Revel Cooper is a key figure in the Carrolup School of Nyungar landscape painting.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- c.April 1983
- Age at death
- 49
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1932-01-01 End Date1983-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- Peter Upward was born in Melbourne in 1932 where he studied art at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 1951. Later that year he moved to Sydney in the hope of escaping the figurative expressionists and social realism dominating the Melbourne art scene. From 1951 to 1955, he studied at the Julian Ashton Art School under John Passmore where he began exploring abstraction as a viable alternative to realism. Upward’s first significant series reflected Passmore’s interest with the semi-figurative abstraction and the earthy tones of the Australian landscape seen in Untitled (1958).
In 1955 Upward moved back to Melbourne where he married Joan Russel and had two children. Returning to Sydney in 1960, Upward worked closely with fellow artists John Olsen and Clement Meadmore, rapidly developing an iconic abstract style with confidence and originality.
Upward had no direct contact with the emerging Abstract Expressionist movement in America and Europe although its influence can be seen in many of his works. Curator of the 2007 retrospective Frozen Gestures: The Art of Peter Upward, Christopher Dean, writes that ‘Upward invented a highly individual visual language that reacted against, rather than conformed to, American abstract expressionism’ (Dean 2007). Dean argues there is a sense of restraint in Upward’s works that would not easily classify him as an Abstract Expressionist, despite being exhibited in Abstract Expressionism in Australia at the Ivan Dougherty Gallery, Sydney in 1980. Upward’s ‘frozen gestures’ embody the energy, movement and action of the artist. The all-encompassing oversized canvases depict form, colour and stroke over emotionally charged representations of self or feeling setting him apart from traditional abstract expressionists. Rather, Upward’s limited colour palette and considered movements bridge the gap between expressive abstraction and minimal art with an immediate emphasis on process over representation. It was this unique approach that predicted the emergence of colour field and hard edge painting that would infiltrate Sydney and Melbourne in the 1960s and 1970s.
Upward was strongly influenced by Jazz music and the principles of Zen including the book by Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki titled Studies in Zen. Here Upward encountered the ‘Zen Paradox’ whereby actions are connected to reactions like the transformation of water to ice. June Celebration (1960) explores the unique transformative qualities of the paint medium while capturing the energetic gesture that goes into its production. Inspired by this study of Zen, Upward’s paintings echo the smooth lines, symbols and expressive characters of Chinese and Japanese calligraphy. This saw his paintings chosen to be included in the 1976 exhibition The Calligraphic Image with Brett Whiteley and Royston Harpur at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Abandoning what was a successful painting formula, Upward moved to London in 1962. Gestural painting became a therapeutic exercise where he could explore different ideas, mediums and boundaries – a process he attempted to enhance with the assistance of large quantities of drugs that would have long term affects on this physical and psychological health. In 1971 Upward returned to Australia in a compromised financial and physical state. Despite entering an art scene where he was largely forgotten, Upward continued his art making producing a series brightly coloured resin works on circular canvases. Although his works were reviewed with support and admiration, they were commercially unsuccessful.
Towards the end of the 1970s Upward began teaching at East Sydney Technical College where he was greatly admired by his students. With improved health, he began building a home north of Sydney in the bushland of Wollombi. He married Julie Harris in 1979, and in 1982 they had daughter, Asia. Upward was in the process of moving to the new property when he suffered a fatal heart attack while walking near Sydney’s Balmoral Beach.
Peter Upward explored his career as an artist, student and teacher with bold dynamism as evidenced in the legacy of his paintings, friendships and students. At times life proved difficult but he continued to face his trials with optimism and perseverance as artist, John Olsen fondly recalls: ‘he refused to be bored and everything about him was based on spontaneity and improvisation’ (Olsen, 1984).
In recent years a new generation of curators and critics, including Christopher Dean and Christine France, have written on the complex and valuable contribution of this innovative and remarkable pure abstractionist to the development of minimalism and contemporary Australian art. His standing as a key figure in Australian lyrical abstraction is best indicated by the decision of the National Gallery of Australia to make June Celebration one of the key Australian works included in the Abstract Expressionism exhibition of 2013.
Writers:
Joanna Mendelssohn
GretaStevens
Eric Riddler
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2015
- Born
- b. 29 September 1932
- Summary
- Peter Upward's gestural calligraphic works are possibly the closest Australia came to mid-twentieth century American Abstract Expressionism. However he was more inspired by the metaphysics of Japanese calligraphy.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- Nov-83
- Age at death
- 51
Details
Latitude-19.2569391 Longitude146.8239537 Start Date1913-01-01 End Date1983-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Townsville, Qld., Australia
- Biography
- potter, leather worker and illustrator, was born on 15 June 1913 in Townsville, third of four children of Andrew John Baxter McMaster and Maria Frances Maude née Kennedy. Her father established a series of properties in central western Queensland as well as a wool scour before moving his family to Brisbane in 1922. Val was educated at Somerville House. Aged eighteen, she enrolled in the full-time art course at the Central Technical College, Brisbane. She took up pottery under L.J. Harvey as an elective in her third year and became his most enthusiastic pupil, working many additional hours and cutting other classes to do so.
Val showed pots at the annual student exhibitions in 1933 and 1934 (and probably in 1935-36). She exhibited with the Arts and Crafts Society of Queensland in 1933-36 and was also the most successful prize-winner at the Royal National Agricultural Show during these years; in 1933 she was awarded six firsts, two seconds and two highly commended prizes, in 1936 eight firsts and two second prizes. She also exhibited black-and-white work and pottery with the Royal Agricultural Society of Queensland at Toowoomba in 1932 and 1934.
Her uncle Sir Fergus McMaster, one of the founders of Qantas, purchased pieces from Val for official company gifts. In 1937-41 she worked for William Bustard at R.S. Exton & Co. painting Bustard’s designs onto stained-glass panels, Owen Maguire, the head artist, adding the final details. Although continuing to produce ceramics at Exton’s, she largely ceased her exhibiting career at this time. In the war years she joined the Women’s National Emergency League and worked as a driver for the 5th USA Airforce. Pottery was no longer a major concern, but she produced prodigious quantities of pokerwork to distribute at Queensland Country Women’s Association and political fetes. Virtually nothing of this survives.
Val McMaster cared for her mother for several years before she died in 1948. Three years later, Val married Edward Potts, a chartered accountant. Hitherto, she had had a surprisingly productive career for one of Harvey’s 'social’ students, and even after this late marriage she learned to throw from Jack Breedon at the Kitty Art Pottery, Albion, and to decorate pottery similarly. However, because she travelled extensively with her husband for most of her married life, she produced little other work.
Writers:
Cooke, Glenn R.
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 15 June 1913
- Summary
- Maude McMaster won a swathe of prizes in her youth for her pottery, which she entered in shows in her native state of Queensland. She was an enthusiastic student and would work extra hours and cut classes to devote more time to her art while studying at Central Technical College in Brisbane.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1983
- Age at death
- 70
Details
Latitude52.561928 Longitude-1.464854 Start Date1904-01-01 End Date1983-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- England, UK
- Biography
- photographer, film-maker, editor and Presbyterian clergyman, was born and educated in England. He came to Australia as an adult in 1942 and played an influential role in the Presbyterian Church for 40 years. He was the first Director of the Audio Visual Department of the Church in Victoria, he ran the first Stewardship campaign in the country in 1955 and he was founder and first president of the Australian Film Society. In 1953 he produced a film about Aborigines entitled Man of the Mulga .
In 1966 Aikin became a freelance professional photographer. In 1970 he was appointed editor of the Church’s paper, Outreach , and then often took photographs to illustrate articles. His widow, Margaret Aikin, said that 'he always saw photography as a means of communication’. The National Library of Australia holds a collection of about 1,000 of Aikin’s gelatin silver photographs taken 1942-c.1978. Most are of young people, both indigenous and non-indigenous, in schools or church-related activities throughout Australia. 81 are exhibition prints. 21 photographs, ranging in size from exhibition prints to reference prints, record the traditional life of the people of the South Australian Musgrave Ranges region (c.1950). They include portraits of individuals, e.g. a man holding a baby (P3499), groups such as a large group of hunters (P3506) and people engaged in activities like skinning a kangaroo (P3498) or milking a goat (P3501). There is a photograph of the opening of Ernabella Church in the Musgrave Ranges in 1953, showing a large mixed population waiting outside before the ceremony began (P846/120). 14 photographs of Yirrkala Aboriginal Community on the Gove Peninsula at the north-eastern tip of Arnhem Land (c.1974) include buildings around Yirrkala and construction work around the college and a portrait of Wandjuk Marika. (Aikin took another portrait in the 1970s when Wandjuk was a member of the Australia Council for the Arts.)
His photographs of Aurukun (Cape York) people include one of an Aurukun (Wik?) woman teaching her weaving skills to a Spinners and Weavers Guild Exhibition crowd at Melbourne in 1975. 16 (c.1968-78) are portraits of young people living in the Top End, ranging from kindergarten children to young girls sewing and young men with guitars or harvesting pawpaw on Elcho Island. Photographs in his Australian Inland Mission (AIM) frontier services collection taken 1974-75 show various people involved in education, from primary school to health education, including a white teacher learning the Aboriginal language Anindilyakwa (or Warnindilyakwa, P846/940); also a blacksmith shop (P846/948).
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1904
- Summary
- English male photographer, film-maker, editor and Presbyterian priest who went outback for Outreach, a Church journal, documenting indigenous cultures and mission activity.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1983
- Age at death
- 79
Details
Latitude48.2 Longitude16.366667 Start Date1904-01-01 End Date1983-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Vienna, Austria
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1904
- Summary
- Teltscher attended the School of Arts and Crafts, Vienna, later studying at the Bauhaus 1921-23. He later immigrated to England where he was interned and deported to Australia aboard the vessel Dunera. While interned at Hay, he designed "camp currency" printed locally. He returned to England in 1941 to take up a teaching career, design for Thames and Hudson, later taking a teaching post in Nigeria.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-83
- Age at death
- 79
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1904-01-01 End Date1983-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- painter, teacher, illustrator, graphic artist and cartoonist, was born in Sydney of French ancestry. She studied in Paris under Andre L’hôte and at Colarossi’s. According to Power (p.47, apparently quoting Margaret Coen but without acknowledgement), Dora was 'pretty, petite, very proud of her French ancestry and recently returned from Paris’ when a student of Dattilo Rubbo 's in the late 1920s. She shared a studio in a condemned building owned by the Electricity Commission near Circular Quay with fellow students, the lovers Alison Rehfisch and George Duncan , and was the only member of their set to have travelled overseas. (George Duncan was a New Zealander, but that of course didn’t count.) Jarret’s Awful results of sketching on a roof , an undated gentle caricature of a woman sketching from and subsequently falling off a roof with her sketchbook, pencils and chair preceding her, was apparently a joke about her friend Grace Cossington Smith’s plein air painting habits. Found as a loose sheet inside Cossington Smith’s sketchbook no.5 (NGA), it seems likely to have been drawn in Sydney when both were studying with Rubbo.
In the 1920s Jarret exhibited with the Royal Art Society, had work in the Australian Art Society’s first exhibition (1927) and was a regular exhibitor with the Australian Watercolour Institute. With Rehfisch, Neville Barker and Arthur Murch, she exhibited as 'Four Young Artists’ at Farmer’s Blaxland Galleries in 1929. She showed watercolours, travel sketches and linocuts; the AGNSW purchased An Italian Bypath . The Bulletin (3 December 1929) noted:
Dora Jarret, looking like a rose adorned with pearls instead of dewdrops, was a radiant spot on the balcony at the Blaxland Galleries last week. Chum Alison Rehfisch looked smart as paint, which was all to the good, as the two young creatures were welcoming the world to a show of their canvases. Neville Barker and Arthur Murch, who are also exhibiting, added male support and nice manners to the gathering (quoted Power, 47-48).
On the closing night of the exhibition the artists held a party in Alison and Dora’s new studio at 8 Bridge Street, which was apparently attended by the NSW Governor’s wife Lady de Chair (see Sunday Sun 15 December 1929, cited by Power, p.49). A weekly sketch club had its headquarters at 8 Bridge Street; Elaine Haxton was one of the younger members until she went overseas in 1931: 'We paid half a crown for a model and a cuppa tea’ (Haxton, 'A Reminiscence’ in Alison Rehfish and George Duncan catalogue 1976, quoted Power, p.49. SEE also Meg Stewart, Reminiscence of My Mother ). George still officially lived at Tempe, but actually inhabited the place too. E.A. Harvey (unpub. Mss) recalled that they 'shared a big studio in Bridge Street and went everywhere in a baby Austin. George was as big as the other two put together; the car was Jarret’s (Jar Ray as everyone calls her), and she drove, consequently the car had a perpetual lean’. A photograph of Alison and Dora painting beside a car in 1932 is included in Power (p.52), alongside one of the three of them in the Blue Mountains (apparently Katoomba lookout). The three of them beside the car near Cooma in 1933 is on p.53.
Alison and George moved in together to 12 Bridge Street, the site of more notoriously licentious parties, e.g. a 'loincloth party’ held in honour of Christopher Brennan, which Jarret attended dressed as a Pierrot [sic] with frilled collar (described Power, p.49). The 'Prehistoric and Primitive Party’, held in 1933 in honour of George who was leaving 'Sordid Sydney for Peppy Paris’, included Dora and Alison, wearing grass skirts, welcoming guests into 'the jungle’ decorated with friends’ 'island treasures’ and with 'tribal drawings’ on the walls. The colourful send-off included Norman Lindsay’s hornpipe act and a dancing exhibition by Ellen Gray with a male partner from the German School of Dancing where she took lessons (Power, p.53). It was this party that inspired Norman Lindsay’s watercolour The Party (1933, p.c.), with its bare-breasted woman dancer in the centre (called Coen but clearly Gray and her male partner) and reputedly including Jarret, in grass skirt and bra, seated on the floor on the right (reproduced Power, p.48). Norman sent a photograph of the painting to Rehfisch with the note: 'To Alison – with thanks for the best of all possible parties’. After George went to Europe and Alison followed with her friend Ellen Gray in 1933, Norman Lindsay took over the studio, moving down from Springwood at a time of personal and artistic crisis so he could devote himself to oil painting. When Lindsay left, Margaret Coen, Douglas Stewart and their daughter Meg took it over (Power, p.57). Jarret remained in Sydney; in 1936 she passed on the news that George had three paintings hung at the RA, two 'on the line’, to the Daily Telegraph (Power, p.77). Alison alone returned to Sydney in 1939 and, following Rehfisch’s death, a party was held at Dora Jarret’s studio that included Alison’s daughter Peg, B.J. Waterhouse, President of the AGNSW board of trustees, and various artists (Power, p.81). A photograph taken after the 'Show of Fives’ at Macquarie Galleries c.1940 (Power, p.97) includes Jarret between Jean Bellette and Rehfisch along with other artists including 'George Duncan just back from London’.
Germaine states that Jarret mainly painted landscapes, old houses and portraits in oil and watercolour. She also illustrated Henry Handel Richardson’s The Bath , published in 1933, with elegant drawings of four pubescent girls in various stages of undress, and she designed bookplates (Mark Ferson). Germaine claims that her first solo show was at Brisbane in 1929, but this must be an error. She was, however, a member of the Royal Queensland Art Society in 1946. In 1951 she was included in a small group exhibition in the foyer of a J.C. Williamson theatre in Melbourne with Elsa Russell and Piers Bourke (cited Paula Furby). When Sydney Rubbo interviewed some of his father’s former students (tape recording n.d but after Rubbo’s death, AGNSW, mentioned Power 35), Jarret was living in Neutral Bay (Cossington Smith was at Turramurra, Janna Bruce was at Warrawee and Alison Rehfisch was at Pymble).
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. c.1904
- Summary
- Early 20th century Sydney painter, teacher, illustrator, graphic artist and cartoonist.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1983
- Age at death
- 79
Details
Latitude-19.2569391 Longitude146.8239537 Start Date1903-01-01 End Date1983-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Townsville, QLD, Australia
- Biography
- Kathleen Judith Coren was born in Townsville in 1903 the second daughter of Francis De Sales Coren and Elizabeth Gray. Her sisters Doris and Belle, who were talented in different fields, were born in 1901 and 1908 respectively. Their father worked for the Langdon family on a property outside Muttaburra and the girls were schooled locally and later at the Mundingburra State School, Townsville. Kathleen, who was a proficient violinist throughout her life, first studied her chosen instrument at St Patrick’s High School, Townsville.
Kathleen worked as a photographic retoucher for Laurie’s Studio, Townsville, under the guidance of Elsie Lampton and was encouraged to study drawing at the Townsville Technical College. Subsequently, she worked at the Graham Studio, Mackay, before making her way to Brisbane. Here she took further lessons with the artist, Vida Lahey, and began to exhibit, largely portraits, with the Royal Queensland Art Society (RQAS) in 1938.
During the years of World War II she served as draftswoman for the construction business owned by Jack Mulholland and was stationed at Kissing Point, Townsville. While here, she painted the portrait of USA Army Nurse, Lt. F. Miller which was exhibited in the RQAS’s Annual exhibition in 1942.
When she returned to Brisbane Kathleen painted and exhibited with the Brisbane Art Group from 1948 to 1953 which included Dorothy Coleman, G. Wilson Cooper, Marion Finlayson, Flora Hosking, Vera Leichney, Wal Potts and James Wieneke. She also studied with Richard Rodier Rivron (a student of the Royal Academician, Glyn Philpot) whose teaching methods brought a fresh approach to her art practice in the years from 1950 to 1954.
She married George Leichney in 1953 after the death of his first wife, Vera, in 1951 and as Kathleen Leichney served on the committee of the RQAS from 1956 to 1969. For some reason her exhibition career slowed significantly during the 1950s, but revived the following decade in which she exhibited from 1960 to 1971. Leichney was made an honorary life member of the Society in 1978.
Kathleen became a close friend of the prominent sculptor, Daphne Mayo, and they painted portraits of each other. Mayo’s portrait shows Kathleen clasping her violin as she performs with Brisbane’s String Orchestra. Mayo also produced a bronze head of Kathleen, ca. 1955, which is in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. It is probably through this connection that Daphne Mayo received the commission from Mulholland’s for the bronze Jolly Swagman at Winton installed in 1958.
Leichney suffers from the obscurity that burdens many portrait painters as her major works are unseen in the private collections of the families that commissioned the portraits. Two only are in public collections: Little girl in the RQAS Collection, Brisbane, and Self portrait in the Perc Tucker Regional Gallery, Townsville. Her funeral service was held at St Andrew’s Anglican Church, Indooroopilly, in 1983.
Writers:
Cooke, Glenn R.
Date written:
2010
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1903
- Summary
- Kathleen Leichney had an extensive career in Queensland in both the visual arts and in music. She painted and exhibited in Brisbane (largely portraits) and played her violin in amateur orchestras for over forty years.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1983
- Age at death
- 80
Details
Latitude-33.8718758 Longitude151.2192218 Start Date1903-01-01 End Date1983-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Woolloomooloo, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- painter, commercial artist and printmaker, was born on 26 February 1903 at Woolloomooloo, Sydney. A mural painted with her husband Bim Hilder for the staff restaurant, Grace Bros., Sydney is also known.
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Writers:
Staff Writer
Note: Primary
Michael Bogle
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2014
- Born
- b. c.26 February 1903
- Summary
- Painter, commercial artist and printmaker, a life long Sydney resident, the city was her main theme. Worked with her husband, sculptor Bim Hilder, exploring print techniques.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 11-Aug-83
- Age at death
- 80
Details
Latitude-33.8798136 Longitude151.078522 Start Date1901-01-01 End Date1983-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Strathfield, New South Wales, Australia
- Biography
- cartoonist and caricaturist, was born in Strathfield, Sydney, son of a newsagent. He left Fort Street High in 1916 and became an apprentice process engraver on the Bulletin . Like many of his Bulletin colleagues, he attended classes at the Royal Art Society and graduated to doing cartoons for the paper. In 1917 he joined Smith and Julius 's commercial art studios where Australia’s first commercially made animated films were produced through Julius’s 'Filmads’ company.
Miller drew cartoons for various periodicals as a freelance, including the Bulletin (including one particularly good 1930s Bulletin cartoon) and Aussie . Two undated original Bulletin cartoons, “I thought you said your new gown was backless” and The Monkey Glands , are in AGWA. He was a founding member of the Black and White Artists’ Club in 1924. In 1920 (acc. Shiell & Unger, 'Fifty Years’ & Rainbow), 1922 (acc. Blaikie) or 1919 (acc. Lindesay), he joined Smith’s Weekly , when Frank Marien was editor-in-chief, and remained for 12 years (until 1939 acc. Rafty & Mack and Rainbow). He drew caricatures of artists, eg An Unexpected Response (Streeton, Lambert, Gruner & J.S. Watkins), published 2 April 1923, 15; Dictators of “Art in Australia”, (left to right) Harry Julius, Sydney Ure Smith, Charles Lloyd Jones [q.v.] , and Ernest Watt savour a new Lindsay etching 14 May 1927, 13 and Sydney’s “Royal” Artists discuss a hanging matter. Left to right (back row): Henry Fullwood, Oxnard Smith, Will Ashton, Syd. Long, Charlie Bryant, Lister Lister; (front row): Dattilo Rubbo and J. S Watkins , 20 August 1927, 13. Also (prophetic shades of Lyndon Johnson and Robin Askin in 1966?) 'Mr Jock Lenin Garden: “What’s holding us up here, chauffeur?”/ Chauffeur: “One of these unemployed processions, Sir.”/ Mr Jock Lenin Garden: “Aw, toot and drive through 'em!”’ Smith’s 11 October 1930, 10.
Miller was said to have specialised in drawing elephants and monkeys at Smith’s (monkeys as an angry father and smooching daughter, plus dogs, a leopardess, lions and monkey dresser and 2 gags about chooks are illustrated in Rainbow, pp.43-45). He also did many political and sporting cartoons and wrote and illustrated film and theatre critiques. He was one of the first cartoonists to use the scraperboard technique (in the 1930s). After being dismissed then re-instated during the Depression, he insisted on signing all his work 'Noel’ – the name he had been using for the outside work that led to his dismissal. Later cartoons include [maid peering through hotel room keyhole], “I thought so; none for number 8 and two cups for number 7!” 21 September 1940.
During the 1930s Miller continued to create newspaper comic strips, including his best-known character Chesty Bond (from 1938) and A little Bear will fix it . He published numerous comic books in 1943-45 and his strip Animal Angus was syndicated overseas as well as throughout Australia. He worked on the Melbourne Herald in 1945-56. In 1957 he resigned from his job of producing the daily strip Us Girls and became involved in making TV animation and sound-slide films.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1901
- Summary
- Mid 20th century Sydney and Melbourne cartoonist, animator and caricaturist. Creator of logo/comic strip character Chesty Bond
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1983
- Age at death
- 82
Details
Latitude-38.243315 Longitude145.0885432 Start Date1901-01-01 End Date1983-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Mornington, Melbourne, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 25 September 1901
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1983
- Age at death
- 82
Details
Latitude52.634444 Longitude-1.131944 Start Date1898-01-01 End Date1983-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Leicester, England, UK
- Biography
- painter, illuminator, illustrator, weaver, potter, leather-worker, embroiderer, jeweller and enameller, was born in Leicester, England. She gained a Diploma of Arts and Crafts at the Manchester College of Art on a scholarship (1915-18), then spent three years working as a designer for a Lancashire firm of textile printers until marrying the Queensland pastoralist Andrew Pedersen in 1921. They came to live on a property outside St Laurence, from which she published some cartoons in the Sydney magazine Aussie in the 1920s. Lilian revisited England in 1925-26. On her return she settled at Emerald and continued to produce cartoons, as well as making weavings which she exhibited at local shows.
In 1936 Lilian Pedersen lived in Brisbane in order to take refresher courses with Martyn Roberts and L.J. Harvey at the Central Technical College. She produced pottery in 1936-40 and became a member of the Arts and Crafts Society of Queensland. She was noted for the variety of her exhibits at the annual exhibitions in 1937-40; needlework pictures, pottery, tapestry chairs, leatherwork, weaving and illuminated manuscripts were all mentioned in 1939. She exhibited weavings, pewter, embroidery and illuminations in the Queensland display at the NSW Society of Arts and Crafts in 1940. Independently in 1941 she showed seven illuminations; one of her illuminated books was included in the Elisabeth S öderberg Memorial exhibition in 1948. She exhibited with the Royal National Agricultural and Industrial Association (Qld) in 1937-38 and with the Australian Watercolour Institute (Sydney) from 1951.
Pedersen’s role in Queensland arts organisations was just as significant. With Mona Elliott, she founded the Half Dozen Group of Artists at Brisbane in 1941 and acted as Honorary Secretary for 31 years. The photograph of Lilian with her illuminations and Mona with her pots was taken at the Group’s inaugural exhibition, and she continued to show her craftwork and oil and watercolour paintings at the annual exhibitions until 1955. Under her direction it actively promoted art and craft in Queensland; the L.J. Harvey Drawing Prize was established in 1951 and she acted as organising secretary for the exhibitions 'Queensland Artists of Fame and Promise’ in 1955-63. In 1975 she established the biennial Andrew and Lilian Pedersen Memorial Prize for printmaking, drawing and small sculpture administered by the Queensland Art Gallery. The Gallery reciprocated. In 1982 Lilian Pedersen was presented with its inaugural Trustees’ Medal for distinguished services to art in Queensland.
Writers:
Cooke, Glenn R.
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1898
- Summary
- Ella Lilian Pedersen was a painter, illuminator, illustrator, weaver, potter, leather-worker, embroiderer, jeweller and enameller. In 1941, with Mona Elliott, she founded the Half Dozen Group of Artists in Brisbane.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1983
- Age at death
- 85
Details
Latitude-32.9186415 Longitude151.7487447 Start Date1895-01-01 End Date1983-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Hamilton, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Norman Lloyd was born on 16 October 1895 near Newcastle, NSW, where he also attended primary school. Leaving school in 1911, Lloyd started to work and study painting with Julian Ashton and James R Jackson in Sydney. On his 21st birthday in 1916 Lloyd enlisted with the Australian Imperial Forces and was transported to Europe where he was seriously wounded in battle a year later. Returning to Sydney in February 1918, he re-commenced painting lessons at the Julian Ashton Art School. From 1921 to 1926, Lloyd exhibited with galleries in Sydney and Melbourne, showing landscapes and Sydney harbour scenes painted in the more traditional style of his teachers. From 1926 to 1929 Lloyd visited Europe and travelled widely in Italy and France, exhibiting in the UK, France and Australia, culminating in a solo exhibition at Macquarie Galleries in Sydney.In the 1930s, Lloyd emigrated permanently to London with his wife Edith, setting up a boarding house in upmarket St Johns Wood and establishing himself quickly in the new society as a kind, generous and interested man with a broad horizon. His mansion became a meeting point and home for many Australian expatriates, among them painters Will Ashton , Alison Rehfisch and George Duncan . The Lloyds hosted pianist Nancy Weir, and war correspondent Harold Fyffe was a close friend who introduced Lloyd to H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw. Lloyd also established himself professionally when he was elected member of the exclusive Royal Institute of Oil Painters (ROI) in 1936 and of the London Sketch Club, over which he presided during 1941 to 1942. He also kept his connection with Australia by becoming a Fellow of the Royal Art Society of New South Wales, and in 1949 Henry Hanke’s portrait of Norman Lloyd was chosen to be hung in the Archibald Prize of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. From 1933 until 1970, Lloyd exhibited regularly with the ROI, and showed at the Royal Academy of London. The titles of his work testify of Lloyd’s love for mediterranean Europe – Italy, Spain, France, Turkey and Morocco – which inspired joyful land, sea and mountainscapes in a style that evoked impressionism. Lloyd was a prolific painter who was able to paint fast, preferring textural oil and pastels. From 1947 onwards, Lloyd spent the summers with Zénaide Chaumette – whom he had met in Paris after the war – in the heart of France in Chassignolles. This liaison strengthened his connection with France and probably led to his exhibiting at several Salons of the Société des Artistes Français from 1947 until 1962, and also at the Salon d’Hiver in Paris. After the death of Zénaide Chaumette in 1954, Lloyd was willed Chaumette’s house in Chassignolles until he died, and it seems that he moved to Chassignolles permanently in 1974, at the age of 80. It appears that he later returned to London to live and he died there on 5 March 1983. The Times of London printed a short obituary.In 1989 and 1990, Lloyd’s work was shown at Savill Galleries in Sydney alongside a number of important Australian artists. In 1990 Christopher Day Gallery, Sydney, dedicated a solo exhibition to Norman Lloyd, and 1991 saw his work hung again in a group exhibition in Deutscher Fine Art, Melbourne. Lloyd’s work is now represented in the Art Gallery of Western Australia, the Queensland Art Gallery, the University of Sydney Art Collection and numerous private collections in Australia, Europe and the United States of America.
Writers:
Banziger, Brigitte
Date written:
2008
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 16 October 1895
- Summary
- A student of Julian Ashton's, Lloyd migrated to London in 1930 where he became a member of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters and the London Sketch Club. For a time Lloyd was also the proprietor of an upmarket boarding house whose guests and associates included Australian artists Will Ashton, Alison Rehfisch and George Duncan, pianist Nancy Weir and war correspondent Harold Fyffe.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 5-Mar-83
- Age at death
- 88
Details
Latitude-33.8945061 Longitude151.1554222 Start Date1895-01-01 End Date1983-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Petersham, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- painter and illustrator, eg “Wilga” of the Arunta Tribe 1929, woodcut, ill. Josef Lebovic 1995 special collectors’ list no. 54A, cat. 36.
There is some speculation that Paul may be Dorothy Ellsmore Paul as they share the same birth and death dates according to Lebovic 1995.
This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. c.1895
- Summary
- Early 20th century painter and illustrator in Australia. Archibald Prize finalist with her painting of Walter Burley Griffin Constance moved to London and had a BBC tv series Careering with Constance about her travels overseas.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- c.1983
- Age at death
- 88
Details
Latitude52.561928 Longitude-1.464854 Start Date1893-01-01 End Date1983-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- England, UK
- Biography
- printmaker, designer and illustrator, was born in England. She studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London, specialising in wood engraving, lithography and copperplate engraving. She illustrated numerous books in the 1930s before moving to Australia in 1939. Began exhibiting with the Contemporary Group of Artists under her married name (Rees) from 1941.
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1893
- Summary
- Ann Gilmore Rees, an English printmaker, designer and illustrator, migrated to Sydney Australia in 1939. She regularly exhibited with the Contemporary Group in Sydney from 1941 onwards.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1983
- Age at death
- 90
Details
Latitude-41.19414 Longitude147.19892 Start Date1893-01-01 End Date1983-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Tunnel, Tas., Australia
- Biography
- rug-maker, was born on 25 February 1893 at Tunnel. Widowed in 1936, she brought up her nine children at Retreat in north-eastern Tasmania. Continuing the tradition of her mother, Maude Kettle began to make hooked rugs in the late 1930s and continued to do so until the mid-1970s. Most of her designs were geometric, the earliest employing straight lines while later examples incorporate circles and scrolls. Charcoal from the fire was used to draw up the designs, at first on chaff bags and later on lengths of hessian. The rugs were edged with pieces of men’s old work trousers and the fabric used in the hooked areas came from old clothes. Commercially produced rug-hooking needles were generally used, but at one time a needle was made by her son-in-law from a six-inch nail. The rugs were not made for sale but given to the children and grand-children who collected the old clothes for her.
Maude Kettle died in Launceston, Tasmania, on 1 October 1983. One of her daughters has continued the tradition of making rugs.
Writers:
McPhee, John
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 25 February 1893
- Summary
- Maude Kettle lived and worked in Tasmania. She began making hooked rugs in the late 1930s and continued until the mid-1970s, mostly in geometric designs.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1-Oct-83
- Age at death
- 90
Details
Latitude-37.8 Longitude144.9 Start Date1892-01-01 End Date1983-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Footscray, Melbourne, Vic, Australia
- Biography
- Painter, cabinetmaker and restorer of antique furniture was born in Footscray, Victoria son of a cabinetmaker from whom he learnt the trade. By eighteen Lander was foreman of a joinery workshop. He studied art at night at Gordon Technical College, Geelong, Victoria from 1909-14. His teacher was A. Anderson and his subjects included drawing, design for the applied arts, modelling and woodcarving. His friends included Arthur Streeton, McCubbin, Daryl Lindsay and others. Streeton told him to forget the detail in watercolour and concentrate on creating a mass effect. Lander went to work for Buckley & Nunn in Melbourne before enlisting in 1915. He served at Gallipoli and the Western Front and was wounded twice but survived and opened a cabinet making and furniture restoration business in Toorak. About 1937 Lander decided to paint for a living and when World War II broke out he became a camouflage officer. In 1943 was transferred to Western Australia. His wife and family came too. He and Allon Cook went on painting excursions together and exhibited together. Lander exhibited with the Perth Society of Artists in 1945, “a luminous study of water and boats, just as good as any in his just concluded show”. He exhibited watercolours and an oil painting in the 'Art Competition’ at Art Gallery of Western Australia in 1950. His entry in the Perth Prize for Contemporary Art in 1956 was a watercolour Winter Sky. Lander won the Claude Hotchin Art Prize in 1957 and 1959 and the Bunbury Prize in 1959. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Artists of South Australia in 1946 and a member of the Australian Watercolour Institute in 1964. Lander exhibited regularly in South Australia and Tasmania. His work was described by Charles Hamilton in the following way: now and then he he gives us a bit of rich and strong hue and tone as we see in 'Canal Rocks’. He has the same deliberate procedure in working out his theme step by step as we may see in his demonstrations to students and amateurs. But his style is swift and confident if unhurried, and he seldom tinkers with a painting thereby setting a good example to his students.Lander taught watercolour painting to adult education classes at the University of Western Australia in the 1960s. He had quite a following as the subject was not taught at Perth Technical College or the new art school at Western Australian Institute of Technology. Charles Hamilton wrote: “Lander’s influence on local painting rivals that of Linton and Benson, who directly and by example taught many of our painters to look for and select for themselves the material for their pictures, and to work hard at the techniques of painting through which they expressed themselves.”
Writers:
Dr Dorothy Erickson
Date written:
2010
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1892
- Summary
- Cyril George Lander was born in 1892. He was a painter, cabinetmaker and restorer of antique furniture. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Artists of South Australia in 1946 and a member of the Australian Watercolour Institute in 1964.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1983
- Age at death
- 91
Details
Latitude-37 Longitude144 Start Date1891-01-01 End Date1983-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- VIC
- Biography
- Although the exact location of her birth is contested, Maie Casey was born Ethel Marian Sumner Ryan in Victoria on 13 March 1891. Her parents were the Melbourne surgeon Sir Charles Snodgrass Ryan and Alice Sumner (Lady Ryan). Maie was the niece of the well known botanical illustrator Ellis Rowan (1848-1922) and in later life she inherited much of her aunt’s art collection.
It seems that Maie first became serious about art when she was aged in her late twenties. She was a close friend of Joan Weigall (later Lady Joan Lindsay) and during 1920s the pair shared a studio in Melbourne. This workroom was described by Joan Lindsay in her memoir Time Without Clocks (p 206):
'Before either of us was married we had shared a studio in Bourke Street somewhere near Spencer Street Station – not a party giving studio but a big dusty room – it never entered our heads to dust it – where in frenzied bursts of amateur energy we really worked away at our drawing. We even wrote a book together about the ballet dancer called Anna… When we got bored with the illustrations for Anna or painstaking drawing of Miss Minty – a professional model who only consented to sit if the poses were not what she called 'rude’ – we would take our 'Greyhounds’ (packets of cheap coloured chalks) and go off somewhere by tram sketch out of doors.’
Around this time Maie and Joan apparantely held an exhibition titled, 'The Neo-Pantechnicists’. This portentous title was, according to Maie, a 'leg-pull’, but with the support of Rosemary Reynolds and Ethel Spowers the exhibition was a sell out.
Maie later married the Australian conservative politician and diplomat, Richard (Dick) Casey in London on 24 June 1926. In 1932 Maie studied at the George Bell Art School with the modernist artist Arnold Shore in Melbourne and continued to attend classes at the art school intermittentely during the mid 1930s when she was living in Melbourne. Fellow students included Russell Drysdale, Peter Purves Smith, Geoff Jones, Sali Herman and Frances Burke. Despite being a well known student at the school, Casey was rarely mentioned in Mary Eagle and Jan Minchin’s fascinating 1981 history of the George Bell School.
During their long marriage Maie and Dick lived in many overseas postings including London, Cairo, Washington and Calcutta. During these extended residencies Maie continued to paint and draw more out of pleasure than a need to make an income. More importantly for local art Maie actively advocated Australian art while abroad. This was especially the case in Washington D.C. and London where she promoted the work of Sidney Nolan. During the 1930s Maie purchased a Picasso oil work in London titled, Le Repos (1932) which returned home with her, making it one of the first known examples of the Spanish artist’s work in Australia.
From the late 1950s there was increasing international fascination with botanical illustration. Reflecting this interest saw the publication of a biography about Maie’s aunt Ellis Rowan titled Wild Flower Hunter: the Story of Ellis Rowan by H.J. Samuel. For this publication Casey not only illustrated the book but also wrote the foreword.
On 22 September 1965 Richard Casey was appointed to the role of Governor-General, a position he held until 1969. During this period Maie publically promoted Australian art and literature and often invited local artists to visit Government House , Yarralumla and Admiralty House , Kirribilli.
In late 1972 Maie Casey and her old friend Joan Lindsay held a joint exhibition of their painting at the McClelland Gallery, Langwarrin near Mulberry Hill . This was described in Maie’s biography, Glittering Surfaces , as 'a historical rather than a commercial exhibition’.
Writers:
Clifford-Smith, Silas
Date written:
2008
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 13 March 1891
- Summary
- Maie Casey was an amateur painter, who as the wife of the Governor-General did much to support the arts both in Australia and overseas.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 20-Jan-83
- Age at death
- 92
Details
Latitude-37.8611788 Longitude144.8898569 Start Date1891-01-01 End Date1983-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Williamstown, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- botanist and educator, was born on 15 March 1891 at Williamstown, Victoria, second child of George McLennan and Eleanor, née Tucker. She lived all her life in Hawthorn where she was educated at Tintern Church of England Girls’ Grammar School. After matriculation in 1910, she studied Science at the University of Melbourne, majoring in the Biological Sciences. She was particularly interested in Botany, then taught by Professor A.J. Ewart. In Zoology she was instructed by Professor (later Sir) Baldwin Spencer, a great advocate of clear-cut scientific illustrations.
Ethel was employed by Professor Ewart as a tutor-lecturer in Botany straight after graduation in 1915; she published her first paper in 1916. She had a heavy teaching load in the small department, specialising in plant pathology and mycology. These two subjects were also the main objects of her research and she never veered from her chosen path.
McLennan focused her early interests on the endophytic fungus associated with the seed of the grass Lolium . A detailed, illustrated, scholarly study of this gained her the DSc degree in 1921. With a second publication on the same subject, she successfully entered for the David Syme Research Prize given for the best original research in Science in 1927. She was only the second woman to win the award, after Dr Georgina Sweet. She was also second to Dr Sweet in becoming a woman associate professor at Melbourne University, in 1931.
When the first Botany Department (1928) was built for Melbourne University, McLennan helped to plan and furnish the building (she had a strong influence in all departmental matters). The furnishings of the entire Department, made from Tasmanian blackwood ( Acacia melanoxylon ), reflected her taste and her advocacy of Australian timbers and other raw materials.
In charge of the Department after Professor Ewart’s death, she organised his memorial window in the Botany School, employing the Australian artists Napier and Christian Waller and choosing native flora – ground orchids – as the subject. Although disappointed not to have been appointed to the Chair, she gave the successful applicant, Professor J.S. Turner, full allegiance and support and indeed greatly helped the newcomer find his feet in the new country and flora. She trained generations of students, giving them a good grounding in the subject and fostering their research and career paths.
Dr McLennan’s own research in the 1920s was directed towards economically and agriculturally important plant diseases, finding the pathogens and suggesting treatments. During World War II she was a leading member of a team working on bio-deterioration of optical instruments, particularly those used by the Forces in the Pacific. After successful elucidation of the fungal causes, she devised remedies which were adopted by all Allied units. With the discovery of Penicillin in the 1940s, she turned to searching for Australian antibiotics, particularly in soil fungi. Her published work spans seven decades.
She was strict with her students but her sense of duty, wit and humour endeared her to all of them. She died in Melbourne aged ninety-two.
Writers:
Ducker, Sophie C.
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 15 March 1891
- Summary
- McLennan had an admirable academic career in the area of botany. She lived a full life, managing to teach and research while still maintaining her wit and sense of humour.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1983
- Age at death
- 92
Details
Latitude-34.9275 Longitude138.6 Start Date1935-01-01 End Date1982-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1935
- Summary
- Cooper was involved in motor racing as a teenager and in 1959, he designed and built the first Elfin Streamliner. In 1961, he was producing vehicles as Elfin Sports Cars. In the Formula Junior class, he designed the Elfin FJ and went on to design and build racing cars across a number of vehicle classes. Elfin Sports Cars produced some 240 vehicles until Cooper's death in 1982.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-82
- Age at death
- 47
Details
Latitude-37.823 Longitude144.998 Start Date1927-01-01 End Date1982-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Richmond, Melbourne, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- Frederick Ronald Williams was born in the inner Melbourne suburb of Richmond on 23 January 1927. On leaving school he was apprenticed to a company fitting out shops and making boxes.In later years when he was trying to establish himself in London, he would support himself by making picture frames.At the age of 16 he began classes at the National Gallery School, including painting under William Dargie. He also took painting classes with the gently modernist painter, George Bell.In 1950 he left Australia to further his studies in London. He furthered his studies at the Chelsea Art School, and also studied etching at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. His subject matter from these years was often figurative, as he drew elements of London life and music hall performers, almost in the tradition of Sickert usually on a small scale. He absorbed as much as he could from the great collections of European art, and from the start was especially influenced by the work of Cézanne.These were years of considerable poverty for him, but he wanted to absorb as much knowledge about art as he could. Patrick McCaughey wrote that bq). He would allow himself a trifling sum, say half a crown, for dinner but would frequently pass it up for an extra pint or two at the pub where Francis Bacon and his crew regularly drank.bq). In 1956 his family were able to arrange a cheap passage home on one of the ships taking visitors to the Melbourne Olympics. Back in Melbourne he saw afresh both the landscape and the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria. These were both intellectually rigorous and emotionally responsive works. His understanding of the value of imagery meant that he was a surprise omission from Bernard Smith’s polemical Antipodean exhibition – especially as it otherwise included all his closest colleagues. But Smith rejected Williams’ essentially apolitical vision. Although he had an exhibiting profile, Fred Williams was less than financially successful until after 1960. That was the year he met Lyn Watson, who was to become his wife. He also changed dealers from Australian Galleries, to the entrepreneurial Rudy Komon, who was able to effectively market his work to the new breed of corporate collectors.In 1963 the Williams family moved to Upwey in the Dandenongs, which became the subject of some of his most iconic works. He flattened the space of the scrubby bush so that it could be read in different ways. The subjects for his graphic work now included his three daughters,drawn on an intimate scale. The following year he was awarded a Helena Rubenstein Travelling Scholarship and the family travelled to Europe. On the return to Upwey Williams continued to paint the landscape around his home. There was a changed response in 1968 when bushfires threatened the house, but then he was also able to make works based on the rebirth of the land. Eight years later, he was flying to China and saw from the plane the lines of bushfires crossing the land. The drawings based on these were mingled with a new appreciation of Chinese aesthetic values.In 1969 the family moved to a house in Hawthorn which remained his home. The 1970s saw more experimental approaches to his art. He returned to painting figures, including some of the subjects from his London years. 1977 Williams was the first Australian artist to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.In 1979, on his return to Australia, Williams painted in far north Queensland, and later was encouraged by Sir Roderick Carnegie CRA to paint in the the Pilbara region in Western Australia. These brilliantly coloured gouaches and oil paintings were his last sustained body of work. In 1981 Willams was diagnosed with inoperable cancer, and died on 22 April 1982. At Williams’ funeral his friend John Brack said: bq). The work speaks to usnow, in his voice, as it will speak to those yet to come.bq).
Writers:
Staff Writer
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 23 January 1927
- Summary
- Fred Williams' paintings of the Australian landscape can be seen as a modernist reinterpretation of the Heidelberg tradition. He was a figurative artist who valued abstract qualities, a maker of figures as well as landscape. Williams was also a printmaker who made almost 300 etchings.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 22-Apr-82
- Age at death
- 55
Details
Latitude51.507222 Longitude-0.1275 Start Date1907-01-01 End Date1982-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- London, England, UK
- Biography
- Painter, art director, commercial artist was born in London to Swiss parents. Lunghi studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London and worked as a commercial artist before moving to Western Australia in 1937. He joined Gibbney & Son, later becoming Art Director. Lunghi was to hold this position for thirty-five years. He joined the Perth Society of Artists and exhibited from 1937. In 1950 Lunghi won the Thorogood Prize with Off Stage in the society’s annual exhibition. He was one of the artists who exhibited in the 'Recent Australian Painting’ at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1961. When he retired in 1972, he promptly altered his age and went to lecture in the evenings at Perth Technical College for five years. Lunghi held only three solo exhibitions. He won the 'Festival of Perth Art Exhibition’ in 1958 with his entry Boy on a Donkey now in the collection of the Art Gallery of Western Australia. His final solo exhibition was at Davro Interiors in 1973. Lunghi firmly believed that a solid academic background was required for abstraction.
Writers:
Dr Dorothy Erickson
Date written:
2010
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1907
- Summary
- John Lunghi was born in 1907. He was a painter, art director and commercial artist. He joined the Perth Society of Artists and exhibited from 1937. In 1950 Lunghi won the Thorogood Prize in the society's annual exhibition. He firmly believed that a solid academic background was required for abstraction.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1982
- Age at death
- 75
Details
Latitude-33.8805556 Longitude151.1783333 Start Date1903-01-01 End Date1982-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Forest Lodge, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
- Biography
- cartoonist, comic strip artist, theatrical scene painter and commercial artist, was born in Forest Lodge, Sydney. He attended Ultimo Technical College and studied art with J.S. Watkins. Then he began a career as a scene-painter and pictorial artist with Greater Union Theatres under Fred Finlay (w/c of Theatres Art Studio by Lyon in Burgess, p.3). Went to Queensland as a cane-cutter in 1929 'hoping to avoid the Depression’ (Sheill) but was back in Sydney in 1930 working as a freelance artist (which he continued to be all his life). He contributed cartoons and illustrations to Smith’s Weekly , the Bulletin , Guardian , Sydney Mail (including covers), the Australian Women’s Weekly , Wireless Weekly and Humour (including covers). Good caricatures made from paper cutouts were published in various papers, e.g. 'Laurel and Hardy’ for Smith’s Weekly 13 June 1939, Prime Minister Lyons for the Sunday Sun and Billy Hughes (illustrated in monograph, p.5). In June 1936 he created Humour 's first comic strip, Tootles (“a dizzy blonde”), followed in late 1938 by Shaver: A Dinkum Aussie , a strip used as the cover of the Sunnyside supplement to the Daily News .
In the late 1930s and early 1940s Lyon drew eight adventure strips for Frank Johnson publications (some listed Sheill 1998, p.120). In the early 1940s he produced Avian Tempest for Frank Douglas James. In 1945 he drew 'New Chum’ for the Syd Miller publication Monster Comic and in 1946 produced 'Tim O’Hara’ for the Daily Mirror . He created the detective comic 'The Astounding Mr Storm’ in 1954. From 1930 to 1957 he also did many covers for Western and Detective Story magazines, e.g. The Sheriff and County Jail (both which combined watercolours and oils). Lyon also painted traditional oils and watercolours, many being bush landscapes done on regular holidays in the Burragorang Valley, now flooded by the Warragamba Dam.
In November 1948 he began the adventure strip 'Black McDermitt’ in the Sydney Sun ( supplement ). Set in 1812 it 'demonstrated … that a historical subject such as the crossing of the Blue Mountains by Blaxland, Wentworth & Lawson, could be produced in an educational and entertaining manner, of interest to adults as well as children’ (Burgess, 12). Did lots of other adventure strips and magazines, children’s book illustrations, advertisements, fashion drawings, etc.
In 1957 Lyon agreed to assist Stan Cross drawing daily and weekly Wally and the Major strips (NB: there are two strips by Stan Cross and Carl Lyon, dated 1938 and c.1938 by PICMAN cataloguer (ML PXD 764), presumably misdated. Lyon solely drew the weekly strip in 1966-70 and when Cross retired in 1970 took over the daily one too, devoting himself entirely to Wally and the Major for the next ten years. Hundreds of his 1970s original strips were presented to the SLNSW by Fairfax Press c.1979 (ML Pic Acc 3088). In 1969 and 1973 his colleagues at the Sydney Savage Club presented him with the Cartoonist Award for Best Comic Strip. He retired from Wally and the Major in 1979 and died in 1982.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1903
- Summary
- Mid 20th century Sydney cartoonist, comic strip artist, theatrical scene painter and commercial artist. Worked with Stan Cross on 'Wally and the Major'
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1982
- Age at death
- 79
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1901-01-01 End Date1982-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- painter and printmaker, was born in Sydney on 13 September 1901, only daughter of Guy Ernest Huntley, an engineer who later worked on the Sydney Harbour Bridge (of which Isabel made a print in July 1930), and of Mary Edith, a sister of Andrew Barton Paterson and niece of Emily Paterson ; Miriam Moxham was her aunt.
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 13 September 1901
- Summary
- Painter and printmaker, taught at Julian Ashton's Sydney Art School, and played an active role in the Sydney Scene during the 1920s and 1930s. In the late 1930s her creative focus shifted to music.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 18-Feb-82
- Age at death
- 81
Details
Latitude-33.8583992 Longitude151.1807353 Start Date1898-01-01 End Date1982-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Balmain, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Sir Erik Ziegler Langker was born in the Sydney harbour-side district of Balmain on 3 November 1898. The artist’s father, Christian Langker (1854-1914), was a Danish sailor from Schleswig-Holstein who jumped ship in Sydney fearing that he would be conscripted into the Prussian armed forces if he returned home. In his adopted land he pursued his association with the sea and became a master mariner. Christian met an Australian woman of German heritage named Elizabeth Rebecca Ziegler (1863-1936), and the couple married in 1882. Christian and Elizabeth had a large family and Erik was their sixth and youngest child.
Langker was educated at Balmain Primary School and later attended Fort Street Boys’ High School. While at high school he showed an aptitude for art and decided to pursue it as a career. After leaving school he studied with Julian Ashton and subsequently with A. Dattilo Rubbo at the Royal Art Society School. He also studied with J.S. Watkins and the marine artists James R. Jackson and Will Ashton.
In 1921 Langker began his long association with the Royal Art Society (RAS) when he exhibited two works, Haystacks and Sunlit Hills, at their annual spring show. The following year he exhibited twelve works with them and his seascape Clouds at Evening was illustrated in the exhibition catalogue. Despite his youth, Langker’s art showed promise to the leaders of the RAS and in 1923 he was made an Associate of the Royal Art Society (ARAS) and served a one-year term on the RAS executive council.
In preparation for his first major exhibition Langker purchased a horse and old caravan so he could visit isolated rural painting spots. During May and June 1924 he exhibited sixty-nine works at his first one-man show at Anthony Hordern’s department store gallery in Sydney. The event was reviewed by several newspapers including the critic from the (Sydney) Sunday Times on 12 May 1924: “Mr Langker is to be commended for his undoubted earnestness and industry. That he will reach a high place among Australian artists would seem highly probable from the present show.”
During 1928 Langker became one of the first Australian artists to be heard on the newly developed medium of radio. He gave several lectures on art and other subjects for the Sydney radio station 2FC. In August 1928 he exhibited forty works at Ormsby’s Galleries in Pitt Street, Sydney. He garnered a positive review in the Sydney Morning Herald (16 August 1928), but received a mixed notice from the influential landscape artist and journalist Howard Ashton ( Sun , 18 August 1928). In 1932 his oil Gathering Clouds was purchased by the (then National) Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW). Five further images were purchased by the AGNSW during the 1940s and 50s.
On 1 December 1928 Langker married Alice Pollock. The couple had two children, Robert Ziegler Langker (1929-2010), and Elizabeth Diana Langker (b. 1932). By 1934 the Langkers had built a cottage in Wollstonecraft, Sydney, which they named 'Lombardy’. Despite the Italian name of the house, Langker never travelled overseas and, according to his family, he had a lifelong fear of cars, boats and aeroplanes. Despite this he was a regular user of public transport and would accept lifts in cars.
In late life Langker described himself as a “middle period” painter of the impressionist school ( North Shore Times , 3 December 1980). His work was primarily in landscape painting with popular subjects including coastal scenes, cloud studies, and formally arranged flower portraits. His daughter tells that he especially enjoyed painting at Narrabeen Lakes (northeast of Sydney) where his friend, the artist Sydney Long, had a weekend cottage. Other favoured painting spots included the south coast of NSW, Tumut, and around the bays of Sydney Harbour. While never a keen traveller, Langker once visited the Barrier Reef on a painting tri
While painting was his main love, Langker supplemented his income for many years by working as an art valuer for the London and Lancashire Insurance Company. By the early 1930s Langker was re-appointed to the RAS executive council, a position he held for the rest of his life. As well as his council responsibilities he was also a regular exhibitor with the Society, and in 1936 he was awarded a Fellowship of the Royal Art Society (FRAS), the group’s highest honour. In 1941 Langker was appointed joint Vice-President of the RAS with Sydney Long.
The late 1930s and early 1940s was a dynamic period within the Australian visual arts where realists battled with modernists for patronage and attention. After the retirement of long-time RAS President William Lister Lister in 1942, the leadership of the RAS was taken on by artist and reviewer Howard Ashton, who had been publicly critical of Langker’s early career work. During Ashton’s leadership the RAS took a defiant conservative stance against the increasing influence of modernism within the visual arts. In 1946 Langker replaced Ashton as President of the RAS, a position he held up to the time of his death. More progressive in his opinions than his predecessor, Langker set a more tolerant tone in the RAS during the post-war period, as can be seen in his 'Foreword’ to the 1952 RAS annual exhibition catalogue:
The Art here will, no doubt, be described by some critics as 'Conservative’ and this is so in the true sense of the word. We desire to conserve those qualities and standards which we believe to be necessary foundations of the pictorial arts. While we believe that experimentation is necessary, we do not depart too far to the left or right and the Society, for this reason, has been described as the “Centre of Gravity of Art” in this State.
In 1947, after the resignation of Sydney Ure Smith, Langker was appointed a trustee of the (then National) Art Gallery of NSW, a position he held until 1974. He worked well with the institution’s modernist post-war Director, Hal Missingham, and in 1958 was appointed Vice President of Trustees. Subsequently, in 1961 he was promoted to President of the Trustees. During his time on this board the AGNSW became increasingly welcoming of new modern styles of art. Langker acted as a mentor to emerging artists and musicians and advised them “to do what you have to do with zest” ( North Shore Times , 3 December 1980). His best-known pupil was Victor Cusack who painted two paintings a week for Langker’s approval during the late 1950s.
In 1952 Langker held his last one-man show at the Grosvenor Galleries in George Street, Sydney. The exhibition included thirty-one works and the show was opened by his friend B.J. Waterhouse. A mid-career assessment of his work came from Herbert E. Badham, the modernist artist and author of A Study of Australian Art , (1949, p. 152):
It is a long step from the “modern” to Erik Langker who renders landscape as did his fathers, literally and with respect to the broad Impressionist principles introduced to Australia by Tom Roberts. This is quite legitimate because much lovely subtlety and vital understanding of nature’s ageless facts are neglected in the restless search for new expressions. Langker has found enough significance for his practice in the painting of forty years ago, and aims to show the public what it is likely to miss by the pursuit of what seem to him false interests. His painting is direct, with some bravura and self-confidence.
Although best known as an oil painter, Langker also worked with watercolour. One such work, River Reflections, was purchased by the AGNSW in 1948. In 1970 Langker wrote an article in Art and Australia on the watercolourist G.K. Townshend ( March 1970, pp 338-341).
As well as his love of painting, Langker had a love of music and the theatre. He enjoyed playing the piano and wrote several compositions for the instrument. In 1949 he became actively involved in organisations that led to the establishment of the Australian Opera. He was also chairman of the Independent Theatre in Sydney. According to his obituary in Art and Australia , Langker “is regarded as one of the four pioneers of the Sydney Opera House the others being Clarice Lorenz, Joseph Post and Sir Eugene Goossens.”
While a trustee of the AGNSW, Langker was made an Ordinary Member of the British Empire (OBE), and in 1968 he was awarded a knighthood (Kt) for services to the arts. Although Langker was deserving of these honours, some family members have suggested that he was nominated for his knighthood by the NSW Liberal Party Premier, Robert Askin, after Langker (as president of the AGNSW trustees) allowed the Sydney Gallery to be used as the principal venue for the 1966 visit of USA President, Lyndon B. Johnson.
While his main exhibiting career ended in the 1950s, Langker continued to paint and show with the RAS up to 1980. While the rival Society of Artists disbanded during the 1960s, Langker’s major achievement with the RAS was maintaining the relevance of the Society during a period of radical cultural change. During his RAS presidency he purchased two houses in North Sydney, which, after conversion, became the new exhibiting headquarters of the Society. He was proud of his achievements at the RAS and the AGNSW and often judged regional art shows as well as the annual Archibald and Wynne competitions. Langker became ill in 1980, and died on 3 February 1982.
Writers:
Silas Clifford-Smith
Date written:
2010
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 3 November 1898
- Summary
- Erik Langker was an influential member of the Sydney art establishment during the middle decades of the twentieth century. As well as being a leading arts administrator he was also a distinguished landscape and still-life painter.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 3-Feb-82
- Age at death
- 84
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1897-01-01 End Date1982-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1897
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 17-Apr-82
- Age at death
- 85
Details
Latitude-34.9275 Longitude138.6 Start Date1896-01-01 End Date1982-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Kent Town, Adelaide, SA, Australia
- Biography
- former actress and elocution artist from childhood, turned theatre designer, cartoonist and illustrator, stage and film actress, was employed as a wellpaid commercial artist by David Jones department store in the mid 1920s. Wanda drew illustrations in Home c.1924-27, her subjects being social events like the David Jones’ Ball (1 June 1924, 58A) or people at a gymkhana (cover, 1 November 1924). Blanche Wanda Radford, was daughter of the secretary of R Radford the A.B.C.Cafe in Pitt street Sydney, later manager of Tattersalls (George Adams) Hotel in Sydney for 15 years, also manager of the Grand Hotel, Mildura. Showing precocious talent as a reciter and performer Wanda was sent for training under elocution teacher Mr A.B. Flohm in Ballarat and left for further studies and performances in Germany under her parent’s care in 1905. The family had relatives in Germany. Her carreer was followed by Australian newspapers.The Adelaide observer__23 March 1907 reporting she had been employed by the German Kaiser to give his children acting lessons. Wanda had a number of successful concerts and stage roles and became a film actress by 1916 under the name Beryl Bryan. Wanda had been sketching and designing since her teens turned to art studies after WWI. She returned to work in Sydney for David Jones’ in the 1920s but appears to have ceased work by the 1930s possibly spending time in America she was living in Sydney in 1946. Radford remained unmarried until her death in 1982.
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Writers:
Staff Writer
newtog
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2022
- Born
- b. 22 June 1896
- Summary
- Illustrator and Cartoonist, 1920s. Radford's subjects were social events like the David Jones' Ball. Appears to withdraw from public life and work in the 1930s
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 16-Aug-82
- Age at death
- 86
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1895-01-01 End Date1982-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- sculptor, was born in Sydney on 1 October 1895, daughter of William McArthur Mayo, an insurance executive, and Lila Mary, née Jaxelby. The family moved to Brisbane where Daphne attended the Eton High School at Hamilton before studying for a Diploma in Art Craftsmanship at the Brisbane Central Technical College in 1911-13, specialising in modelling under L.J. Harvey. In 1914 she was awarded the first Wattle Day Travelling Art Scholarship. When her departure was delayed by the outbreak of war she attended Julian Ashton 's Sydney Art School and worked with an Ipswich (Qld) stonemason, Frank Williams.
Arriving at London in 1919, she worked as an assistant to the sculptor John Angel before being admitted to the Sculpture School of the Royal Academy. Upon graduation in 1923, she was awarded the gold medal for sculpture and the Edward Stott Travelling Scholarship. For the next two years she toured France and Italy, beginning her travels with fellow Brisbane student Lloyd Rees , to whom she became engaged in 1923 although no marriage eventuated. Mayo returned to Brisbane in 1925 and resolved to pursue an independent career in her home city. She never married. She soon received large sculptural commissions, which were carved in situ, including the Brisbane City Hall tympanum (1927-30), the Queensland Women’s War Memorial, Anzac Square (1929-32) and relief panels for the original chapel at Mount Thompson Crematorium (1934).
She performed equally monumental feats to promote art in Queensland, suspending her sculptural work for much of 1934-35 in order to do so. Her vision was shared with her friend, the painter Vida Lahey . In 1927 they founded the Queensland Art Fund to purchase contemporary British works for the Queensland Art Gallery; in 1936 they established the state’s first Art Reference Library. In 1931 Mayo obtained for the Queensland Art Gallery its first major monetary bequest, the Godfrey Rivers Bequest, with which contemporary Australian works were acquired, initially through prize exhibitions. Her major feat for art in Queensland came in 1935 when she led a public appeal for the £10,000 needed to secure the John Darnell Bequest for Queensland University. For her public service she was awarded the Society of Artists’ medal in 1938 and the MBE in 1959.
Mayo travelled in Europe, the USA and Canada in 1938-39 to observe modern developments in sculpture. On her return she moved to Sydney in search of a more stimulating environment and to undertake the bronze doors for the Public Library of NSW (1940-42). She worked speculatively on small-scale sculpture, experimented with ceramics and exhibited regularly with the Society of Artists until 1958. With Lyndon Dadswell and Arthur Fleischmann , she staged the Three Sculptors exhibition in 1946, Sydney’s first sculpture exhibition for years. The Olympian was acquired in 1949 by the Felton Bequest (NGV), but the mainstay of her late career were her portrait commissions.
Appointed Queensland Art Gallery’s first woman trustee in 1960, Mayo resumed living in Brisbane and undertook her last large commission, a statue of Sir William Glasgow (1961-64). Her public career of extraordinary tenacity and courage ended in 1967 when she resigned her post as trustee, voicing her disapproval of the Gallery’s administration. She stayed in Brisbane in her retirement while maintaining her Sydney studio.
Mayo died on 31 July 1982. A retrospective exhibition of her sculpture was held at the University Art Museum, Brisbane, in 1981. Her work is widely represented in Australian state and provincial galleries. {Bronzes of “Banjo” Paterson and his creation, The Jolly Swagman, are in the main street of Winton, Qld, home of the Waltzing Matilda legend. The NPG has her bronze portrait bust of {Lahey?}.
Writers:
McKay, Judith
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1 January 1895
- Summary
- Stronger than the stone she carved, this widely collected female artist's promotion of the arts rivalled her international sculpting career, by setting up several bequests and the first Art Reference Library in Queensland.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 31-Jul-82
- Age at death
- 87
Details
Latitude50.8036831 Longitude-1.075614 Start Date1890-01-01 End Date1982-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Portsmouth, England, UK
- Biography
- painter, was born on 17 December 1890 at Portsmouth, England, seventh of the eight children of John White (d.1910), a sculptor, and his wife Sophia, née Welch (1850-1943). Winifred studied at the Portsmouth and Gosport Schools of Art and was awarded a three year scholarship to the Royal College of Art, London, but was unable to take up the offer. In Portsmouth during World War I she was employed as a press illustrator for the Evening News and Hampshire Telegraph and Post . She also undertook portrait commissions and conducted private art classes.
Late in 1918 Winifred White moved to London. In 1921 she married Alfred Towers (1895-1980), a telegraphist on the headquarters’ ship of a North Sea trawling fleet operating out of Hull. Winifred Towers spent the next six years in London working as a commercial artist, mainly in advertising, for firms such as Muller Blatchley. During this period she also worked with the cartoonist Millar Watt.
In 1926 Alfred Towers migrated to Australia, settling at Glenel, a dairy property situated on the Nogo River, near Abercorn in the Upper Burnett region of Queensland. The following year he was joined by his wife and in 1928 by the artist’s mother, sisters and several other family members. Alfred and Winifred Towers spent the next thirteen years at Glenel, moving to Brisbane in 1940. During World War II Alfred served as a telegraphist in the Royal Australian Air Force. Following his discharge in 1945, the couple built a cottage at Sunnybank, on the southern outskirts of Brisbane, where they farmed a small property for a livelihood.
Over the next two decades Winifred Towers gradually established herself as a talented and accomplished painter in oil and watercolour. Her subject matter embraced still life, landscape, portraiture and figure studies. She also engaged successfully in book illustration, her most important work being for the children’s book Little Words to God by Maureen C. Meadows (Sydney 1949).
Towers first exhibited in Australia in 1937, with the Royal Queensland Art Society, and continued to show intermittently at their annual exhibitions until 1949. Between 1945 and 1972 her work was included regularly in the annual exhibitions of the Half Dozen Group of Artists (its founder Lilian Pedersen became a close friend) and she served as vice-president in 1947-48. Two of her paintings were included in the Commonwealth Jubilee Celebration Exhibition of Queensland Art (Queensland Art Gallery, 1951). In the late 1950s she exhibited with the Fellowship of Australian Artists in Melbourne. Although she never returned to England, she maintained links with her homeland through membership of the Portsmouth and Southsea Art Clubs and the Portsmouth Art Grou
The artist died in Brisbane on 28 February 1982, aged ninety-one. Her works are held by the Queensland Art Gallery and Queensland University of Technology Art Collection, Brisbane.
Writers:
Rainbird, Stephen
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 17 December 1890
- Summary
- Oil and watercolour painter, illustrator of children's book by Maureen C. Meadows 'Little Words to God' (Sydney, 1949). Regularly exhibited with the Half Dozen Group of Artists, where she served as vice-president in 1947-48, was included as well in major national art surveys such as the Commonwealth Jubilee Celebration Exhibition of Queensland Art and the Fellowship of Australian Artists in 1951.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 28-Feb-82
- Age at death
- 92
Details
Latitude-27.467778 Longitude153.028056 Start Date1890-01-01 End Date1982-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Brisbane, Qld, Australia
- Biography
- Florence Eleanor Bland was born in Brisbane on 22 April 1890, the only daughter of Charles Edwin Bland and Margaret Ann née Murtagh. She was educated in Ipswich and later exhibited with the Ipswich Technical College at the Queensland National Association in 1905. She enrolled at the Central Technical College in 1914 where she received an honours for Painting I and later began pottery classes at the College in 1923 with L. J. Harvey. She worked in association with fellow potter Mrs Littlejons. She exhibited pottery 1925-28 at the Arts and Crafts Society of Queensland where in 1927 a “toilet set in a soft dull green tone” received special comment and at the Royal National Agricultural and Industrial Association 1923-29 where she was awarded several prizes.
In 1928 her vessel with scraffito decoration received special comment from L. J. Harvey who acted as the judge of the pottery section. It, and a work by Kitty Collings were described as “. . . admirable examples of work with two clays, which had only recently been done.” This particular vase was reproduced in the 1983 publication 'L. J. Harvey & his School’ (p. 40). A note by Florence Bland was inserted in the vase which stated it was the first example of double scraffito work and that it was her idea to attempt such a piece. There is no reason to doubt this assertion as other suggestions by students were taken on board by Harvey and incorporated into the School style. Double scraffito is one of the most complex decorative techniques produced by the Harvey School in Brisbane.
Florence Bland numbered her pieces consecutively and while she produced only 80 plus works this is a considerable output for a member of the Harvey School. She had ceased making pottery prior to her marriage to Ernest S. O’Riley on 2 October 1942 and died in Brisbane on 22 March 1982.
Queensland Art Gallery: Research Curator, Queensland Heritage
Writers:
Cooke, Glenn R.
Note: Research Curator, Queensland Heritage, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Qld
Date written:
2003
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 22 April 1890
- Summary
- Florence Bland was one of the most accomplished potters of the Harvey School. She is credited with being the first to attempt the double scraffito technique, one of the most complex decorative techniques produced by the Harvey School.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 22-Mar-82
- Age at death
- 92
Details
Latitude-24.8653253 Longitude152.3516785 Start Date1913-01-01 End Date1981-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Bundaberg, Qld., Australia
- Biography
- Frank Fox was born in Bundaberg, Queensland, and was apprenticed to design firms in Melbourne and Sydney. He also studied through the International Correspondence School (ICS), then moved to London in 1939 for further study. After the Second World War, in 1946, he set up his own 'commercial and industrial design’ practice in Sydney, Frank Fox and Associates (also known as Frank R. Fox), specialising in store design and remodelling hospitality venues. Some of his early projects included Oxford Square, Central Square, the Crest Hotel and the Granville RSL Club. He also completed redesigns of the Searles flower shop at 104 King Street and Penguin book Shop at Hosking Place (then existing between Pitt and Castlereagh Streets), Sydney. He also worked in Queensland, Victoria. In the late 1960s, he began to develop Old Sydney Town, a tourist attraction on rural land near Gosford, which recreated Sydney Cove during its early years of settlement as a British colony. The Town opened in 1975 and was sold to the NSW Government and Bank of New South Wales before Fox retired in 1976.
Sources—'Two Shops with A Narrow Frontage: Searle’s Flower Shop, Penguin Book Shop’, in Decoration and Glass,November-December 1948, pp. 12–13.—'Modern Basement Cafe’, Decoration and Glass, Mau-June 1948, pp. 20-21.—'The architect founder of Old Sydney Town’, in The Sydney Morning Herald (Obituary), 23 May 1981.
Writers:
Michael Bogle
Davina Jackson
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2016
- Born
- b. 1913
- Summary
- Frank Fox was an architect (perhaps not registered?), industrial designer and interior designer who initially was successful as the designer of late 1940s and early 1950s shops and restaurants, but became best known as the entrepreneur who created Old Sydney Town, a tourist attraction which opened in 1975 and recreated the buildings and cultural life of the waterfront convict settlement of Sydney's The Rocks district.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1981
- Age at death
- 68
Details
Latitude59.4372155 Longitude24.7453688 Start Date1912-01-01 End Date1981-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Tallinn, Estonia
- Biography
- cartoonist and illustrator, the 'incomprehensible wild wee man from Estonia’ (Stewart, 36) was born in Tallinn, son of a jeweller. His father migrated to Australia with his family after losing a fortune at the beginning of the Depression. They reached Sydney in 1929 and Hardtmuth (also spelt Hardmut or Hartmut) enrolled at ESTC, where he was christened 'Hotpoint’ by Mollie Horseman (usually shortened to 'Hotti’ or 'Hottie’), as he reminded his lifelong friend on an annotated photograph he sent her for Christmas in 1970. Lahm sold his first cartoon to the Sydney Mail while still a student, the second two years later. During the 1930s he took whatever freelance work was offered, contributing both to Smith’s Weekly and the Bulletin . In 1934 he created two comic strips for Fatty Finn’s Weekly . After it folded in 1935, he travelled around the country drawing caricatures of pub customers at two shillings a sketch but claimed he spent most of his earnings shouting his offended subjects drinks (Ryan 74).
He returned to Sydney and in December 1936 began work as a general cartoonist for the Sun- Associated Newspapers Group, drawing covers, caricatures and cartoons for their various publications. He contributed to K.G. Murray’s Man for its entire existence (December 1936 to May 1974), where he – and the magazine itself – was renowned for the piddling dog 'Snifter’, born in 1937 and continued until Man 's demise (ill. Lindesay WWW , 139). As well as pissing on the back page of Man for over thirty years, Snifter acquired a life of his own in numerous anthologies. Lahm also drew many other cartoons for Man , especially during the first decades, e.g. coloured April 1948 cover of animals boarding the ark with an elderly gent with flowers accompanying the wolf (ill. Lindesay, WWW , 142). Man cartoons in file include one of a man looking into a mirror while seated beside a cross female on a desert island (March 1937, 37), Hitler as a boy in class saluting (April 1937, 95) and Hitler walking through the glove department of a store with all the gloves saluting him (September 1938, 15).
The comic strip David and Dawn (one original strip AGWA – possibly also in ML?), written by George Edwards and illustrated by Lahm, appeared in the centre pages of Smith’s Weekly 4-page comic book supplement published in 1938-39 in an unsuccessful effort to stave off falling circulation. It then became a radio serial on 2UW, which led to various books illustrated by Lahm, including David and Dawn with George Edwards in Fairyland and David and Dawn with George Edwards under the Southern Cross . The latter marked the first appearance of an Aboriginal piccaninny, Tuckonie of the Arrente tribe, a supporting character who became a star in Edwards’s subsequent and far more successful radio 2UW serial, The Search for the Golden Boomerang . It too resulted in a number of books illustrated by Lahm in 1941-46.
For the Sunday Sun he wrote and drew the strip Snowy McGann (1951-54), an ultimately unsuccessful replacement for Ginger Meggs after Bancks moved from Associated Newspapers to Frank Packer’s Sunday Telegraph (the comic relief in Snowy is provided by 'Pistol Packer’). He also illustrated numerous books, e.g. Musette Morrell, The Antics of Algy , col. plates & or. 1-col. illustrated by Hartmut Lahm , A/R, Sydney, 1946, pp.69.
An undated Smith’s Weekly original, There’s no need for me to go home early, my husband doesn’t eat breakfast , was donated to ML (PXD 840) in 1999 by the wife of a former reporter, along with over 20 originals by other Smith’s artists and a copy of the final issue (28 October 1950) signed by them all. 111 original cartoons and 15 caricatures by Lahm dated 1934-60 are in the ML Bulletin collection. An original 1965 Lahm cartoon is at ML PXD 764, while the NLA has the pen, ink and watercolour original of 'Time you decided who you’re going to listen to…” (NLA R11404), published in Man in September 1963. 19 originals acquired from the proprietors of the Sun-Herald are in the AGWA, including several caricatures, e.g. “Modern Art Bah!” Jimmy McDonald, Director Art Gallery of New South Wales (957/D288). From their titles others appear to be more general, e.g. The end of the war! or ration books, a Panorama of Sydney on V.J. day (957/D374) and The Gum-tree Gully Show! 1941 (AGWA 957/D371).
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1912
- Summary
- Mid 20th century Sydney cartoonist and illustrator, an "incomprehensible wild wee man from Estonia", creator of 'Man' magazine's Snifter
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1981
- Age at death
- 69
Details
Latitude50.7834973 Longitude-0.6730718 Start Date1912-01-01 End Date1981-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Bognor Regis, Sussex, England
- Biography
- Sir George Russell Drysdale was born on 7 February 1912 at Bognor Regis in England. His father, also called George Russell Drysdale who led a private life, was the son of George Russell, the pioneer pastoralist who had with his brothers established the Pioneer Sugar mill on the Burdekin River in far north Queensland. His mother, Isobel Gates, was English. In 1919 the family returned to Australia, to the Pioneer plantation. Then, in 1923 they moved to Melbourne where the young Tas, as he was called by family and friends, was sent to Geelong Grammar School. In 1929, his last year of school, Drysdale was discovered to have a detached retina in one eye. As a way of encouraging him to focus, he was given extensive drawing lessons, five days a week.The following year he stayed on another family property at Boxwood, in the Riverina district to help with the shearing before travelling north to Pioneer. His first European travel as an adult was with his uncle Cluny Drysdale in 1931. On his return to Australia he had decided to be a farmer, and settled on the family farm at Boxwood.However when he was in Melbourne recovering from a further eye operation, his surgeon showed some of his drawings to Daryl Lindsay, who suggested that he take art classes with George Bell. When Bell encouraged him to look at modern (Post-Impressionist) art, Drysdale was less than impressed. However on his next journey to Europe in 1932, he saw enough modern art to convince him to move towards a more liberated style, albeit one firmly based in the European academic tradition.In 1935 he married Elizabeth (Bon) Stephen, a friend of Macquarie Gallery’s Lucy Swanton, who encouraged him in his art. After further eye surgery Drysdale renewed his classes with George Bell, and became a friendly rival with fellow student Peter Purves Smith.In 1938 they travelled again to London and Drysdale enrolled in classes with Iain Macnab at the Grosvenor School. He also joined Peter Purves Smith in his Paris studio and painted there with him. The threat of war caused them to return to Australia. In Melbourne Drysdale shared George Bell’s studio, but disliked the acrimonious politics of the Contemporary Art Society. He was now blind in one eye and was not allowed to enlist in the army. Instead he tried managing Boxwood, but realised that he lacked the necessary skills so the family moved to Sydney, and art. The 1940s to the early 1960s were his most productive years. He travelled to the old gold mining town of Hill End and neighbouring Sofala and immortalised the sparse townships of the outback. He drew the devastation of the El Nino drought of the 1940s and turned it into Henry Moore influenced deep red-toned landscape paintings. He honoured the aspirations of the Aboriginal people of the far north, and the harsh life of outback Australians.He did not ignore the family business. In 1947 he joined the Board of Pioneer Sugar Mills, and often visited the property up north which he called his bq). Spiritual homebq). . Russell Drysdale, along with Sidney Nolan, came to characterise the international face of Australian art in the early 1950s. He had frequent successful exhibitions in London, and his work was purchased by both the Tate and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In 1960 the Art Gallery of New South Wales organised the first scholarly retrospective of his work.His private life was not so fortunate. The suicide of his son Tim in July 1962 was followed by that of his wife Bon in November 1963. Seven months later he married Maisie, the widow of his friend Peter Purves Smith. They bought land outside Gosford on the NSW Central Coast, and there built Bouddi Farm, a place to live and to work. There was little art made in his last years, but he was active as both a member of the Commonwealth Art Advisory Board and the Trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. He was knighted for his services to art in 1969 and died of cancer on 29 June 1981.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 7 February 1912
- Summary
- Russell Drysdale painted some of the iconic landscapes of the Australian outback, and in the 1940s his paintings and drawings enabled city people to see the devastation of drought on a dry land. His modernism was sufficiently muted to enable him to be accepted by many conservatives, and the exotic nature of his subject matter led to significant international success.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 29-Jun-81
- Age at death
- 69
Details
Latitude-33.7718546 Longitude151.0745367 Start Date1911-01-01 End Date1981-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Epping, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- The younger son of pioneer watercolourist Jesse Jewhurst Hilder, Brett Hilder was born in Epping, Sydney, in 1911. His father died when he was young and he was raised by his mother. As a young man he was offered free tuition from his father’s friend and mentor Julian Ashton, but declined the offer. In 1927 he joined Burns Philp & Company and, as one of their sailors, travelled to the Dutch East Indies and the South Pacific Islands. A decade later he became a ship’s master, and during World War II, taught navigation to Australian air crews and later flew Catalina flying boats for the Royal Australian Air Force.
After the war Hilder returned to his former profession and commanded vessels between Sydney and the Solomon Islands. During the war he started painting and drawing, creating many watercolour landscapes and portraits of the people and places he visited. These were exhibited in Sydney (1950) and Melbourne (1951). He also had shows in Port Moresby, Honiara and New York during the 1950s and 60s. He also exhibited his work with the Australian Watercolour Institute and the Royal Art Society of NSW.
Hilder wrote extensively on navigation and his travels for magazines such as Walkabout . In 1961 he wrote Navigator in the South Seas . Captain Hilder also founded the Australian Institute of Navigation and in 1964 became Senior Captain of Company with Burns Philp Ltd.
His interest in his father’s art career saw him write The Heritage of J.J. Hilder . This work was published in 1966 (the fiftieth anniversary of his father’s death) and supported a national touring exhibition of his father’s work organized by the Queensland Art Gallery. In this book Hilder corrected errors made in earlier texts about his father’s career, and also produced an expanded list of his father’s works. The 1966 book also included profiles of his artist brother Bim Hilder, and his own work. Brett Hilder died on the 9 April 1981.
Writers:
Silas Clifford-Smith
Date written:
2009
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 27 March 1911
- Summary
- The son of artist J.J. Hilder, Brett Hilder was a painter, author and distinguished sailor.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 9-Apr-81
- Age at death
- 70
Details
Latitude53.9825271 Longitude-1.385249993 Start Date1909-01-01 End Date1981-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Yorkshire, England, UK
- Biography
- black-and-white artist, was born and worked in Melbourne. He specialised in caricatures of celebrities connected with the theatre and was caricaturist on Table Talk in the early 1930s when Percy Leason was the cartoonist. Parker lived in London from 1936, where he drew for the Bystander and Tatler . He revisited Australia in 1952. Andrea Hull emails (1999): 'Mary Cecil Allen’s 1935/36 scrapbook contains a terrific cartoon of his, with the caption “A very sophisticated time bomb. Mary Cecil Allen clad for cocktails, is let loose in local society”’.
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 15 March 1909
- Summary
- A mid 20th century Melbourne and London caricaturist, Parker specialised in caricatures of celebrities connected with the theatre.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- Mar-81
- Age at death
- 72
Details
Latitude-33.88477 Longitude151.22621 Start Date1909-01-01 End Date1981-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Paddington, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- cartoonist, illustrator, painter, sculptor and art critic, was born in Paddington, Sydney. He studied art at the J.S. Watkins School and East Sydney Technical College. In 1925, aged 16, he became a cadet artist on the Evening News (Sydney), then went to the Daily Guardian ('as little finger to the editor’s right hand’) where he 'filled the paper with half column blocks until it looked like “Comic Cuts”. Later drew a comment on the daily news strip.’ For the Sunday Guardian he illustrated Colin Wills’ Rhymes of Sydney (1933) with excellent modernist drawings (reproduced in Spearritt and in Kirkpatrick xv). He 'was sold with the “Guardian” to the Sydney Sun ', but the managing editor was said to dislike his work and he was sacked. He then drew cartoons for the Sunday News and the World , e.g. 'How Phar Lap’s American Path Could Be Made Easier’ 24 November 1931, 2. After the Depression he resurrected a news strip on the latter, which lasted for about a year. He also contributed to Smith’s Weekly , e.g. 'He did wrong by our Nell’ (a cubist artist painting a pretty young thing) 25 April 1931, 4.
WEP’s early illustrations were modernist and innovative but he is far better known as a jovial Australian Women’s Weekly illustrator, e.g. Cup Parade 7 November 1956 (ill. Lindesay WWW , 136), and Saturday Night (large coloured original Mitchell Library [ML] V*CART). He began working on the Weekly as an illustrator, e.g. 'No longer a delicately-reared young woman, she was now a throw-back to the primitive female. Her civilisation was only a veneer’ (girl clobbering a Native American with a hammer) 13 July 1935, p.7, but then became known for the long-running strip 'In and Out of Society’, for which he prepared the first mock-up dummy in June 1933. He is also remembered for his illustrations to the comic writings of Lennie Lower, first published in the Weekly in the 1930s and later in book form (e.g. Here’s Luck A&R, 1930, 11 reprints, new edn 1955 with at least two reprints, including a 1957 edition).
In the 1940s WEP drew illustrations for the service magazine Salt , e.g. “What! No letters, blokes?” 1944 (ill. Lindesay 1979, 268), and he illustrated stories in Australia: National Journal . His war cartoons mainly appeared in the Sydney Daily Telegraph – including the Sunday edition – where he was also the regular art critic. The original of his DT caricature showing all the protagonists in the 1944 Archibald Prize court case over William Dobell’s portrait of Joshua Smith, with Dobell being interrogated by Garfield Barwick, was in 'Artists and Cartoonists in Black and White’ in 1999 (borrowed from Bridget Mcdonnell Gallery, Melbourne, but held in p.c).
WEP began working at the Telegraph as an illustrator, drew a news-strip then was appointed relieving editorial cartoonist after the war, which was later made permanent. His many post-war illustrations include those in Nino Culotta’s They’re a Weird Mob (Ure Smith, Sydney 1957) and in Cyril Pearl’s So, You Want To Buy A House? (Cheshire, Melbourne 1961). Five original 1960s-70s works are at ML PXD 764.
As a painter Pidgeon won prizes in the 'Australia at War’ exhibition in 1945, and he won the Archibald Prize three times (1958, 1961 and 1969). He finally retired from newspaper work disillusioned with its lack of status and freedom, though he continued to illustrate books. His article 'What price independence?’ in the final issue of Australian Artist (2/2, winter 1949, 12-15) was a bitter commentary about restrictions on the cartoonist:
“The proper degree of independence of the cartoonist is complete independence -without it there is no passion, and without passion, no greatness. (In an effort to avoid the friction that striving after independence causes, the tendency today is to get closer and closer to a comic gag drawing on local and topical affairs.) ...
“The daily life of the people is today reflected back to them in terms of gentle, even inane satire. Jocularity is wearing out a million pencils and the straight cartoon is as rare as a bonus.”
As a result:
“An enormous amount of cartoon work is done to a type of formula that simply cannot be adapted to a serious theme. Even the solidly based handling of Low can look merely theatrical. In any case the hackneyed symbols of weeping nations and broken men seem to me mawkish and as subjects appropriate more to the music hall than to a newspaper. However Dyson, and at times Finey, can achieve dignity in this line.
“Practically all cartoonists in Australia have drifted into this work from other phases of newspaper art. First as temporary, later as permanent, replacements of someone else. Editors seem to entertain the notion that because a man draws, he is a veritable fountain-head of ideas, both political and funny. Certainly to be any sort of cartoonist an artist must have a journalistic mind…
“The insistence on the journalistic approach places the prime emphasis on the idea of the cartoon.
“This is often carried to the conclusion that the idea is all that matters and that the drawing is sufficient even if it only just adequately interprets the thought.
“All of which militates against the production of good draughtsmanship.”
WEP died in February 1981. His widow, Dorothy, was still alive in 1996, living in Northwood.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Peter Pidgeon
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 1909
- Summary
- Popular mid 20th century Sydney cartoonist, illustrator, painter, sculptor and art critic. Pidgeon won the Archibald Prize three times - in 1958, 1961 and 1969, but is probably best known for his work as an illustrator on the Australian Women's Weekly.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- Feb-81
- Age at death
- 72
Details
Latitude-27.467778 Longitude153.028056 Start Date1904-01-01 End Date1981-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Brisbane, Queensland, Australia
- Biography
- cartoonist, painter, illustrator and journalist, was born and raised in Brisbane. He studied art at Brisbane Technical College. In the late 1920s he began sending work to the Bulletin , e.g. (two flappers) A Single Thought . '“I simply adore George.”/ “So does he”’ 1927 (ill. Rolfe, 270); The Soft Answer. 'Irate Wife: “However did I come to marry such a perfect idiot?”/ Humble Husband: “Just because I was such a perfect idiot, dear!”’ Bulletin 1928, original ink cartoon, QAG (ill. Radford, 71) – not as sinister as others in the Bulletin ; The philosopher. “Was it a very fashionable wedding?”/ The flapper: “Fashionable! Why even the champagne bottles wore garlands of frangipani”’ 1929 (ill. Rolfe, 280); (very Beardsley-like androgynous pair in top hats, veils and long cloaks) Dreams/ MEG: “Are you thinking of buying anything?”/ PEG: “No – not a thing.”/ MEG: “Oh well, then, let’s go and look at something frightfully expensive”’ 30 March 1929; How Percival Felt About It (small groom and large bride, very stylishly drawn) n.d. (ill. Rolfe, 262). ML Bulletin collection has five original drawings 1929-30 and 40 caricatures 1929-37, including one of Ann Weinholt’s father.
Gall is said to have begun drawing for the Brisbane Courier as well as continuing with the Bulletin during the Great Depression, and for a time he was relieving cartoonist on the Melbourne Herald . He then lived in Sydney before returning to Brisbane in 1932 to work on the Telegraph for six years. (Three original cartoons dated c.1940s at ML PXD 764 were probably done for it in the 1930s) He moved to the Courier Mail in 1938 where he drew many notable wartime cartoons before travelling to London in 1946 to work as chief cartoonist on News of the World . Two years later, he returned to Brisbane as political cartoonist for the Courier Mail , where he remained until he retired in 1969. Examples include Another Record Breaker re road toll c.1964 (King, 180). He also drew the weekly 'Radish’ comic strip (initiated by Joe Johnsson) and for a time produced an adventure comic strip Dave Dalton . From 1961 he contributed a Saturday illustrated nature column to the Courier , 'Going Bush with Ian Gall’, which was anthologised in 1971. After 42 years as a cartoonist, Gall died at Brisbane in June 1981, aged 76.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1904
- Summary
- Prolific mid 20th century Brisbane cartoonist, painter, illustrator and journalist.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- Jun-81
- Age at death
- 77
Details
Latitude-22.2745264 Longitude166.442419 Start Date1901-01-01 End Date1981-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Noumea, New Caledonia
- Biography
- cartoonist, was born in Noumea, New Caledonia, on 10 August 1901, son of a French baker. He spent some of his boyhood in Sydney and briefly attended Darlinghurst Public School. Aged eighteen, he came back to Sydney and took a clerical position doing translations in order to study art at Julian Ashton’s Sydney Art School at night (1919-20). He returned to Noumea to serve with the French Colonial Army then came back to Australia permanently. His first cartoon was published in 1923 – in Smith’s Weekly acc. 1965 Yearbook, elsewhere Aussie . [Macqueen says: 'Mercier sold his first cartoon to Smith’s Weekly in February 1923, using the tired formula in which a householder asks: “What are you doing there?” to which the burglar in front of an open safe replies: “Struth, yer not blind are yer?” After that triumph, Mercier sold nothing for six months, surviving on odd translating jobs. He freelanced for much of the next twenty-five years.’] From then on Mercier drew full time, more or less freelance until 1945 (acc. 1965 Year book) though apparently briefly employed by Sir Keith Murdoch at the Melbourne Herald office in the 1920s – presumably for Melbourne Punch – where he reputedly horrified his employer by drawing dirty dust-bins in back alleys. Typically, Murdoch’s reaction led to Mercier making them a speciality.
Although a prolific cartoonist, Mercier was unable to make a living from his work for many years. While employed in a variety of casual jobs in the 1920s, he contributed drawings to Mustard Pot , e.g. illustrations of scantily clad females, and to Beckett’s Budget , e.g. EXHIBITOR: [re bunch of flappers at an exhibition] “Ah! I see that at least one of my pictures attracts attention.”/ FRIEND: “That’s not a picture, Aristol, that’s a looking-glass” (2 August 1927, 19). He had cartoons in the Bulletin and contributed to Man in its palmy early days (late 1930s). His glamour girls were never much good, but his depictions of the unexpected, often maniacal, activities by tiny bearded old men, often mad scientists, and large fat old ladies were good-natured and utterly distinctive, e.g. “Amskra!” [old lady to boys stealing fruit as a policeman approaches in the distance], Man June 1937, 96.
With the profits of the 1927 Black and White Artists’ Ball and the Club’s American Fleet Souvenir book (see Harry Weston ), the Black and White Artists’ Club purchased an etching press and offered classes conducted by Henry Fullwood . On this press Mercier subsequently produced several small editions of fine plates on satirical subjects – with admirable skill and delicacy, acc. Lindesay 1994, 10, who reproduces a dull etching of three mice attracted to a cheese trap (p.11).
Mercier joined Smith’s Weekly as a staff artist c.1937 (c.1940 acc. to Blaikie, 93, who tells the story of a raised cat’s tail that offended Claude McKay). He was one of the artists who illustrated Lennie Lower’s comic writings in Smith’s . Vane Lindesay owns his header for Lower’s 'Detour of Art!’ column (in S.H. Ervin exhibition and Joan Kerr book, 1999). Cartoons for Smith’s include: (arguing couple) “All right! All right! Don’t let’s have a row in the street, let’s go home!” 1 May 1937 (sic), 20, and the undated “Look, Jim can you do this?” (ML PXD 840, donated in 1999 by the wife of a former reporter).
He was political cartoonist for the Sydney Daily Mirror and Truth during WWII (from 1940). He created several comic strips for the latter, including 'News Splashes’ and 'Week Spots’. He drew 'Pen Pushers’ for the ABC Weekly in 1941. From 1949 (1945 according to 1965 Year Book) until his retirement in 1971 (1968 acc. Shiell & Unger) Mercier had daily cartoons in the Sun and Sun-Herald , e.g. [trumpet player to other members of orchestra] “Rest assured there will be many orchestral concerts in the new Opera House. After all, it’s not being built merely for a song, you know”, Sun 1964 (reproduced Grollier Year Book, 1965). ML has the original 1964 cartoon (PXD 764).
“Gravy speciality!” The peak of his career was the 1950s in the Sun , according to McQueen.
Many of Mercier’s cartoons reappeared in anthologies published annually by Frank Johnson in the 1940s, e.g. Supa Dupa Man , Wocko the Beaut (originals ML Px*D69 vol.2) and Krazy Kracks – 'The funniest collection of drawings and humour ever crammed into one book’, according to the publisher’s ad. in Lock (1941). Humphrey McQueen says he collaborated with his first wife, Flora, on a couple of kids’ alphabet books for Frank Johnson Publications c.1941 as well as doing other children’s books (see Muir). Angus & Robertson took over publication of the cartoon anthologies, resulting in Wake Me Up At Nine! (1950), Sauce or Mustard? (1951), Gravy Pie (1953), Hang On Please! (1954), My Ears are Killing Me (1955), I’m Waiting for an Earthquake! (1956), Follow that wardrobe! (1957), My Wife’s Swallowed a Bishop (1958), Is My Slip Showing? (1959), Hold It! (1960) and Don’t Shove! (1961).
Mercier contributed to the annual 'Salon Internationale de la Caricature’ at the Pavilion of Humour inMontreal,Canada, until his death in 1981. His favourite hobby was collecting native plants [acc. 1965 Year Book] and he was an avid North Sydney Bears Rugby League supporter. He died on 17 March 1981, survived by his second wife, Pat, the two sons from his first marriage and three step sons from his second marriage.
Original images include: Mercier originals in Frank Johnson papers: Two women at a 'sale of masterpieces’ – Hals’s Laughing Cavalier , Ingres’ La Source , a Claude landscape, a Crome windmill, a Gainsborough lady in profile with black hat and, in upper left corner, the edge of a painting labelled 'Unk’ (i.e. his fellow cartoonist 'Unk’ White ) – with one woman saying: '“Mere imitations some of them, my dear. Why, my grocer has a calendar with the identical picture of one here.”’ undated (ML Px*D68/387); Artist kissing man offering him a £50 note – '“Three hundred quid for my painting, ah, you’re a man after my own art!”’ – annotated as having been published in the Daily Telegraph on 11 April 1938 (ML Px*D68/405). Other originals in the Frank Johnson Papers include “Look Bert, I caught a Jewfish” n.d. (two fishermen with fish with nose and black hat) annotated verso 'It’s a Beaut’ (ML Px*D69/no.1110). There are lots of Mercier original cartoons with wartime joke subjects in vol.10 of the Johnson Papers (ML Px*D68) plus cards and notes by and from Mercier et al. ( Broadley , Cook , Jessup , Lock , Weston, Unk White).
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 10 August 1901
- Summary
- Popular and prolific French-New Caledonian born Sydney cartoonist and illustrator.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 17-Mar-81
- Age at death
- 80
Details
Latitude-40.4730011 Longitude175.2822068 Start Date1896-01-01 End Date1981-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Foxton, Horowhenua, NZ
- Biography
- cartoonist and comic strip writer, was born in New Zealand. In the 1920s he shared a room in Sydney with fellow Kiwi, Cecil ('Unk’) White , drawing cartoons for Smith’s Weekly and the Bulletin. His Smith’s cartoons include: 'Foreman (to worker): “Now, don’t you take no risks, me lad. Think of your wife – brokenhearted, if anything was ter 'appen to yer – yer kids grievin’ – and me! I’d 'ave ter put in two blanky reports about it”’ 1 November 1924, 23.
The first of Cook’s many popular comic strips, Roving Peter (late 1920s), was drawn for the Sunday Times . His strip Bobby and Betty , published in the Daily Telegraph from August 1933, was initially old-fashioned in style with text below each panel, but it became more modern under the influence of US artists Alex Raymond and Burne Hogarth. Cook was also interested in the science fiction of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells and drew sci-fi comics in the 1940s, eg Pirate Planet and Peril Planet for the NSW Bookstall Co. and The Blue Ray for K.G. Murray publications (1946).
Noel Cook also created adventure strips for Frank Johnson publications, eg Boris of Mars and Hawk Larse – in the Year 2000 AD . Undated (c.1940s) originals in ML include gag cartoons like (man about to be grilled by cops) “Well boys, what’s it to be? – Humor? Pathos? Fiction?” (Px*D69/no. 789, used in SLNSW 1999 b/w exhibition) and (woman in funny hat in surgery) “I’m obsessed with the idea, doctor, that people are looking at me!” (Px*D69/ no.737). Late in 1947 Elmsdale Publications introduced Cook’s Kokey Koala and his Magic Button for young readers.
Later Cook was a staff artist with Associated Newspapers and ACP in Sydney. He also produced children’s comics. In 1950 he left Australia for London. He became art director of children’s magazines for Fleetway Publications in 1964.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1896
- Summary
- Mid 20th century Auckland/Sydney/London based cartoonist and comic strip writer.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1981
- Age at death
- 85
Details
Latitude-34.9275 Longitude138.6 Start Date1888-01-01 End Date1981-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
- Biography
- painter, china painter, potter and art teacher, was born on 1 April 1888 in Adelaide, daughter of John Le Cornu, a gardener, and Emma, née Cole. The family moved to Western Australia in 1896 and lived in Guildford until 1905 when they moved to the country. Seventeen-year-old Flora remained in town, to study and earn her living giving art lessons. Thus began a career as an artist and teacher spanning more than sixty years. She painted in oils on canvas, in watercolours on paper and on china and clay. She was WA’s first studio potter.
Flora commenced her studies in 1903 at the Perth Technical Art School under James W.R. Linton and John Edgar. She proved an outstanding student and was soon enrolled in a five-year Associateship in Art. Her subjects included freehand, model, cast, life, antique and light and shade drawing, plus still-life painting and design. She achieved first-class results, winning scholarships that paid her fees. Her 'art exhibits’ formed part of the School’s contribution to the Perth Women’s Work exhibition of 1907 forwarded to the national exhibition in Melbourne. Select examples of Landells work were then sent to the 1908 Franco-British Exhibition in London, where they were awarded a Grand Prix and a Diploma of Honour.
In 1908 Flora set up art classes at the Midlands Junction Technical School, which she continued until 1930 when social pressures during the Depression forced her to resign. In 1909-49 she taught art at the Methodist Ladies’ College. She joined the WA Society of Arts in 1904 and exhibited regularly with it, winning the open competition and the Hackett prize for drawing in 1906. She held a number of solo exhibitions, the last at Pastoral House in 1960.
In 1913 Flora Le Cornu married Reginald Landells, an engineer and industrial chemist who worked as a Health Department inspector. They lived at 34 Tenth Avenue, Maylands, where in 1925 she set up the Maylands School of Art and later (with Reg’s help) a pottery. In about 1927 she established the Landells Studio Pottery, making handbuilt work and learning to throw pottery from the Royal Doulton-trained potter, Frederick Piercy, owner of the Westralian Pottery Company, about 1929. Clay was dug from local pits. Reg prepared the clay, made all the glazes and built much of the equipment. During World War II they catered for shortages of domestic ware. Reg died in 1960 and the pottery was closed. Flora then held her final exhibition of pottery, but she continued china painting almost up to her death. She did much to encourage an interest in pottery in Perth. A role model for younger potters, she was in demand as a speaker, teacher and maker.
Writers:
Erickson, Dorothy
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1 April 1888
- Summary
- Flora Landells was born in 1888 in Adelaide. She was a successful painter and potter and did much to encourage an interest in pottery in Perth. A role model for younger potters, she was in demand as a speaker, teacher and maker.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1981
- Age at death
- 93
Details
Latitude-37.78887735 Longitude144.9953627 Start Date1888-01-01 End Date1981-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Clifton Hill. VIC, Australia
- Biography
- Edith Rebecca Trumble Ward was born in 1888 in Clifton Hill, Victoria, the daughter of Alfred Trumble Ward and Emma Hodgson. She became an enthusiastic amateur photographer. exhibiting her work in local shows in Bendigo and mentoring her niece, the photographer Mattie Hodgson. In 1921 she married a grazier, Richard Charles Darton, who was killed in a motorcycle accident later that year.After her father’s death in 1923 she moved to Perth to live with her sister Ellen Hodgson. By 1931 she was a student of Flora Landells at her Maylands School of Art and exhibited in the 1931 exhibition organized by Landells in the Industries Hall in Barrack Street, Perth. When Lottie Lapsley, Mrs Irving died in 1936, Edith Darton taught china painting at the Young Women’s Christian Association. There is a lovely lustre compote/vase in a private collection in Perth.
Writers:
Dr Dorothy Erickson
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2010
Last updated:
2020
- Born
- b. 1888
- Summary
- China painter who was a student of Flora Landells at her Maylands School of Art in Perth.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1981
- Age at death
- 93
Details
Latitude-33.6713629 Longitude138.9300733 Start Date1887-01-01 End Date1981-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Burra Burra, SA, Australia
- Biography
- China painter was born in Burra Burra South Australia in 1887 and moved to Boulder after her marriage. The couple then moved to Perth where they lived in Bayswater, Mt Lawley and Attadale. Eugene was taught by J. W. R. Linton, A. B. Webb and Mr Rowbotham at Perth Technical School. She commenced painting c.1918 and learnt her china painting from the Misses Creeth. She exhibited china painting with the West Australian Society of Arts in 1935. Joined the Voluntary Aid Detachment during World War I. At some later stage she attended art school in North London. She visited United States of America on a regular basis from 1961 to learn china painting from an expert in depicting roses, Sony Aimes.
Writers:
Erickson, Dorothy (Dr)
Date written:
2011
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1887
- Summary
- Menz commenced painting c.1918 and learnt her china painting from the Misses Creeth. She exhibited china painting with the West Australian Society of Arts in 1935.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1981
- Age at death
- 94
Details
Latitude-37.063611 Longitude144.217222 Start Date1883-01-01 End Date1981-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Castlemaine, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- Hilda Geraldine Leviny was the youngest daughter of Ernest Leviny, a notable colonial silversmith, and his wife, Bertha. Although never married, Hilda lived away from the family home, Buda, for almost 30 years, not returning permanently until she was in her early 50s.
Hilda studied art subjects as well as woodcarving and needlework and had a particular aptitude for embroidery. She exhibited three pieces in the First Australian Exhibition of Women’s Work 1907, including a three-panelled draught screen with hand embroidered and appliquéd panels which is on display at Buda.
In 1906 Hilda studied at the Domestic Science College and then worked as a bursar at Merton Hall for three years. She then took up a position as Matron at Grimwade House, the preparatory school for Melbourne Grammar, where she stayed for 15 years. In 1929, she became Matron at the Women’s College in the University of Sydney, where she remained for a further 7 years.
Hilda enjoyed travel. Her trips, between 1912 and 1939, included Ceylon, Lord Howe Island, Norfolk Island, England, America, and Europe, including Hungary, the homeland of her father. It was largely through her efforts that the Buda Museum exists today. She sold the house to the Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum in 1970 on the proviso that she could live out her days at Buda. She died eleven years later in 1981, aged 98. (SOURCE: Culture Victoria: Goldfield Stories, The Leviny Sisters)
Writers:
Staff Writer
fulleg
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2015
- Born
- b. 1883
- Summary
- Artist,woodcarver, embroiderer and college house matron. The youngest of the Leviny sisters.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1981
- Age at death
- 98
Details
Latitude-37.768844 Longitude145.0455919 Start Date1949-01-01 End Date1980-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Ivanhoe, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 14 March 1949
- Summary
- Carol Jerrems was the first contemporary Australian woman photographer to have work acquired by a number of museums including the National Gallery of Australia.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 21-Feb-80
- Age at death
- 31
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1948-01-01 End Date1980-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 1948
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1980
- Age at death
- 32
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1930-01-01 End Date1980-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1930
- Summary
- Scriven was one of the founders of the Puppet Guild of Australia, founding Peter Scriven Puppets ca.1953, later expanding into the Marionette Theatre of Australia. ca.1965. Centred on puppetry, he worked as a designer, performer and writer.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-80
- Age at death
- 50
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1921-01-01 End Date1980-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, VIC, Australia
- Biography
- painter, sculptor, printmaker, author and teacher, was born in Melbourne She spent her childhood at Heyfield and, later, at Portland. In 1936 she recollected:
'I left home at fifteen, was at school in Melbourne, and at sixteen commenced an art course at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology on a technical scholarship which paid an allowance of £7 a term plus fees. I used up two years of the four-year scholarship, managed to cram in a teaching course as well as a fine art course by going to classes every night, then a further year of teacher training, and at nineteen I was on the payroll in front of those large wartime classes of Brunswick boys, ousted from their classrooms by the needs of airforce trainees’.
Once embarked on her art course, O’Connor became involved in all the highly charged meetings of the period. She identified with the radical forces supporting modern art against Menzies’s push for an Academy and joined the Contemporary Art Society at its first meeting in 1938. She became increasingly politicised and was the only woman to exhibit in the 1942 Melbourne 'Anti-Fascist Exhibition’, where she showed 'crayon drawings’. That year also saw her marry fellow artist Vic O’Connor , whom she had met at the George Bell School’s Saturday classes. In 1945 she was awarded first prize for painting in the 'Women in Industry’ section of the 'Australia at War’ exhibition, but her political interests began to take precedence over her art. For the next nine years she became a political activist among women, having joined the Communist Party of Australia in 1944 after the birth of her first child, Megan: her second, Sean, was born in 1946. During the Cold War period she served as Victorian secretary of the Union of Australian Women (1950-55). In 1953 she was the Victorian delegate to the World Congress of Women in Copenhagen, a trip which also took her to Eastern Europe. That year she won first prize in the May Day Art competition and was an initiator of the Asian Australian Child Art Exchange. This effort to counter Cold War propaganda and anti-Asian sentiments lasted until 1956.
In 1955 domestic difficulties demanded a return to full-time teaching for the next 15 years. Yet, in spite of her various activities, O’Connor continued to paint. She exhibited regularly during the 1950s and early ’60s with the Realist Group, whose members included Noel Counihan , Mary Hammond and Vic O’Connor. She was one of 10 artists of the 'Melbourne Popular Art Group’ (including Counihan, Peter Miller et al.) who produced a folio of 14 linocuts Eureka 1854-1954 (Melbourne 1954) that paid tribute to 'the stand of the Ballarat miners in the Eureka Stockade (copy Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, et al). Ailsa O’Connor did no.7, Building the Stockade (and erecting the flag); Pat O’Connor did no.3 The Licence Hunt (a simplified story); no.13 Trampling the Flag is by Naomi Schipp and the last of the set, no.14 After the Battle (a mother mourning over her son’s dead body), is by Mary Zuvella.
In 1962 O’Connor was offered the opportunity to undertake a two-year retraining course at RMIT and chose sculpture, a medium in which she had always wanted to work. In 1965 she studied Fine Arts at Melbourne University. In 1979 her sculpture won the Caulfield City Council invitation Art Award. Throughout the 1970s she travelled, worked, exhibited, wrote and actively participated in the feminist movement. Until her death in 1980, she provided important leadership to a new generation interested in producing socially relevant art by bringing to bear her political, theoretical and historical perspectives on feminist and left wing debates.
Writers:
Kirby, Sandy
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1921
- Summary
- Ailsa O'Connor was a painter, sculptor, print maker, author and teacher. She studied at both the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and Melbourne University and was politically active, joining the Communist Party of Australia in 1944. She later initiated the Asian Australian Child Art Exchange and represented Victoria at the World Congress of Women in Copenhagen in 1953.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1980
- Age at death
- 59
Details
Latitude51.4817512 Longitude-3.1442697 Start Date1920-01-01 End Date1980-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Pengam, South Wales, UK
- Biography
- Painter and engineer, was born in Pengam, South Wales on 31 December 1920 and migrated to Australia with his family when he was three. He left school during the Depression aged 13 and worked at the BHP Port Kembla Steel Works. He began attending night classes in building construction in 1937 and taking correspondence courses in mathematics at London University. After completing his studies in structural and civil engineering, he moved to Hobart where he was appointed engineer in charge of power station designs with the HEC 1950-55. He studied part-time at Hobart Technical College under Jack Carington Smith in 1951-55, winning the Tasmanian Sesquicentenary Prize silver medal in 1954 and formally graduating in 1956, then did a part-time BA at the University of Tasmania in 1955-57. He won a commemorative medal for painting at the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games and did preliminary work towards a MA degree in Philosophy at Monash in 1969.
Tanner moved to Melbourne in 1957 to work as a chief engineer and later as a consulting engineer in private practice. He travelled to Europe in 1966-67 and also travelled extensively in Asia, the Middle East, UK, Ireland and the USA.
This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 31 December 1920
- Summary
- Painter and engineer, won a commemorative medal for painting at the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games. Tanner also did preliminary work towards a MA degree in Philosophy at Monash in 1969.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1980
- Age at death
- 60
Details
Latitude-32.9277778 Longitude151.7108333 Start Date1919-01-01 End Date1980-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- New Lambton, Newcastle, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Irvine Homer was born in 1919 in Newcastle, NSW. His family moved regularly around New South Wales, New Zealand and Fiji, and in at the age of fifteen, Homer left school and pursued a variety of odd jobs including shearing in the Willow Tree and Merriwa districts of New South Wales. Homer entered rodeos, where he enjoyed picking up prize money.
In 1938 he met Sylvia Blencowe and they married at the Smithfield Methodists Church, Grafton, on 19 October 1940. It was around this time that he began receiving treatment for violent bouts of epilepsy. He had enlisted in the army at the outbreak of the war but was discharged as medically unfit within a year. The Homers lived at Hilltop near Mittagong, eking out a living charcoal burning. He later worked on the railways near Woy Woy, and after the birth of son Wally (b. July 1942 – d. 6 April 2000), was hit and injured by a train. A daughter, Pearl was born in January 1948. In 1949 Homer bought land at Butta-Ba and built a house.
The Homers divorced in March 1954. Irvine later married Yvonne Dreis, with whom he had three children; Lynda (b.1950) Irvine (b.1951- d.1974) and Wayne (b.1953) (Blencowe to Rumley and Robson, pers. comm. May-June 2003).
In the early 1950s Homer was diagnosed with spondylitis, an incurable and degenerative inflammatory arthritis that particularly affects the spine. Reading in an Australian Women’s Weekly that painting could be therapeutic for illnesses, Homer began daubing on the walls, furniture and plates of his house. Gil Docking, then Director of Newcastle City Art Gallery, encouraged Homer’s painting and arranged his first exhibition there in January 1959; William Dobell, an early supporter, opened the exhibition. As a result of the exhibition, Women’s Weekly visited Homer at home in Butta-Ba and ran a feature on him. Homer, not wishing for sympathy, was upset when the article appeared as he felt that it overemphasized him as an invalid rather than primarily focusing on his career as a painter (Canu 1977). The shy and reclusive Homer was greatly affected by publicity and couldn’t paint at times throughout his career due to the intrusions of what he related to the Women’s Weekly reporter Ron McKie, as “rubbernecks and stickybeaks” (McKie 1959).
Humble and down to earth, Homer did not like hanging his paintings at home and often burnt paintings he was not happy with. He also burnt a batch of early paintings because someone had likened them to Russell Drysdale’s work, and although Homer had not heard of Drysdale, he did not want to be thought of as a copyist (Alliston 1971). Anne Von Bertouch was a major supporter and regular exhibitor of his works throughout the 1960s and 1970s, including staging his first retrospective in 1965. Homers’ painting Approach of the Big Dust was acquired for the later disbanded Mertz Collection of Australian Art in 1966.
With the impending marriage of his daughter Lynda, Homer moved to a nursing home during 1970 where he remained bedridden for the majority of the rest of his life. Replacing Lynda, who had applied base colours to paintings and assisted by tying brushes on his fingers (and later when the disease worsened to his wrists) was Rose-Anne Hall, who helped Homer for a couple of hours each day after school ( Newcastle Herald 27 December 1971). In June 1972 Homer was made Honorary Life Member Newcastle Art Gallery Society, an honour only previously conferred to Dobell ( Newcastle Herald 25 May 1972).
In March 1973 Homer set off, accompanied by his nurse aide Marie Dixon and a helper in a converted ambulance to travel by road through Queensland, Northern Territory and Western Australia. The work Alice on Todd Regatta (1974) was a result of this trip and is unusual for Homer as he worked the layout of the composition on paper first due to the large amount of people in it (Homer to Thomas, pers. comm. 28 February 1975). In September 1975 the Newcastle Region Art Gallery held a major retrospective of his work. Homer attended the opening in his wheelchair where the Newcastle Gallery Society presented a painting, Skeeta gets Home from the Show (1971), to the Gallery.
Homer’s late paintings are of a predominantly blue hue, and limited to a maximum size of 55cm, being the extent his disability allowed him to reach, even when turning the painting upside down while working (Craig 1975).
Early in 1976, due to the onset of severe blindness, he ceased to paint, instead dictating anecdotes about the characters and incidents he had painted. This added disability did not prevent Homer from visiting London in June 1976 with the assistance of a grant from the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council. To assist in overseas travel Homer had had his legs amputated in March 1975. He made the decision so that he would not be classified as a stretcher case and be charged more expensive airfare. Homer enjoyed visits to the Tate Gallery, in particularly enjoying the Constables (Homer to Fergusson, pers. comm. 22 July 1976). In 1977 he again visited London to attend the 'Commonwealth Artists of Fame’ exhibition where, together with Sidney Nolan, he had been chosen to represent Australia. Homer received generous support from the people of Newcastle through the Morning Herald Irvine Homer Appeal, that afforded him and his carers travel expenses. On 9 August 1980, at the age of sixty-one, Homer finally succumbed to his illnesses at the Riversdale Nursing Home.
Pro Hart was an admirer and collector of Homer’s work. Homer was called the Henry Lawson of Primitivism by Elwyn Lynn as his highly personalised paintings recollect the incidents, characters and idiosyncrasies of his childhood or of people he had met while travelling about the bush from job to job as a young man. Lynn likened Manhunt Near My Home (1960) to the “turbulently compressed” style of Albrecht Altdorfer (c1480-1538),while Geoffrey Lehmann, launching Homer’s 1972 exhibition, compared Homer’s work to Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) and Pieter Breughel (c1525-1569) (Lynn, 1965; Alliston, 1977). Likenesses to Cubism were also identified in several early paintings (Fergusson 1975).
Unlike contemporary primitive artists Sam Byrne and Henri Bastin, whose work numbered in the thousands, Homer’s output is estimated to number little more than 250 paintings and plates (Allison, 1971). As with many Australian primitive artists, public recognition of Homer’s work waned in the 1980s and 1990s, as what had become a frequently emulated and hence often seemingly contrived parochial idiom became less fashionable with art critics and curators. In addition, many of its originally proclaimed proponents died (James Fardoulys d.1975, Sam Byrne d.1978, Roma Higgins d.1979, Henri Bastin d.1979, Irvine Homer d.1980, Charles Callins d.1982, Muriel Luders d.1984). Homer’s entry in the first McCulloch’s Encyclopedia of Australian Art (1968) was retained in the 2006 edition.
Writers:
Bull, Julian
Date written:
2009
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 23 April 1919
- Summary
- Homer was a self-taught primitive artist who rose to prominence in the late 1950s.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 9-Aug-80
- Age at death
- 61
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1917-01-01 End Date1980-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- graphic artist and teacher, born Melbourne; first wife of Leonard French. Studied RMIT and George Bell School. Showed drawings with the Victorian Artists’ Society (where she won a prize for figure drawing in 1948, w/c prize in 1970, 1971, and special prize in 1972), Contemporary Art Society (Victorian Branch) and Albury Prize (graphics 1972) exhibitions.
This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1917
- Summary
- A graphic artist and teacher who studied at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and the George Bell School. French also exhibited with the Victorian Artists' Society, winning numerous prizes.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- c.1980
- Age at death
- 63
Details
Latitude64.6863136 Longitude97.7453061 Start Date1914-01-01 End Date1980-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Russia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1914
- Summary
- Shapiro was a cabinet maker, arriving in Perth in 1939. He worked in uncle's cabinet-making factory, later for Paul Ernest Kafka, Sydney (1948-1951), he returned to Melbourne in 1958.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-80
- Age at death
- 66
Details
Latitude-27.4736234 Longitude153.0364287 Start Date1914-01-01 End Date1980-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Kangaroo Point, Brisbane, Qld., Australia
- Biography
- Painter, mural painter, modeller, puppet-maker, theatre and diorama artist, Clothilde Highton was born in Kangaroo Point, Brisbane, daughter of Major D.R. Harris DSM and his wife, Bertha, of the pioneering pastoral Collins family. Clothilde was raised on the family property, Eurara, at Tamrookum near Beaudesert, where she was privately educated by a governess. She studied art at the Brisbane Central Technical College under L.J. Harvey and Martyn Collins in the early 1930s, then worked in Sydney for a time. There she met, and in 1940 married, Lieutenant Michael Howard Highton RN. He was posted missing after the sinking of HMAS Perth in the Battle Of Sunda Strait in 1942; she was officially informed of his death in 1946. Soon afterwards, Clothilde and their five-year-old daughter, Caryl, left for London. Her watercolour paintings executed in the early years, mainly Australian snow-gum scenes, were sold to art-lovers and collectors from all over the world. She also worked for a local pottery in Sussex, making dressing-table ornaments and cat figures in large numbers, anything at all that was required of her, simply to ensure an income to support herself and her young daughter until she became well-known.
Clothilde came to be highly regarded as a sculptor in England in the 1940s and early 50s. Her work was largely in the repair and reconstruction of external statuary severely damaged in the bombing of London during the blitz. She had invented a synthetic stone, a combination of cement and silicas that resembled natural stone in appearance and aged and weathered exactly like the real thing. For this work she was in great demand. Any person looking at the work would be hard-pressed to tell the original parts of figures from the repaired sections.
In London, Highton met and studied painting with the Australian artist Will Longstaff. Longstaff was making dioramas for Australia House, London, and after seeing Highton’s large religious figures encouraged her to make dioramas too. In three months she had made and sold her first diorama to the Mowbray Gallery. Her Castles and Carriages toured provincial England and was shown in London. She produced scenery and costumes for operettas, murals, displays and puppet theatres. The major work she undertook in England was a larger than life-size Crucifix with subsidiary figures of Mary and and St John, for St Nicholas’ Anglican Church in Arundel, Sussex. It was included in the religious art section of the 1951 Festival of Britain, resulting in her being elected a member of the Guild of Memorial Craftsmen of Great Britain that year (membership was restricted to fifty, five of whom were women). The figures were originally placed above and behind the altar in front of the rood screen at St Nicholas separating the church from the Fitzalan Howard Chapel (the private – Catholic – Chapel of the Duke of Norfolk) which adjoined it. Recently the figures have been placed in the garden of the church, under the branches of a flowering cherry tree, with Arundel Castle in the background.
Clothilde also undertook private commissions for statues and other large works for domestic garden settings, and executed a portrait bust of Lord Gowrie, then Governor of Windsor Castle, where she stayed while making the clay model for the work. While there she also did several small watercolour paintings of the Queen Mother’s private gardens. When Clothilde was constructing some of her larger diorama series Lavinia, Duchess of Norfolk, offered her a very large hall in Arundel Castle in which she could spread out and work uninterrupted. The only visitors were the Duchess herself, and on one occasion, the Queen when she was staying at the castle to inspect some of her horses that were kept there.
Clothilde wrote a Nativity play, 'The Cradle of the Dove’, for performance in St Nicholas’ church, Arundel, which required a special dispensation from the Bishop. This play was later performed at St Michael and All Angels at New Farm in Brisbane in 1961, with her three-week old granddaughter Gaynor playing the baby Jesus. The play was in verse, and incorporated singing and dance, and was accompanied by songs from the Oxford Book of Carols and anthems from the Book of Common Prayer.
In the fifties, Clothilde designed and made unique Christmas windows for the department store Allan & Stark (later Myer) when she returned to Brisbane, by reproducing with life-sized figures some of the most famous religious paintings by the Old Masters, such as The Madonna of the Rocks by Leonardo da Vinci. These were huge dioramas, a combination of painting, sculpture, lighting and fabrics and were very popular with Christmas shoppers. Highton exhibited Coronations through the Ages in Brisbane in 1953, then toured it to other state capitals. As a result of its popular appeal she was commissioned by Qantas to produce Fifty Years of Flight , shown in Farmers Gallery at Sydney and Georges Gallery, Melbourne. Australia’s Links with the Crown , consisting of ten dioramas, was executed for the 1954 Royal Tour; Fashion Fads and Fancies , twenty-four dioramas depicting ’2,000 years of fashion’, was shown at Ball & Welchs, Melbourne, and at Anthony Horderns, Sydney in 1955.
She turned her hand to the production of other theatrical enterprises, including puppets for the Queensland Road Safety Police in 1959 and the Spastic Children’s Centre in 1960. She designed many displays for firms in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, as well as exhibits for the Queensland Industries Fairs from 1955. But the advent of television in Australia largely destroyed the popular appeal of dioramas and she stopped producing them.
Highton cared for her widowed father and, later, remarried and moved to Ormiston. Between 1947 and 1963 she had occasionally exhibited paintings with the Royal Queensland Art Society and from 1964 exhibited with the Yurara Art Group, of which she was a founding member (it merged with the Royal Queensland Art Society in 1983). Her paintings were also hung in the Redlands Art Prize competition in the 1960s, a prize that she inaugurated through the Yurara Art Group sponsored by the Redland Shire Councel.
Eventually Highton moved back to the bush not far from where she’d grown up, retiring to a farm at Boonah, where she still painted, but also bred Arabian horses, her great love, for the last years of her life. Clothilde died in Brisbane on 7 June 1980, and was buried in the private Collins family section at All Saints’ church, Tamrookum, Queensland on 10 June 1980. She left one daughter, five grandchildren and one great-granddaughter.
Writers:
Cooke, Glenn R.
duggim
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2013
- Born
- b. 1914
- Summary
- Painter, mural painter, modeller, puppet-maker, theatre and diorama artist. Her dioramas were popular and toured extensively in the UK and Australia during the 1950s.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1980
- Age at death
- 66
Details
Latitude-37.8001 Longitude144.9671 Start Date1906-01-01 End Date1980-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- North Carlton, Melbourne, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1906
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1980
- Age at death
- 74
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1906-01-01 End Date1980-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, Vic, Australia
- Biography
- painter, etcher and art teacher, was born in Melbourne in Septemer 1906, daughter of Dr R.J. Bull. She began her career in 1929 at the National Gallery School, where she produced some fine portraits and competent etchings, eg Batman’s Landing 1935, etching and aquatint, National Gallery of Australia. In 1937 she won the Sir John Longstaff scholarship to travel and work overseas. She went to London, where she was an accredited Australian war artist during World War II. An exhibition of these artists’ works recording the damage caused by German bombing raids on cities and towns throughout Britain – about 200 paintings and etchings in all – was held at London’s Australia House in November 1947. Until then they had been 'censored and on the official secrets list’, according to a report in the Sydney Sun . Bull’s war pictures are represented in the Imperial War Museum, London, as well as in Australia.
On her return to Australia after nine years abroad Norma wished to do something different. For over twelve months she followed Wirth’s Circus around Australia, passionately painting the acrobats, animals, clowns, people and scenes of circus life. From then on she lived at the family home, Medlow, in Warrigal Road, Surrey Hills (Vic.). From 1960 she was secretary of the Fellowship of Australian Artists. This artist and teacher would spend part of each year at her holiday homes in Anglesea and Bright, painting and drawing Australian landscapes and seascapes. She loved nature and was very much a conservationist, noted for her expressions of despair that so many forest areas were being destroyed, as she said, 'to make room for buildings and freeways’. Norma Bull died in Melbourne in September 1980.
Writers:
Rollason, Tim
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. September 1906
- Summary
- accredited Australian war artist during World War II.conservationist.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- Sep-80
- Age at death
- 74
Details
Latitude-33.8772 Longitude151.1049 Start Date1904-01-01 End Date1980-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Burwood, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- cartoonist, was born in Burwood, NSW. He was apparently christened John but was always known as Jack. His nephew, the Sydney journalist Mike Gibson, called him 'Gibbie’ and said he 'one of the true Bohemians of the old King’s Cross’ – 'a member of the hard working, hard drinking group of journalists and cartoonists who haunted the Cross’. Gibson’s 1930s House of Horror Luna Park, 'Our Town’, appeared in Man , along with many other cartoons, and he also illustrated for Adam , Man Junior and Cavalcade . He drew stylish society and other cartoons in a sophisticated modernist/abstract Art Deco style for Man , e.g. 'Gibson symbolises Nazism, not forgetting the salute’ May 1937, 13. His first cartoon for Man appeared in the March 1937 issue. He had three highly stylised cartoons in the 12th issue (November 1937): a waitress and customer; a couple unable to marry until they can afford a divorce; and “Cheer up, Blondie. Every cloud has a Silver Fox lining” .
In the December 1937 issue, Gibson wrote an article entitled, 'So this is Surrealism; Giving you the lowdown on Modern Art’ (pp.45-46). He had two cartoons in the issue, along with a photo (p.7) that accompanied a description of him as:
“MAN’s modernist artist, who in this issue gives us the low-down on surrealism, affected the modern style because he was not satisfied with “drawing things as they are”. “I endeavour to twist existing forms into decorative designs, not to distort nature into unrecognisable monstrosities”, he says.”
His cartoon (p.44), “It’s either symbolism or … it’s LOUSY!” faced his article 'So This is Surrealism’, which featured and illustrated Picasso, Ben Nicholson and a lump of clay in a London gallery titled 'Two Ideas and a Navel’. The text also noted the 'monstrosity that was exhibited under the title “Captain Cook’s Last Voyage of Discovery”. It was a dressmaker’s dummy surrounded by a network of wire like a clumsy bird-cage.’ He damned the breakfast cup and saucer covered in brown fur [evidently by Meret Oppenheim] and was against Nicholson, Klee (though he was not 'strictly speaking’ a surrealist, he admitted), Picasso ('Femme Lisant’ 1934 ill. and text p.46), Dali, Dadaists and Freud.
The December 1939 issue of Man had another two Gibson cartoons, one being the coloured cover cartoon showing Hitler in bed being visited by Santa with a pistol, the other a black-and-white cartoon of a man being blown up in the loo. In Man Annual (undated but evidently 1944 – the date on a Hayles cartoon), Gibson had 12 cartoons about: a hot dog stand; water on the knee; bathroom; woman playing poker with three men and asking if four aces is any good; a rain cloud over a single car; mint; cannibal complaining about a wartime privation dinner of Jap (in the pot); butchy man arriving in drag at a poker party because his wife had hidden his clothes; a ferocious dog; wife in bed photographing her husband’s dream; trains about to crash while the operator tries to work out which handle to pull; and an advertised 'room with private bath’ that proves to be a hammock in a bathroom.
This was probably Gibson’s peak period of productivity for Man , but it was not his most distinctive since it pre-dates the subject for which he became world famous. From the 1940s until the demise of the magazine in 1974, Gibson drew madly intricate monthly cartoons for Man set in Hell. They were quite as lunatic as Roland Emmett’s world but more crude, e.g. August 1952 (when Frank S. Greenop was still editor) he did a two-page spread of two men emerging from a rocket into Hell with one saying, “Our calculations may have been a trifle faulty … ask if this is Mars anyway”. The September 1952 double-page spread focuses on a new arrival (“Ah! Dentist Jones! ... Take a seat …’ It won’t hurt a bit’... to coin a phrase”). Part of the pleasure of these drawings is the great variety of intricate (but not realistically painful) tortures and sinful (but not offensive) pleasures taking place all around. Man Annual 1952 had no Hell cartoon by Gibson but only a weak half-page b/w nudist club gag showing a fence and a tree, the speaking male inmates being hidden behind the fence; but the March 1959 and January 1966 issues both contained a double page b/w Hell scene (the only Gibson cartoon). By February 1970 his 'Infernal Nonsense’ had been reduced to a single page, coloured yellow. This one featured two fencers running each other through and other devilish delights. Even so, the Hell series continued until Man’s demise.
Gibson was one of the few local cartoonists to survive for the duration (the only others were Lahm and Vernon Hayles ). The central theme of his intricate 'Infernal Regions’ drawings, usually printed as a double-page spread, is normally a character or couple who have just arrived to find 'Hordes of devils – tempting naked sheilas and boooze’ as well as a certain amount of light-hearted torture. In a 1943 article explaining how to write gags for cartoons ( Man April 1943, 18-19) Albert A. Murray, 'cartoon editor, Man ', wrote:
“Gibbie” said he hit on the idea when he was drawing a couple of blokes digging a hole in the ground. They dug deeper and deeper. Suddenly they crashed through the ceiling as it were and landed in Hell!
Man January 1939 tells the same story, while Albert A. Murray in 'Sweating to Make 'Em Laugh’ ( Man April 1948, pp.18-19) repeats the tale of the trench-digging genesis of Gibson’s 'widely famous’ Hell cartoons filled with 'strange little “djits”, as he called them, (those formless, headless gremlins with a penchant for murmuring tender thoughts like “terts, nertz, adink, adonk”)’. By 1948 the results of Gibson’s watching a trench being dug and wondering what would happen if the bottom of the hole collapsed and the men fell through had been going 'nearly ten years’, Murray noted. “Gibbie” told his nephew Mike that one of the few restrictions K.G. Murray, 'the boss of Man’, put on these cartoons was that no Australian serviceman was to be depicted: 'Old K.G. said Australian soldiers would never go there’.
Gibson retired in the 1970s. He had married three times. His first wife, Anne née Bowley, later Jensen, was the mother of cartoonist John Jensen and Ingrid. His second wife was Daphne Winslow. Gibson died at Sydney in 1980.
Gibson’s son, the cartoonist and illustrator John Jensen of London, has the only known extant original Hell cartoon, although vast numbers are rumoured to be hidden away in some ACP/PBL warehouse (who acquired K.G. Murray publications at some stage).
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1904
- Summary
- Mid 20th century Sydney magazine writer and cartoonist for 'Man'. Journalist Mike Gibson, described him as 'one of the true Bohemians...'a member of the hard working, hard drinking group of journalists and cartoonists who haunted the Cross.'
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1980
- Age at death
- 76
Details
Latitude-34.81502565 Longitude147.672675 Start Date1897-01-01 End Date1980-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Junee, New South Wales, Australia
- Biography
- painter, cartoonist, commercial artist, clerk, theatrical designer and producer, was born in Junee, NSW but moved to Melbourne as a young man. When WWI broke out, he enlisted and served at Gallipoli. After his return, he devoted much time and energy to working against war and imperialism. Studied at the Working Men’s College (RMIT) in the 1920s, then worked in various commercial art studios, finally becoming a tally clerk in a shipping office where he remained for the rest of his working life. The Depression led him to join the Communist Party.
Reproductions of anti-war images by Otto Dix and George Grosz had a deep and lasting effect on Maughan and inspired him to begin drawing. In 1931, with Noel Counihan, Judah Waten, Nettie Seeligson and Nutter Buzacott, he formed the Workers’ Art Club. He was allocated the first exhibition of the 'worker artists’, which had a catalogue by Guido Baracchi, a founding member of the Party. ( Portrait of a Man c.1931, pen and ink on paper, private collection, reproduced Merewether, depicts a working man in a cloth cap.) At the same time Maughan began to contribute cartoons and illustrations to labor publications like Stream , Proletariat and the first issue of the Workers’ Art Club magazine Masses (1931). In late 1932 he held another exhibition at the Club with Counihan and Buzacott but mostly did stage designs and produced agit-prop (agitation-propaganda) sketches and full-length plays. The first play performed, Ernst Toller’s Masses and Man , was condemned by sections of the party for its expressionist defeatism and pessimism, as was Maughan’s own artwork like Civilization 1931 (pen, indian ink and watercolour on paper, La Trobe Library: ill. Merewether in b/w), a great image of ant-like workers dwarfed by their factory.
The Workers’ Art Club was disbanded in 1935 and the New Theatre set up. There Maughan continued his stage work and wrote even more one-act plays. In 1937 he produced a scene from Irwin Shaw’s Bury the Dead at the Princess Theatre, part of a programme sponsored by the 'Movement Against War and Fascism’ with half the proceeds going to help Australian nurses serving with the Spanish Republican Army. The full play, staged at the Apollo Theatre by the New Theatre Company in 1938, had a poster and handbill designed by Maughan (poster with Hitler-skull reproduced in Merewether, 102). The plays he produced throughout the 1930s and 1940s included Storm Over St. Kilda (1939), which starred his wife, Leila. He also did the stage design for Vic Arnold’s production of Clifford Odet’s Waiting for Lefty . Jack and Leila Maughan continued to work in theatre for the rest of their lives, with Jack retaining his daytime job in the shipping office. He also continued cartooning, at least for some years, e.g. for the Melbourne Guardian 1943.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1897
- Summary
- Maughan was a painter, cartoonist, commercial artist, clerk, theatrical designer and producer. Reproductions of anti-war images by Otto Dix and George Grosz had a deep and lasting effect and inspired him to begin drawing.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1980
- Age at death
- 83
Details
Latitude-34.9275 Longitude138.6 Start Date1896-01-01 End Date1980-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Goodwood West, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
- Biography
- painter, illustrator and cartoonist, was born at Goodwood West, Adelaide, on 8 September 1896, youngest of the four children of William Irven Dawkins, an accountant, and Annie Eliza, née Roberts. For many years the family lived at 'Karadoc’, 36 Young Street, Parkside (no sale of their home was recorded until 1933-34) and Mabel studied at the South Australian School of Art for five years. During WWI she worked primarily as a commercial artist from a studio in the Hindmarsh Buildings, Grenfell Street, Adelaide. On 14 March 1916 she wrote to the South Australian State War Council with a proposal for a recruitment poster: 'Dear Sir,/ I wish to submit to you a miniature recruiting poster design/ which I would be pleased to/ present to the state on the condition that my name/ appears on each copy issued.’ (Information Samantha Littley)
Her design was accepted and 1,000 copies of the poster ordered from the Government Photolithographer, A. Vaughan, at a cost of £10 (SL). The graphically powerful Enlist!! (colour photolithograph, AWM V1074) understandably presents the most attractive face of World War I – the 'six-bob-a-day tourist’ image that attracted many young men. Seeing Egypt and visiting the Pyramids and the Sphinx in sunny spare moments was a vastly more attractive prospect than the mud of the Somme, although joining 'our boys beside the Nile’ was a far less likely destination. The appeal of the accompanying verse to mateship (where the mate is wounded and needing help – but still smiling) combined with a pleasure trip visiting some of the world’s greatest monuments would never have fooled the family man, the old hand or those critical of the war. Such simple propaganda was aimed at the young men who still believed that war was an adventure, more fun than staying at home.
That it appeared early in the war made the message more believable, probably to the artist as much as to her audience. Thousands of Australian recruits unwittingly colluded in this propaganda exercise by sending home postcards and photographs from Egypt, frequently with themselves and their 'Hale and Hearty’ mates posed with pyramid, Sphinx and camel en route to France. Such symbols of Egypt alone signified duty done. Dawkins does not entirely dispense with the military presence but her line of distant silhouetted marchers are an attractive compositional device, no more realistic or militaristic than comparable pre-war silhouettes by Blamire Young or the influential English 'Beggarstaff Brothers’ (William Nicholson and James Pryde).
As a member of the South Australian Society of Arts (SASA), Dawkins exhibited in the Society’s annual exhibitions in 1916-18, showing (inter alia) Orient in1916, Ballet Costume Designs and Head of Old Man in 1917 and Theatrical Costume in 1918, which suggest she may also have been designing for the theatre at the time. She certainly designed the program (with an allegorical woman on the cover) for a SASA Patriotic Evening held on 3 July 1917, which included banjo duets, recitations, papers, a dramatic sketch and the judging of an Exhibition of Pictures (listed) by Art Club members (the artists are unnamed but presumably included Dawkins).
Dawkins’ illustrative work for the Adelaide magazine Shopping : The Australian Housewife’s Monthly Newspaper , published July-December 1918, includes a page of witty cartoons parodying the current theatrical production of the Bing Boys. She drew art nouveauish illustrations for each segment of the publication, including 'Miss Vanity’s Page’, 'The Garden of Beauty & Usefulness’, 'Poultry Notes’ and 'Who’s Who & What’s Doing’. In 1918 she also designed two covers, a Japonaise image of a woman peeping over her fan with a cherry blossom branch behind her for September and a smart girl-about-town twirling a striped umbrella in her hands for November.
Dawkins moved to Melbourne about 1920. (She disappears from the Adelaide electoral roll in 1919 and is not listed in the SASA annual reports after this date.) In 1925, as a witness to her sister Eva’s marriage, she gave her place of residence as South Yarra, Victoria, her occupation 'home duties’. In the 1930s she married John Francis Williams, later Sir John, chairman and managing director of the Herald and Weekly Times ; they had a son, John Irven. The family lived in Broken Hill and Brisbane before returning to Melbourne, where Mabel studied with George Bell in 1948-54. Bell had considerable influence on her style. According to McCulloch, 'the qualities that give her work identity are lightness and soft colour, combined with firm cubist structure, all carefully considered elements in the pattern of George Bell’s teaching and philosophy’.
She also studied briefly under Iain MacNab at the Warwick Gardens Art School, London (Grosvenor School?). She exhibited with the Melbourne Contemporary Artists and was its president from 1957 [1959 acc. to McCulloch] to 1965, when the society was disbanded. She used her position to promote the cause of art and artists. During the late 1950s, having identified a paucity of exhibition space in Melbourne, she initiated the building of the Argus Gallery. For six years, she was chairman of the Red Cross Picture Library sub-committee (see McCulloch 1984, memorial exhibition catalogue, 1981).
Mabel Williams died on October 24 1980 at Freemasons’ Hospital, East Melbourne. A memorial exhibition was held at the Melbourne Lyceum Club in January 1981. The catalogue lists 85 paintings by Williams (and gives their owners), not all of which were in the exhibition. In his introduction, Alan McCulloch called her 'a woman who loved art and artists, and was herself a painter of great sensitivity’.
Writers:
Littley, SamanthaCallaway, AnitaKerr, Joan
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
1992
- Born
- b. 8 September 1896
- Summary
- Mid 20th century modern artist and cartoonist.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 24-Oct-80
- Age at death
- 84
Details
Latitude53.7229229 Longitude-1.8604874 Start Date1895-01-01 End Date1980-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Halifax, Yorkshire, England, UK
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 29 April 1895
- Summary
- Shillito was a designer and educator. She taught in the UK, Brisbane Technical College 1923, Sydney Technical College 1925. She became Head, East Sydney Technical College (Women's Handicrafts) 1958 and was the founder of Shillito School of Design in 1962. She was a noted colourist and taught and published on colour theory and practice.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 13-Mar-80
- Age at death
- 85
Details
Latitude53.7229229 Longitude-1.8604874 Start Date1895-01-01 End Date1980-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Halifax, Yorkshire, England, UK
- Biography
- Designer and painter
This artist’s biography is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 28 April 1895
- Summary
- Mid 20th century Sydney-based designer and painter
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 13-Mar-80
- Age at death
- 85
Details
Latitude-34.9275 Longitude138.6 Start Date1892-01-01 End Date1980-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Adelaide, SA, Australia
- Biography
- Potter, was born in Adelaide in December 1892, oldest of the four children of Hubert William (Bill) Holden and his wife Annie Maria Turner. She was also a niece of Win Preston, a talented amateur artist ( History , p.67), and a cousin of May Gibbs . Her two younger brothers were Leslie, a WWI air ace, and James, at one time director of General Motors-Holden, the company formed by Nell’s cousin Edward and uncle H.J. Holden. The youngest member of the family was Winfred [sic] Turner Holden, born in Adelaide in October 1904. Soon after Win’s birth, the family moved to Sydney where Bill Holden and his brother-in-law Herbert Preston established the Australian subsidiary of the Nestlé Swiss Milk Company. The family initially lived at Mosman then c.1911 moved to Lynwood a large property in Winton Street, Warrawee. During WWI Nell was in charge of a Voluntary Aid Detachment of the Red Cross that established a nursery at Turramurra, growing cut flowers and raising seedlings for sale to raise funds for the war effort. After the war Nell planned to take up commercial art in order to be financially independent, but her father vetoed this.
In 1971 Nell wrote a record of her early struggles (published in History pp.67-71) to become a potter, which she decided to be in 1926 – inspired perhaps, Martin suggests (p.7), by the British studio and industrial pottery she had seen on a visit to England in 1925. Pottery was also an acceptable hobby for a young lady, the Society of Arts and Crafts of NSW (which the sisters joined in 1928) having vice-regal patronage. Opportunity came when the Warrawee land was subdivided and the house sold (the family retained part of the bottom of the garden containing a gardener’s cottage in the form of a Swiss Chalet imported from Switzerland in the early 1920s for use as a pavilion for Nestlé at the Royal Easter Show that had been re-erected with additions at Warrawee in 1925). In 1927 the Holdens moved to Edgecliff Road, Woollahra, making it convenient for Nell and Win to enrol at ESTC in 1928 for pottery, clay modelling and china painting classes taught by J. Arthur Peach and 'Design’ taught by Phyllis Shillitoe .
The sisters found the pottery classes quite unsatisfactory – Mr. Peach was a devotee of china painting – and left to learn from Mr Guthrie, a thrower at Fowlers [Commercial] Pottery: 'Mr Guthrie helped us fire our first kiln (which was built in my Aunt’s [Win Preston’s] garden at [Shellcove Road,] Kurraba Point)… [using coal as well as wood and coke] The chimney smoked like a warship and there were complaints from the neighbours so we had to give up firing in that way.’ No gas kiln in Australia was suitable and the sisters and their mother visited England again in 1929 and learned about kilns, glazes and wheels. There the English Gas Light and Coke Company arranged to send plans for a small kiln to Sydney. Made (with difficulty over almost 12 months) by the Australian Gas Light Company, it was set up in a small pottery studio at 'The Chalet’, Winton Street, Warrawee, Bill, Annie and Win having returned to live in the cottage in late 1929. Nell joined them 12 months later. The kiln was installed in 1930 and the company’s achievement was publicised in Building in December 1931, illustrated with a photograph of Win and Nell Holden loading their new kiln. Woman’s Budget (30 December 1931) carried a similar story and the Building article was reprinted by AGL in a brochure promoting the product, illustrated with photos of Win and Nell in the 'Wynnel Pottery Studio’ erected just behind the Chalet.
There the sisters experimented with local clay and made some of the earliest coil pots in Sydney, which they sold through the Arts & Crafts Shop in Rowe Street. Win married in 1932 and gradually abandoned pottery, but Nell continued, buying a commercial wheel with a 1-horsepower motor 'which was good for any amount of clay’. In November 1933 an extension housing a showroom, 'architecturally in sympathy with the house and connected to it by a stone-flagged path bordered with Japanese iris’, was built at right angles to the studio (Martin). The Daily Telegraph (December 1933) published several photographs of the sisters in the studio (reproduced Martin), followed by Woman’s Budget in August 1934 and the Sydney Morning Herald on 16 November 1934 ('Exhibition in a garden studio’) and 17 January 1935 ('Swiss chalet with additions’). It was by no means the first pottery studio in Sydney (see Martin p.11), but the Wynnel Pottery Studio attached to the Holdens’ picturesque chalet had more media appeal in the 1930s than any of the others.
An active member of the NSW Society of Arts & Crafts from 1928 until her death, Nell made a great variety of pots in her Warrawee studio pre-WWII, as can be seen in late 1930s photograph ( History pp.30-31 and Martin). Despite a government regulation that restricted potters to utilitarian ware only during the war, she was able to continue to produce her distinctive 'banksia man’ jugs, based on her cousin’s creation since the mould had been made pre-war (an example of a cream slip-cast earthenware banksia jug c.1945, private collection, is illustrated by Martin, p.8). Nell wrote in 1971:
My speciality was “slip” ware – white with blue slip colours – green – also pink etc on white clay. White slip on brown clay pottery is an endless subject… When the Second World War came, I was told by the authorities (as others like me were) I could make only utility ware. I did make endless cups and saucers, teapots etc, as these articles were not coming into Australia.
She also helped with the Red Cross classes for convalescent ex-servicemen during the war. In 1950 she taught at the Society’s pottery class at North Sydney and after it closed had 10 pupils at her Warrawee studio for about 2 years, then abandoned teaching for her own work.
In 1954 Holden won the Society’s Elisabeth Söderberg Memorial Award (est. 1940) for her pottery. She won it again in 1956. That year she judged the crafts at the Castle Hill Agricultural Show with Myrtle Innes , another longstanding member of the NSW Society of Arts and Crafts. The Society’s Christmas party was held in Holden’s Turramurra studio in 1957. In 1965 a small members’ exhibition preceding the annual exhibition in November was held there and the Söderberg Memorial Award made (Miss Row’s christening robe won; Miss Woods’s 'bark picture’ was equal third). Sales totalled £327/6/-. She held another exhibition in her studio-home in 1966. Nell was President of the Society in 1966-68 and she succeeded Olive Nock as Patron in 1978. She died in 1980.
EXAMPLES: a sky blue wheel-thrown earthenware vase with simple carved slip decoration c. 1940 private collection, is on the cover of Australiana Feb.2003; others in Martin also pcs.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Michael Bogle
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. December 1892
- Summary
- Nell Turner Holden was a potter. An active member of the NSW Society of Arts & Crafts from 1928 until her death in 1980, Turner Holden also taught at the Society's pottery class at North Sydney.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1980
- Age at death
- 88
Details
Latitude-23.3782137 Longitude150.5134227 Start Date1890-01-01 End Date1980-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Rockhampton, Qld., Australia
- Biography
- wood-carvers, were mother and daughter who worked in central Queensland from the turn of the century. As well as being an accomplished wood-carver, Daisy Archer , was prominent in the social life of the area. Born Alice Manon Marwedel in Tasmania in 1862, Daisy, as she was known, and her twin sister Jessie Marie Martha later moved to Toowoomba, Queensland, with their family. Jessie married George Allan, a schoolmaster at Rockhampton, and when Daisy came to stay she met, and in 1889 married, the pastoralist Robert Archer (1858-1926). They lived at the Archer family property, Gracemere, outside Rockhampton, which Robert had inherited.
Daisy Archer’s interest in carving was sparked off by the work of the station bookkeeper Henry James King-Church (c.1869-1905). She appears to have had no formal training in art, although she may have had lessons in carving from her eldest sister, Emma, who cared for the twins after their mother died. Daisy also produced her own embroidery designs.
Robert Archer was extensively involved with the Rockhampton Agricultural Society, and Daisy acted as judge and steward of the Women’s Industries’ section at the Rockhampton Annual Show on several occasions. She was instrumental in setting up the local branch of the Queensland Country Women’s Association and during the 1930s became increasingly involved in this organisation. From the early part of this century until her husband died, she produced an extensive body of carving.
Daisy and Robert Archer’s daughter Joan was born in Rockhampton. She studied art in England in 1905-09 at the Croamhurst School in Croydon, where her best subject was watercolour painting. Her initial interest in woodcarving was also fostered by King-Church. Unlike her mother, Joan exhibited her work. In 1910 she was awarded a prize for woodcarving from the Rockhampton Agricultural Society, and in 1939 from Toowoomba.
While engaged to her cousin Alister Archer, Joan completed a carved chair after an original in an Oslo museum while he was on active service during World War I. They married in 1919. She continued carving after her marriage and produced many items for the Comforts Funds during World War II, until a stroke put an end to these activities.
Writers:
Cooke, Glenn R.
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1890
- Summary
- Queensland born artist, daughter of accomplished woodcarver Daisy Archer and a woodcarver herself. Produced many items for the Comforts Fund during World War II.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1980
- Age at death
- 90
Details
Latitude-45.874167 Longitude170.503611 Start Date1917-01-01 End Date1979-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Dunedin, New Zealand
- Biography
- painter, has been linked stylistically to Norman Lindsay , for whom she occasionally modelled. Norton’s art usually featured visionary and occult imagery and was influenced by European Vorticism. Born in Dunedin, New Zealand on 2 October 1917, Norton came to Sydney with her family in June 1925. Her father, Albert, a merchant captain, was a cousin of the composer Vaughan Williams. The youngest of three sisters, Norton was expelled from Chatswood Girls’ Grammar for producing 'depraved’ drawings of vampires, ghouls and werewolves thought likely to corrupt the other girls. She subsequently enrolled at East Sydney Technical College under Rayner Hoff for two years. Hoff encouraged her 'pagan’ creativity, but she did not graduate. While still a student, Norton dabbled as a pavement artist near the Sydney GPO. After leaving college, she worked variously as a kitchen maid, night-club waitress, PMG messenger and trainee journalist for Smith’s Weekly . Her first published illustrations – two fantasy works of ghost-like entities and a pencil study, The Borgias – appeared in the monthly Pertinent in October 1941. Through the magazine she met her creative partner and lover, the poet Gavin Greenlees.
Norton first attracted controversy when she exhibited a series of pagan, sexually explicit drawings at the Rowden-White Library, University of Melbourne in August 1949. Police raided the exhibition – which included such works as Lucifer , Witches’ Sabbath and Individuation – and Norton was charged with obscenity. The charges were dismissed after she provided detailed explanations of her occult symbolism to the court. She derived much of her imagery from a type of psychic exploration based on self-hypnosis and what in occult circles has been described as 'wanderings on the astral planes’. Many of her works are based on trance-encounters with archetypal beings whom Norton considered had their own independent existence. She began to compile a series of these mystical drawings with Greenlees providing accompanying poems. Under the sponsorship of the publisher Walter Glover, they appeared in The Art of Rosaleen Norton in 1952. This attracted even more controversy than her Melbourne exhibition. Glover was charged with producing an obscene publication and the book could only be distributed in Australia with some of the more controversial – sexually explicit – images blacked out. Export copies were burnt by US Customs, and Glover became bankrupt. Greenlees and Norton, who had been financially assisted by Glover, were forced to scrounge a living by other means.
Norton became well known as an occult artist and bohemian personality in the 1950s and early ’60s and would sell her sketches and paintings to whomever expressed an interest. She acquired a persona as 'The Witch of Kings Cross’, openly advocated her dedication to occult beliefs and the Great God Pan and was falsely accused by the tabloid press of holding Black Masses. This was not without its consequences either. On the basis of a series of confiscated photographs simulating ceremonial rituals, she was charged with 'engaging in unnatural sexual acts’. She unwittingly played a part in the downfall of Sir Eugene Goossens, the first conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and a member of Norton’s occult group, who was charged in March 1956 with importing ritual objects and pornographic photographs. His career never recovered from the publicity and he was obliged to return to England, where he soon died.
Norton continued to produce macabre supernatural works until her death from cancer of the colon on 5 December 1979, but these became increasingly lurid and repetitive. Her most accomplished works are the early drawings reproduced in The Art of Rosaleen Norton (1952) and in a small publication released by Walter Glover in 1984, The Supplement to The Art of Rosaleen Norton . Glover reissued The Art of Rosaleen Norton in 1982 after emerging from bankruptcy.
Writers:
Drury, Nevill
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 2 October 1917
- Summary
- A painter who produced pagan and sexually explicit drawings. She attended East Sydney Technical College but didn't graduate due to the kind of work she produced. Her work and life regularly attracted controversy.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 5-Dec-79
- Age at death
- 62
Details
Latitude-35.4388907 Longitude149.7955552 Start Date1916-01-01 End Date1979-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Braidwood, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- painter, printmaker and commercial artist, was born in Braidwood (NSW) on 25 May 1916, daughter of H.R. Beatty, the local doctor at Braidwood, and his wife. Attended Presbyterian Ladies’ College, Croydon until 1933 and probably made her first linocuts there. Studied at Julian Ashton 's Sydney Art School from 1933 and with Adelaide Perry (1934-37). Her only known linocuts were produced in 1936 and include a scene on the sailing ship Joseph Conrad owned by the businessman Alan Villiers, entitled Holy Stone, Joseph Conrad (men scrubbing deck) 1936, linocut, National Gallery of Australia. The subject was also used for prints by other art students.
In the late 1930s Beatty worked as a commercial artist from a studio in Daley Street, Sydney, which she shared with Betty Arnott and a few other students producing black and white drawings and paintings for advertisements and dress illustrations. In 1943 she married William Fesq, a wine and spirit merchant. After raising a family, she returned to painting in the late 1950s. Her last works were life drawings done with Mary White. Died Sydney in 1979.
This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 25 May 1916
- Summary
- Margaret Checkley Beatty was a printmaker, painter and commercial artist who attended Julian Ashton's Sydney Art School with Adelaide Perry from 1933. Her linocut of the sailing ship Joseph Conrad is held in the National Gallery of Australia.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1979
- Age at death
- 63
Details
Latitude55 Longitude-3 Start Date1908-01-01 End Date1979-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- UK
- Biography
- painter; was born in the UK (in 1908 according to McCulloch & Edward D. Craig, 1909 acc. Deutscher-Menzies). She came to Australia as a child (McCulloch says 1914). She had no formal art training and did not start painting seriously until 1972 (Craig). Her naïve oil on composition board paintings signed 'Roma’, which reflect her life on a farm at Bangalow, NSW, were exhibited in most Australian capitals and in London. They include: Country Corner auctioned at Deutscher-Menzies’s Australian and International Paintings, Sculpture and Works on Paper , Melbourne 22 November 1998, lot 79; Interior Leonard Joel April 2000, $1,600; The Christening Party Gregson Flanagan (Perth) June 2001, $1,800; and Country Fair , Deutscher-Menzies August 2000, $2,200. She won the Albury Art Prize in 1976.
There is some speculation that she was probably the married Roma May McBurney, who lived at Abbotsford and died on 15 December 1979, aged 71.
This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1908
- Summary
- Painter who began painting in her sixties and whose naïve oil on composition board paintings were signed 'Roma' and which reflected her life on a farm at Bangalow, NSW. Her work was exhibited in most Australian capitals and in London.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 15-Dec-79
- Age at death
- 71
Details
Latitude-37 Longitude144 Start Date1900-01-01 End Date1979-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Victoria
- Biography
- painter, was born in Victoria on 30 December 1900.
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Note: Heritage biography.
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 30 December 1900
- Summary
- Painter, was reluctant to speak about her art and left little information about herself.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 29-Oct-79
- Age at death
- 79
Details
Latitude52.2055314 Longitude0.1186637 Start Date1898-01-01 End Date1979-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Cambridge, England, UK
- Biography
- Born in Cambridge, England. When his mother, who was a talented painter, died he left England at seven years of age to go with his father to Argentina. He returned to go to boarding school. Upon the start of World War I he became an artilleryman. He studied watercolours with T. I. Hallett for six years, tried farming and horse breeding and then came to Australia in 1923 where he was a jackaroo on a northern cattle station, before trying mining and then the civil service. He was married to Ellen Benedict. He exhibited with the West Australian Society of Arts about 1923. When World War II broke out he enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force. After the war he became the secretary of the Perth Club. He exhibited two oil paintings The Road by the Creek and River Reflections, North Fremantle in the Claude Hotchin Art Prize in 1949. He became a member of the Perth Society of Artists. In 1950 his exhibit was The Shadowed Peak. In 1952 he exhibited watercolours Peewees and Clouds and Shadows. He had fourteen exhibitions in Perth between 1946 and 1973. Murray Mason wrote of his 1973 sellout exhibition, “His admirable handling and vision are certainly evident in this present exhibition. Whether in translating landscapes, birds, river scenes or horses he depicts with extreme accuracy and matching sensitivity. His ability to suggest sheen is splendid.”
Writers:
Dr Dorothy Erickson
Date written:
2010
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1898
- Summary
- Painter who had fourteen exhibitions in Perth between 1946 and 1973. He was an artilleryman in the World War I and when the World War II broke out he enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1979
- Age at death
- 81
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1897-01-01 End Date1979-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
- Biography
- painter and printmaker, was born in Sydney. He studied at the Sydney Art School under Julian Ashton and Mildred Lovett in 1913. In 1921 he began wood engraving with assistance from Lionel Lindsay and was included in Tyrell’s exhibition of woodcuts 1923. Apparently, he mainly did views conveying atmosphere and light, e.g. The Back Gate 1924, wood engraving (AGNSW) – though see A Mate O’ Mine 1924, wood engraving (edn 36) (ill. Bloomfield). M. Danvers Power’s Verse (published byBeacon Press, Sydney, in an edition of 150 in 1930) was illustrated with original black and white linocuts by Davies. He executed a number of large linocuts for a projected work Ecclesiasticus to be published by Ashendene Press, England, in the 1930s, which never eventuated. He showed work regularly with the NSW Society of Artists between the wars and was the first principal of the National Art School, ESTC (1960 61). His work was included in A Survey of Relief Prints 1900 1950 (Deutscher, Melbourne 1978).
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1897
- Summary
- Printmaker and the first principal of the National Art School, East Sydney Technical College. His work mainly deals with atmosphere and light.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1979
- Age at death
- 82
Details
Latitude50.6402809 Longitude4.6667145 Start Date1896-01-01 End Date1979-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Belgium
- Biography
- Henri Joseph Bastin was born on 27 June 1896 at Châtelet Faubour near Charleroi, Belgium.
During World War I he was allegedly wounded by a German sniper as he cut telephone wires, and after receiving a silver anklebone from his captors, worked as a civilian prisoner on farms and road gangs near Magdeburg, Germany (Lehmann 1977, pg 87). Curiously he made two arrivals in Australia following the cessation of hostilities. The first was aboard the SS Raimund in Fremantle on 6 August 1919 without identification papers, apparently having walked on board the ship in Cherbourg, France, that was repatriating Australian troops (Riddell 1974, pg 7). Bastin’s second arrival was in April 1922 at Port Pirie, South Australia, aboard the SS Conde which had left Newcastle, UK, the previous year. This time Bastin had obtained a passport from the Belgium Counsel in London.
Bastin initially worked as a blacksmith and carpenter at Crystal Brook, near Port Pirie, and Broken Hill. It was in Broken Hill that he began his life long passion for opal mining. In September 1931 he married Minnie Wallsmith (b 1903), an English born station schoolteacher he had met in Bundaberg, Queensland. They had three children; Nancy (b 1931), Gerald (b 1933) and Peter (b 1938). Life in the 1930s for Bastin and his family was hard; moving around Queensland and New South Wales, prospecting as well as labouring at a variety of jobs for short periods, interspersed by periods on Intermittent Relief Assistance and often living in a tent. Bastin was frequently away from his family, and by the early 1940s it appears he was estranged from his wife. Despite their difficulties the Bastins were able to buy a house at Bunyaville in Brisbane, and on 4 September 1943, with support from his wife, Bastin became a naturalized citizen of Australia.
Bastin began painting around 1954 during a rainy day marooned in a shed on a station in southwest Queensland, having seen another’s pictures dabbed on the wall. Fashioning a brush out of horsehair and using branding paint on paper he had whitewashed, Bastin painted a picture of the shearing shed which he sold to the station owner ( The Herald [Melbourne] 1958, pg 1). Encouraged by the station’s owner, Major Harold de Vahl Rubin, a philanthropic grazier, art-collector and birder, Bastin continued to paint on readily available materials such as newspaper and cardboard signs, supplemented by paints and artist supplies Major Rubin exchanged for the paintings he and others in Brisbane bought (Lehmann 1977, pg 92).
His first exhibition was at the newly opened Gallery of Contemporary Art in Melbourne during 1957. Other exhibitions quickly followed including two at the Museum of Modern Art of Australia (Melbourne) in 1958 and 1959, where Alan McCulloch proclaimed the emergence of Australia’s first true modern primitive (McCulloch 1958, pg 20). It appears likely that John Reed introduced Bastin to Henri Rousseau’s oeuvre through the same 1942 Chicago exhibition catalogue that Sidney Nolan had seen at Heide. Bastin painted several homages to Rousseau centered on the burial of a dead Aboriginal queen. Bastin was fascinated by aspects of Aboriginal culture he encountered in the outback especially after working with Dr Flynn, who appropriated their churingas, and Daisy Bates. His paintings of Aboriginal people, such as those depicting ballerina and clown clad participants in corroboree have, far from intending any racial slur, been described as having “quirky integrity” (Pearson 1991, pp. 326-337). Similarly Primitive art (1965), Bastin’s interpretation of the Mona Lisa , with the figure set in the Australian outback replete with painted red fingernails, indicates the artist’s impish wit.
Bastin’s early works were of landscapes; intricately diverse coral reefs and beaches of tropical Queensland as well as drier inland plains and mountains of central Australia. He completed many paintings of the opal mining areas he lived and worked in, taking pride in displaying the accoutrements of his own mining camp; his tent, gun, shovels, axes, pots and pans all laid out around a campfire set among the opal field. He painted largely in gouache until the mid 1960s when he discovered that enamel house paints best caught the particular light he felt emanated from Australia’s landscapes. Bastin was also known for his restless inventive energy and generosity; fashioning toys for friends’ children, making “feel” paintings for the visually impaired and on creating “opal” out of coloured foil and epoxy resin, declaring “I mine opal – and I make opal!” (in Lehmann 1977, pg 83).
Animals, especially cockatoos, budgerigars and birds of paradise with outstretched wings became a recurring motif from the late 1960s onwards. While these were popular with the public some critics found Bastin’s work too “decorative” (McCaughey 1968, pg 6) and “knowing” (McCulloch 1971, pg 25), an accusation often made in attempts to distinguish the 'true’ primitive’s spontaneity with the formulaic and contrived arrangements of imitators of the 'style’. Bastin would methodically outline in pencil his gum trees, leaves and animals before painting them, and like many artists, created multiple versions of paintings. Unlike his fellow primitive painters whose work tended to be largely associated with one area, Bastin painted scenes from across Australia, often homogenizing disparate elements together, indicative both of his own peripatetic nature and his indiscriminate delight in the natural world he encountered.
The popularity of primitive painters in Australia during the 1960s and 1970s reflected an international trend. Bastin was the most represented artist in the now disbanded Harold E. Mertz Collection of Australian Art. Along with other leading Australian primitives Sam Byrne, Charles Callins, Lorna Chick, James Fardoulys, Irvine Homer, Victor Litherland & Muriel Luders, the National Gallery of Australia actively purchased Bastin’s work in the mid 1970s, acquiring ten of his paintings. Bastin’s work was included in the inaugural Christies in Australia auction on 24 September 1969 where realized prices were comparable to those of Albert Namatjira, Sali Herman, Donald Friend and Ray Crooke.
Henri Bastin died at a bus stop at Henley Beach in Adelaide following his usual evening walk on 28 September 1979 (Dutton 1979, pg 94). He was buried in Brisbane alongside his wife (d 1971) and youngest son Peter (d 1968) who had been accidentally electrocuted while serving with the RAAF. A couple of weeks before his death Bastin was afforded the accolade of “a living national treasure of Australia, one of the last of an extraordinary generation of primitive artists whose like we will never see again” (Dolan 1979). His friend Geoffrey Dutton established a public memorial fund with which money was raised to buy a large hanging canvas Australian Paradise , completed shortly before his death, for the Adelaide Festival Centre.
Writers:
Bull, Julian
Date written:
2009
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 27 June 1896
- Summary
- Bastin emerged in the 1950s as a key figure in Australian primitive/naive art.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 28-Sep-79
- Age at death
- 83
Details
Latitude-30.2328885 Longitude150.5785678 Start Date1890-01-01 End Date1979-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Cobbadah, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- painter, was born on 28 May 1890 at Cobbadah (NSW), a daughter of Henry Crowley, a wealthy grazier of Glen Riddle, Barraba. She was educated at home by a governess and attended a Sydney boarding school. In 1907, while still at school, her uncle, the Rev. Archibald Crowley, encouraged her to join him in weekly classes at Julian Ashton 's Sydney Art School. These lessons lasted only a short time; Grace was soon back at Barraba, expected to play a domestic role as dutiful daughter.
Her parents did not want her to pursue a career as a painter; however, Grace managed to return to Sydney in 1915 and began to study seriously under Ashton, Mildred Lovett and Elioth Gruner , eventually becoming Ashton’s assistant in 1918 (replacing Gruner). She taught there until 1923, the year she entered – but did not win – the NSW Society of Artists’ Travelling Scholarship (it was won by Roi de Maistre ). In 1926 she went to Europe anyway, without a scholarship, travelling with Anne Dangar , a fellow teacher at Ashton’s. Grace was supported -grudgingly – by her family: her parents gave her the fare and her brother sent her an annual allowance.
In Paris (1926-29) she studied at Colarossi’s briefly, then with Louis Roger, André Lhôte, Amedée Ozenfant and Albert Gleizes. At first Lhôte was dismissive of Grace’s work; 'The two things he hated most’, Grace remembered, 'were “Les Beaux Arts”, and “les impressionists”’. Under Lhôte’s influence – in Paris and especially at his summer school at Mirmande which Dangar and Dorrit Black also attended – Grace discarded her earlier style and her landscapes and figure paintings began to take on a characteristic geometric form. In 1928 her Girl with Goats (NGV) was exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants, being hung next a painting by Lhôte.
After returning to Australia early in 1930, Grace spent some time at Barraba. By 1932 she had moved back to Sydney, where she helped Dorrit Black at her Modern Art Centre. That year she started her own school with ex-student Rah Fizelle – whose work closely followed Crowley’s – in premises at 215a George Street; during its five-year existence the school became a focus for modern art in Sydney.
Grace Crowley was part of an informal but important network of Sydney modernist artists. Crowley, Black, Eleonore Lange , Frank and Margel Hinder and Ralph Balson all produced 'difficult’ work which was not promoted in that organ of decorative 'easy’ modernism, the Home , so was not as influential in forming Sydney’s taste. The circle held a group exhibition ('Exhibition I’) at David Jones Gallery in 1939, opened by Justice Evatt (husband of Mary Alice ), but no more followed due partly to the outbreak of war and partly to the formation of the Sydney branch of the Contemporary Art Society.
Grace Crowley never married. She remained close friends with Ralph Balson, travelling to the USA with him in 1960-61. She died on 21 April 1979.
Writers:
Burke, Janine
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 28 May 1890
- Summary
- Painter and resident of Sydney, New South Wales. She started her own school with ex-student Rah Fizelle which during its five-year existence the school became a focus for modern art in Sydney.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 21-Apr-79
- Age at death
- 89
Details
Latitude-42.880556 Longitude147.325 Start Date1887-01-01 End Date1979-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Hobart, TAS, Australia
- Biography
- printmaker and bookplate designer, was born in Hobart on 9 March 1887, daughter of George Lovell Dwyer and Margaret Jane, née Shield.
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 9 March 1887
- Summary
- Ella Maggie Dwyer was a printmaker and bookplate designer. She was a foundation member of the Australian Bookplate Club in 1932. In 1928 Dwyer was elected a member of the Australian Painter-Etchers' Society.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 6-Sep-79
- Age at death
- 92
Details
Latitude-42.80792 Longitude147.63436 Start Date1886-01-01 End Date1979-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Forcett, Tasmania, Australia
- Biography
- painter, etcher and monumental mason, was born Violet Emma Alomes in Forcett, Tasmania, in 1886. A painter by training and a monumental mason by chance, she studied art with Lucien Dechaineux at Hobart Technical College in 1928 and 1931-32, later sharing a studio with fellow students Mildred Lovett , Florence Rodway , Edith Holmes , Dorothy Stoner and Ethel M. Nicholls. It was presumably during this period that Holmes painted her portrait. She took private classes with Max Meldrum in 1936-39, travelling regularly to his Melbourne studio from Hobart.
In 1939-40 her work was included in the exhibition, 'International Women: Painters, Sculptors, Gravers’, held by the National Council of Women of the United States at Riverside Museum, New York. She painted in oils and watercolours, made etchings, and was an active member of the Art Society of Tasmania, exhibiting with it from 1932 to 1975; in 1936-52 she was a member of its Council. She also joined the Hobart Soroptomist Club and the First Settler League (her great-grandfather, a Royal Marine, had arrived in Van Diemen’s Land in the Calcutta in 1804).
Violet married Amos William Vimpany, a monumental mason and another former student of Hobart Technical College (1897-1902); they had two daughters, Gwendolene and Violet. After her husband’s sudden death in 1945, Violet Vimpany took over his stonemasonry business. In 1973 she was named one of Tasmania’s Women of Achievement. Having sold the business in 1969 and retired definitively in 1973, she died at Hobart on 2 March 1979.
Writers:
Steggall, Susan
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1886
- Summary
- Vimpany painted in oils and watercolours, made etchings, and was an active member of the Art Society of Tasmania, exhibiting with it from 1932 to 1975.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 2-Mar-79
- Age at death
- 93
Details
Latitude-33.8839305 Longitude151.2769347 Start Date1885-01-01 End Date1979-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Waverley, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- painter, exhibited with the Society of Women Painters in the1910s. The Mitchell Library holds her watercolour Gloucester Street, Old Sydney , 26.2 × 36.8 cm (ZML660), which has a plaque on the mount that reads: 'Gloucester St., Old Sydney. Laura Booth. Society of Women Painters, 1919 (First Exhibited Society of Women Painters, 1913). Transferred to the Mitchell Library from the Art Gallery of NSW 1967.’ As 'Miss L. Booth’, she exhibited at the Royal Art Society of NSW in 1916.
This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1885
- Summary
- Booth was a painter who showed her work with the Society of Women Painters throughout the 1910s. She also exhibited with the Royal Art Society of New South Wales in 1916 and later held the position of Treasurer.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 18-Aug-79
- Age at death
- 94
Details
Latitude45.6848725 Longitude12.3773466 Start Date1939-01-01 End Date1978-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- San Biagio di Callalta, Italy
- Biography
- printmaker, sculptor and teacher, was born in San Biagio di Callalta, Italy. He migrated with his father in 1949 to join his mother in Carlton, Melbourne. After studying at Royal Melbourne Institure of Technology [RMIT] (Fine Art Diploma 1961) he went to London and began studying printmaking at the Chelsea School of Art in 1962. Later that year he moved to Milan and spent a year with Marino Marini at the Brera Academy. He returned to Australia in 1963 and became part-time instructor in the Printmaking Dept of RMIT, full-time in 1968-74. He held his first solo exhibition, featuring sculpture, drawings and prints, in 1964. Visited Japan in 1967. Set up a studio in Paris in 1975, the year he was represented in the Bienal de Sao Paulo. In 1976, with Imants Tillers (b.1950), he did a series of etching/aquatints, According to Des Esseintes (ill. MacIntyre, in Art Gallery of New South Wales collection). Albury Regional Art Centre owns his Personage and Entrances 1974, etching, 2 sheets (ill. Hanson, cat. 210) and Head 1965 is at Museum of Modern Art at Heide (ill. Hanson, cat.209). Baldessin died in a car accident aged 39. Several memorial exhibitions were held, most notably one at the National Gallery of Victoria.
This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1939
- Summary
- Widely travelled, Baldessin honed his art through formal training and collaborative projects. He was a highly respected printmaker who studied at the Chelsea School of Art in London before teaching in the printmaking department at RMIT in Melbourne. In 1975 he was represented in the Bienal de Sao Paulo in Brazil and despite his premature death in a car accident at the age of 39, he is well represe
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1978
- Age at death
- 39
Details
Latitude50.0874654 Longitude14.4212535 Start Date1929-01-01 End Date1978-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Prague, Czech Republic
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1929
- Summary
- Kral was a designer initially active in Melbourne where he was a founder member of the Gallery A commercial design team. He carried out exhibition work for the Commonwealth Department of Trade (Tokyo 1961) and undertook commercial interior design and display work in Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne and internationally. He was also active in the graphic arts. Active member of AIDIA, ACIAA.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-78
- Age at death
- 49
Details
Latitude-33.829075 Longitude151.24409 Start Date1919-01-01 End Date1978-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Mosman, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
- Biography
- illustrator, did linocut covers for the New Theatre Review (Melbourne). That of November 1943 shows Germanic style soldiers, while the one for October 1944 depicts Aboriginal women (ill. Merewether, 81-82, along with covers by Bucknow, Eve Harris , Vane Lindesay , Jack Maughan and Menkhorst).
This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1919
- Summary
- Illustrator who worked in Australia during WWII. Bainbridge's work includes linocut covers for the Melbourne publication 'New Theatre Review' in the early 1940s. Later worked as a poster designer for London Transport.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1978
- Age at death
- 59
Details
Latitude-33.829075 Longitude151.24409 Start Date1908-01-01 End Date1978-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Mosman, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- A painter and craftworker, Margot Lewers is best known for her abstract paintings produced after 1955. An innovative approach and exploration of different media informed her entire professional life. Born in Sydney to a German father, Adolph Plate, a painter and writer who travelled extensively in the Pacific before his early death in 1913, Margo and her brothers, one of whom was the painter Carl Plate , grew up in an improvised one-parent household. However, their mother, Gilly Plate, gave the children the confidence to believe in themselves and this enabled Margo to embark on a lifelong career as a visual artist and craftworker without formal training. The little art education she did receive consisted of a short period studying drawing, painting and textile design at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London (1934) and irregular painting classes with Desiderius Orban in Sydney (1945-50). By the age of 21, Margo had established a studio in Sydney, making and selling a range of craft objects, including pottery, hand-printed fabrics and wooden utensils. With funds from this venture she started a successful commercial pottery business, employing a production potter who worked to her designs. Following her marriage to the sculptor Gerald Lewers in 1933, she travelled to England and Europe. Visits to exhibitions and meetings with artists such as Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and the art critic Herbert Read introduced her to the ideas underpinning modernism. A commitment to them shaped the direction of all her future work.
Lewers was an admirer of the Bauhaus design movement which she experienced during travels in Germany in 1934. An illustrated article on the Bauhaus had previously appeared in an Australian magazine, “The Home”, in 1 October 1928 Henry Pynor. “Visit old Countries for New Ideas for your Home.” The Home 1 October 1928, pps. 48-49. and her associate Sydney Ancher had travelled in Germany in 1931 and returned home with the same enthusiasm. After Lewers returned to Sydney in 1935 she opened a consultancy design service and shop called Notanda in Rowe Street. The stock included simple hand-made pottery, designed by her or imported from Mexico, bold linoblock-printed fabrics, small, carved wooden sculptures by Gerald Lewers and undecorated timber furniture designed with strong flowing lines. She combined the Arts and Crafts tradition with a minimalist approach to interior design.
In 1941 Margo was a founding member of the Contemporary Art Society in Sydney. Her active involvement provided the impetus for a shift away from design towards painting. In order to create a feeling of depth and space, she began exploring the relationship of colour and light. She held her first solo exhibition of abstract paintings in 1952 and was soon making a significant contribution to the development of modernism in Sydney. As a leading abstract expressionist painter, she received favourable reviews, won 14 art awards and during the 1940s and ’60s her work was included in major Australian contemporary exhibitions that toured overseas.
Margo also explored other media such as plexiglass, painted fabrics and mosaics, undertaking significant public commissions including mosaic walls and landscaped gardens. After Gerald’s death she completed a relief sculpture for the Reserve Bank, Canberra, based on his model. Her work is represented in all state and national collections
Margo Lewers held a joint exhibition with her husband, the sculptor Gerald Lewers, at the Peter Bray Gallery in Melbourne in 1952. In that exhibition Studio stood out as Margo’s most accomplished work in geometric abstraction. This watercolour is characteristic of the painting style known as geometric constructivism, a mode of painting based on the principles of dynamic symmetry commonly attributed to the painters Grace Crowley , Ralph Balson and Frank Hinder, leading members of the Sydney Modernist School. The influence of these artists on Margo’s work at this time was significant, as was the work of Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, two of the British modernist artists she had met in England in 1934. In particular, Nicholson’s abstract still lifes and painted reliefs of the early 1930s had a profound influence on her later abstract compositions.
After returning to Australia, Margo Lewers studied under the influential teacher and artist Desiderius Orban. He encouraged her to be spontaneous and to adopt a more intuitive approach to colour, line and space. However, it was not until the early 1950s and her involvement and experimentation with constructivism that her paintings successfully synthesised the technical qualities of geometric abstraction with the transparency and luminosity of watercolour. This transitional period was significant in several respects. It shaped her career as a painter and was a major influence for her more mature expressionist and abstract works in the late 1950s and 1960s. Interestingly, Margo’s arrangement of translucent overlays of subdued colour punctuated by a vertical thrust of overlocking diagonal lines and semi-circles evident in Studio later recur in her painted fabrics and coloured plexiglass constructions of the early 1970s.
Studio exemplifies the culmination of Margo Lewers’s early formal study and experimentation with abstraction, with the technical qualities of watercolour painting and the oblique framing of space through drawing. Studio is unlike her earlier geometric compositions of the late 1940s. These preliminary, painterly investigations into formal abstraction were laboured and contrived and her watercolour techniques were not as refined or skilfully executed. It took several years while living at Emu Plains-where she devoted herself to full-time painting-for the transition from academic abstraction to personal iconography to manifest itself. Characteristically, Studio articulates an inner tension and spiritual presence suggestive of stained-glass windows. The painting also symbolises and signals Margo Lewers’s departure from geometric abstraction to abstract expressionism.
Writers:
Lewers, DaraniCrothers, Tanya
Michael Bogle
Davina Jackson
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2016
- Born
- b. 1908
- Summary
- Margo Lewers was primarily a painter and an admirer of the Bauhaus movement which she experienced during travels in Germany in 1934. She was initially active as a commercial artist, textile designer, potter and gallery manager [Notanda, Sydney, closed in 1939, reopened 1940]. As a leading abstract expressionist painter, she received favourable reviews, won many awards and her work was included in major exhibitions.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1978
- Age at death
- 70
Details
Latitude-37.7667 Longitude144.9628 Start Date1906-01-01 End Date1978-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Brunswick, Melbourne, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1906
- Summary
- Melbourne-born, Sydney-based designer and advertising agent whose collection of Papua New Guinean art and artefacts played a significant role in Australia's understanding of Melanesian art and culture during the 1960s and 1970s.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1978
- Age at death
- 72
Details
Latitude-33.8772 Longitude151.1049 Start Date1903-01-01 End Date1978-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Burwood, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- painter, illustrator and commercial artist, was born in Burwood, Sydney. She was educated at home until she was twelve then went to SCEGGS Redlands, Cremorne. She left school aged sixteen, spent two years at Julian Ashton’s Sydney Art School then worked for the advertising agency of Smith & Julius. Afterwards she freelanced for publications such as the Australian Woman’s Mirror , Home and Sun . She shared a studio with Betty Rogers, another former Ashton student, who modelled for Horder.
Horder worked and saved hard as she wanted to try her fortune in London. She arrived there in 1929 and was fortunate enough to get work with a publicity agent. She began to attend the Westminster Art School, and she obtained commissions to design a group of posters for the Great Northern Railway of Ireland and the Great Southern Railways of England. Horder mixed with various young Australians living in London, including Arthur Freeman, also from Sydney, who had come to England on a Society of Arts’ Travelling Scholarship and was studying at the Royal Academy. They married in 1936. Both enrolled at the London Central School of Arts and Crafts and became interested in printmaking. Arthur was employed as a lithographer with the printers Sun Press, while Margaret began to work for Oxford University Press. She illustrated at least two books a year for Oxford from 1936 until 1952 as well as doing illustrations for other publishers. This continued throughout the war, when Arthur joined the Water Police.
After the war, Australia came vividly to mind when she was offered Nan Chauncy’s They Found a Cave to illustrate. This was a landmark publication, which became a pioneer of modern Australian children’s books. For it, she had to try to remember Australia all over again. It was a challenge she enjoyed, and it may have been partly responsible for the decision to return to Australia. In December 1948 the Freemans arrived back at Sydney.
Although Horder was still illustrating two books a year for Oxford, she began working for Angus & Robertson in Sydney, designing as well as illustrating books. Her first success was Good Luck to the Rider , also the first for its author, Joan Phipson. The book thoroughly justified Angus & Robertson’s faith in Horder, for it was a popular as well as artistic triumph. It began a partnership between author and illustrator which resulted in seven most successful children’s books of high quality, all a pleasure to handle and look at as well as to read, and two of them winners of the Children’s Book of the Year Award. She illustrated five novels by Patricia Wrightson and three by Nan Chauncy with the same care and enthusiasm, enriching them with her thoughtful, interpretative drawings. Again, they included several award winners.
Horder stopped book illustrating in 1968. For a time she continued to work for the New South Wales School Magazine , which she found less demanding. After a few years retirement in Europe, the Freemans returned to Australia in 1977. Margaret Horder became ill the following year and died in August 1978.
Writers:
Muir, Marcie
Note: Primary
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1903
- Summary
- Painter, illustrator and commercial artist, she was a prolific and successful book illustrator. She illustrated seven books by Joan Phipson, two of them winners of the Children's Book of the Year Award.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- Aug-78
- Age at death
- 75
Details
Latitude-33.88477 Longitude151.22621 Start Date1903-01-01 End Date1978-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Paddington, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- cartoonist and commercial artist, was born in Paddington, Sydney but the family soon moved to Tasmania. Mick had his first cartoon published in the Bulletin when aged 16, and he continued to contribute to it occasionally while working as a survey draughtsman, evidently after moving from Tasmania to Melbourne. He also contributed gag cartoons to Smith’s Weekly , Aussie and other papers, e.g. Smith’s Weekly 26 January 1924, 19: 'MAN: “Feelin’ crook?” WOMAN: “No” MAN: “Got a pain?” WOMAN: “No” MAN: “Well, d’yer think yer goin’ ter be crook?” WOMAN: “No” MAN: “Aw, yer contrairy cow. Yer won’t give a block a chance ter drink yer bloomin’ 'ealth.”’
Mick Armstrong drew political cartoons for Melbourne Punch in 1925, for the Sydney Sun in 1932 then worked for several conservative Melbourne papers: the Herald (1932-34), Star (1934-36), Argus (1936-57) and Sun News Pictorial (1957-59). Best known for his work on the Argus during WWII, his wartime subjects include: a wounded tattooed soldier, a cow giving black milk in the blackout, both 1941; The Case for a National Government (a Japanese soldier looking over a map of Australia) 1943 (ill. King, 142); and a plump bespectacled land army girl with an angry cow saying, “Yoo hoo, Mister Cowpaddock – I can’t get this separator thing [udder] to work!” 1943 (ill. Lindesay 1979, 250, 259, 265).
Armstrong published 10 cartoon anthologies, most during WWII (nine listed in refs). His 'Sam N Eggs’ strip circulated widely in the US and in one year during WWII he had 56 cartoons reproduced overseas. National Library of Australia (NLA) has at least three of Armstrong’s original ink cartoons published in the Argus : 'Comp. cook-gen., small fam., live in’, n.d. [1940s?] re Billy Hughes; 'To a miniature’ published 1 September 1949; and 'Barrel of mon [money]’ published 27 June 1955 (re Tatts), while the Victorian State Library (VSL) has at least 11 originals, mostly WWII period. Armstrong worked as a commercial artist from 1959 to 1964 then joined ATV Channel 0.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1903
- Summary
- Prolific mid twentieth century war and political cartoonist and designer. Armstrong contributed to a number of publications including the Argus, the Sydney Sun, Smith's Weekly, Melbourne Punch and Aussie. His first publication, at the age of 16, was in the Bulletin.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1978
- Age at death
- 75
Details
Latitude-37 Longitude144 Start Date1902-01-01 End Date1978-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Victoria
- Biography
- painter, printmaker and decorative artist, was born in Victoria on 6 June 1902, a grand-daughter of the soap manufacturer and keen amateur painter John Sutherland and a cousin once removed of Jane Sutherland . Her mother died before she was two and she was brought up by her father, George Sutherland, a real estate agent, and a housekeeper who lived with the family for many years. From 1918 Jean studied at Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria [NGV] School, winning the NGV’s prestigious Travelling Scholarship in 1923. She travelled to Europe with her aunt Jean Goodlet Sutherland (c.1879-1968), a painter and sculptor who won second prize for sculpture at the 1907 Women’s Work Exhibition (after Margaret Baskerville ) and had given the younger Jean her first art lessons.
In London Jean Parker Sutherland enrolled at the Royal Academy Schools (RA), studying figure drawing and portraiture in oils. In September she travelled to Brittany, resuming her RA studies in 1926. She also took a correspondence course in black-and-white decorative art. She was keen on photography, decorative stencil work, ceramics, printmaking, languages, maths and geometry, all of which skills she improved in London. In spring 1926 her portrait of Miss Erskine (NGV) was hung at the RA. An extra year in London beyond her fellowship reputedly included a period at the Slade under Henry Tonks and some time in the studio of Beatrice Bland (1867-1911), a still-life painter who exhibited at the RA. Phipps mentions that she sent back reports of art seen in Paris in 1926 as a casual correspondent for Melbourne newspapers. One of her 'decorative paintings’ was included in the Rome Scholarship exhibition at the British School, Rome and she visited Italy later that year.
On returning to Victoria towards the end of 1927, Sutherland joined the Victorian Artists’ Society. She sent four paintings to the 1928 exhibition, but none sold and she never exhibited with the Society again. That year she became engaged to the painter Ernest Buckmaster, whom she had known since her student days, but it was broken off before he left for London in 1929 and she never married. She lived quietly on a small private income in the family home in Gardenvale (left to her when her father died in 1936). Many weekends were spent painting at her cottage at Kalorama in the Dandenongs, often with Enid Philip, runner-up for the 1923 scholarship, until about 1933 when the place burnt down. Ethel Carrick Fox stayed with Sutherland at Gardenvale in 1937 and encouraged her to take a renewed interest in the local art scene. She joined the Melbourne Society of Women Painters in 1940 and met Sybil Craig , who became her closest friend. She exhibited with the Women Painters until the early 1950s. In October 1944 she held her only solo exhibition, at Melbourne’s Sedon Galleries. Again few pictures sold.
Jean Sutherland died in Melbourne in July 1978. The National Gallery of Victoria holds five early oils and the National Gallery of Australia has many of her prints, but most of her work is held privately.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 6 June 1902
- Summary
- In 1923 Sutherland was awarded the National Gallery of Victoria's prestigious Travelling Scholarship and after enjoying the cosmopolitan lifestyle of Europe for four years, training and exhibiting in London, Brittany and Rome, she eventually returned to a more provincial artist's life in Victoria in 1927, exhibiting with the Melbourne Society of Women Painters for a number of years.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- Jul-78
- Age at death
- 76
Details
Latitude-36.840556 Longitude174.74 Start Date1890-01-01 End Date1978-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Auckland, New Zealand
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1890
- Summary
- Landscape painter known for her Capertee paintings.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1978
- Age at death
- 88
Details
Latitude-37.048901 Longitude143.8143583 Start Date1908-01-01 End Date1977-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Carisbrook, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 30 June 1908
- Summary
- Procter was a glass and metal artist, working as Glad Procter as a Metalcraft teacher at the Ballarat Technical Art School, Victoria.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Jan-77
- Age at death
- 69
Details
Latitude53.55 Longitude10 Start Date1905-01-01 End Date1977-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Hamburg, Germany
- Biography
- Painter and cartoonist, according to one account, was born Arthur William Olday in Hamburg, Germany, the illegitimate son of a German woman and a Scotsman. Another account has him born in London, not Hamburg— spending his early childhood in New York, where his mother had relocated after his birth. When she visited her native Germany in 1913 she left him there with her mother. Always known as John, at the age of eleven he joined the Hamburg hunger riots of 1916 during WWI. Two years later he participated in the sailors’ mutiny and the workers’ uprising, acting as an ammunition hauler for a Sparticist machine gun emplacement. When the year-long struggle was crushingly defeated, he made a last-minute escape, barely avoiding certain execution. In the early 1920s, as an agitator with the 'Communist Youth’, he got involved in plundering and looting by masses of starving people suffering from food shortages but was soon expelled from the movement for 'anarchist deviations’. He became a member of the 'Anarcho-Sparticists’ and fought in one of their guerrilla squads during the workers’ uprisings in October 1923, then was active in the movement for workers’ councils in industrial western Germany under French occupation.
In 1925-32 Olday withdrew from the revolutionary movement and devoted himself to political cartooning and expressionist graphics. He also wrote socially critical theatre sketches, performed in Hamburg cabarets. In 1933 he illustrated flyers for his Sparticist friends with incisive anti-Nazi caricatures. Acting the 'eccentric gay artist’ for the Nazis, he was accepted and able to help his friends until 1938 when, threatened with imminent arrest by the Gestapo, he escaped to England. Pacifist friends in London helped him publish a collection of his anti-Nazi drawings, The Kingdom of Rags , in 1939. He worked underground with exiled communists in Paris and other parts of Europe. In 1942, he secretly married Hilde Monte, a German Jew and 'dogmatic Marxist intellectual’ who edited German language newspapers and supported Jewish underground resistance, in order to protect her against deportation. In 1944 she was captured by an SS patrol on the Swiss-German border and summarily executed.
When compulsory military service was instituted in Britain in 1940, Olday was to have served as a sapper, but he deserted before he could be sent to 'the imperialist war’. He remained at large until 1944, drawing caustic political cartoons and caricatures, working as an editor and, with two well-known libertarian activists, writing a fortnightly anti-militarist broadsheet distributed to soldiers in the British Army. At the same time he provided numerous drawings and poems for a Scandinavian paper, the Industrial Worker , distributed in German ports. In 1943 he published a collection of 41 of his political drawings, The March of Death . According to Peter Peterson, this 'unexcelled classic of anarchist anti-militarist propaganda’ sold 10,000 copies in a year and a half.
In 1944 Olday was arrested trying to procure a typewriter for the 'Freedom’ group that had supported him since his desertion. In January 1945 he was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment, having been found guilty of 'theft through the finding and fraudulent use of an identity card’. He served eight months, gained early release then was immediately taken to prison camp by the military authorities to serve another 2 years for desertion. A public campaign by 'Freedom Press Defence Campaign’ friends supported by sympathisers like Herbert Read and George Orwell resulted in his release after only 3 months. The Adelaide Quaker artist Mary P. Harris believed that Olday drew passionate anti-war cartoons and pictures while imprisoned in Wormwood Scrubs as a conscientious objector during the war. 'Even while in prison… his leaflets, his drawings of the agony of war and its circumstances were leafletted by air over Germany’, she wrote in her autobiography (p.46).
After the war, says Peterson, Olday carried out anarchist propaganda programs and other anarchist activities in German prison camps under the guise of giving education lectures in democracy. Inevitably finding himself disagreeing with the aims of the various Spartacist groups, he dropped out of international anarchist activity altogether at the end of the 1940s. At the beginning of 1950 he migrated to Sydney. According to James, he found only a small group of feuding Yugoslavs there, organised the anarchists among them to move to outback NSW and train, then took himself off to Adelaide, where he had been invited by a group of artist sympathizers while still in England. His first exhibition at the Royal Society of Arts 'was the prelude to 12 successive exhibitions within one year’ (James). All were in aid of charity organisations such as the United Nations’ Children’s Fund since Olday didn’t believe in selling his work. In order to survive he took a job as attendant at the Art Gallery of South Australia.
Harris met Olday through her friend Fred Whitney, whom she called another [ sic ] Quaker Conscientious Objector in Wormwood Scrubs. When Olday’s exhibition of war art was on at the SA Society of Arts Gallery in 1955 Whitney suggested Harris visit it. She 'met the fair-haired John Olday’ and responded to his cartoons: 'I quivered under the physical and spiritual contact of the cartoons displayed… prisoners; barbed wire; klink parson [a portrait of a Prison Chaplain wearing immaculate lawn sleeves which dominated the exhibition]; and the unmitigated suffering of women and children, each cartoon with its own peculiar case history typed and hung alongside.’ As a result, the two held an exhibition in the Friends’ Meeting House, Adelaide called War and Peace – the former being Olday’s cartoons, the latter Harris’s watercolours. It opened on 6 August 1955, World Peace Day. (His contributions were apparently on the horror of nuclear war, the known subject of one of his Adelaide exhibitions.)
Olday gave Adult Education classes and broadcasts 'attacking Art racketeers, Art snobs, censorship, state education, state sponsorship of the arts, exploitation of the artist by means of taxation, and organised the artists in boycott against the commercialised Galleries. The “Rainbow Group” exhibited works of Arts [ sic ] not acceptable to Galleries, on account of their “indecent”, “blasphemic” or radical political character. J. himself refused to sell at all, but offered his works as a gift to National Galleries on his terms (never to be sold nor to be lent to State officials, but to be kept accessible to anybody at any time). (All State Galleries accepted, bar Sydney and Melbourne.)’ James also adds: 'After aiding Greek New Australians to produce a play, displeasing to the orthodox authoritarian Rulers of the Community; writing and producing incidental music to a play of Irish [ sic ] (The Wake) and next scoring a success with his one-man cabaret 'Roses and Gallows’ he left Adelaide, as the Press put it “in a blaze of glory”.’
He went to Melbourne and released an LP record, Roses and Gallows . He joined the Melbourne University Repertory Company, acting, writing ballads and producing sketches that caused a scandal. He opened a studio in a stable that became a hotbed for student radicals, broadcast, lectured, and joined the editorial staff of the German language paper 'Anker’. To make a living, he worked in a hospital.
Back at Sydney, living on a houseboat moored on Fisher Bay (whose chains were mysteriously cut adrift after he discovered a Nazi conspiracy to set up a major steel industry in Australia that had been suppressed by the Australian government), Olday staged a mime show ( The Immortal Clown ) with Robin Ramsay, the disowned son of the millionaire owner of the Kiwi shoe polish factory who had made a fortune in arms manufacture in WWII. Olday’s Yugoslav friends joined him at the theatre with the aim of attracting New Australians from many countries to work against fascists and Nazis. They subsequently collected amazing (and unlikely) scandals about collaborators and war criminals in Australia.
In March 1964, coinciding with the third Adelaide Festival of the Arts, Olday booked into the Royal Admiral Hotel on Hindley Street and obtained management cooperation in displaying 40 paintings and 70 drawings throughout the premises.
Olday regularly held lectures and recitals on board his houseboat, now protected by a German shepherd called Wolf. Later his son rented a house in Sydney with rooms converted into exhibition and meeting spaces. The basement was turned into an 80-seat theatre, but the Council refused it a license. So a new harbour location was found, known as “Café” la Boheme and “Genius Corner” cabaret. By charging tourists and society people high prices, students, artists and 'sailors from East and West’ could be subsidised. One night Olday and his son were attacked by two men who had asked for shelter; J’s son was knifed and J. was stunned and half blinded. The police later caught the men and the Oldays were told to hold themselves in readiness to appear as witnesses at the trial. 'They decided not to aid the prosecution, sold the café in a hurry and left Australia’ (James).
In the late 1960s Olday returned to London via Hamburg and Berlin. There he worked mainly with the anarchist papers Freedom and Black Flag . In 1974 he founded the 'International Archive Team’, a worldwide correspondence bureau, and again took up a politically active anarchist life. 'He worked for the I.W.W.; he published the German-English information bulletin Mit Teilung ; translated materials of the I.W.W. into German; drew caricatures and kept up contact with exiles and prisoners throughout Europe and Japan. In spite of poor health, he continued to draw social-critical cartoons and worked on two new plays./ In the summer of 1977 at the age of 72, death tore him away from this last creative period’ (Peterson). Harris, however, in reminiscences published in 1971, states that Olday died after working at the gallery for two years. Although he had always refused to sell his work, she believed that he bequeathed some of his cartoons to the AGSA and left other works in the hands of a few disciples called 'the Rainbow Group’.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Brian Jenkins
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2018
- Born
- b. 1905
- Summary
- Mid 20th century European political painter and cartoonist who lived in Sydney, Adelaide and Melbourne in the 1950s and 1960s.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1977
- Age at death
- 72
Details
Latitude-33.87978 Longitude151.18541 Start Date1905-01-01 End Date1977-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Glebe, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
- Biography
- designer, publisher and feminist, was born in Glebe, Sydney. She specialised in modern industrial and interior design in her art studies at ESTC from 1923 and was the first woman to hold a solo design exhibition at the College. In 1939 she set up Viking Press, publishing anti-war material and poetry mainly by women (Dorothy Aucherlonie, Elizabeth Riddell, Elizabeth Lambert, Muir Holburn, Harley Matthews) illustrated with her own artwork and block designs (as Bessie Mitchell). Wartime paper shortages ended the venture in 1943. During the War she was head draughtswoman at Hawker de Havilland, then worked for the Commonwealth Government. After the war, Bessie taught and lectured on design at ESTC and for the WEA and wrote and lectured (especially on radio) about design in the home. In June 1950 she married the social realist painter Clive Guthrie. She was a friend of Rosaleen Norton and Dulcie Deamer. In the 1970s she joined MeJane and was one of the founders of Elsie Women’s Refuge.
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Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1905
- Summary
- Bessie Jean (née Mitchell) Guthrie was a designer, publisher and feminist. She was the first woman to hold a solo design exhibition at the East Sydney Technical College. In 1939 she set up Viking Press, publishing anti-war material and poetry mainly by women.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1977
- Age at death
- 72
Details
Latitude-33.8125405 Longitude151.1115717 Start Date1903-01-01 End Date1977-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Ryde, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Raymond McGrath (1903-1977) trained at Sydney University (B. Arch 1926) after he enrolled in the nation’s first university course in architecture established under the foundation Professor of Architecture Leslie Wilkinson. The Sydney University degree-granting course had produced its first graduates in 1922. Raymond McGrath was intensively creative in a range of media outside of his architecture and each possessed celebrated skills in drawing, water-based media and print-making. Raymond McGrath studied painting and drawing in Sydney and was active in graphic design and private press book printing early in his career. Literature seemed to be his destiny until he was drawn to architecture while he was at University.
McGrath had begun his Sydney University training in the arts and became an acknowledged poet, editor and short-story writer before his graduation. During his undergraduate era, he also published a collection of verse, Seven Songs of Meadow Lane, that he personally illustrated, printed and bound. His private press work has not been fully studied. He continued to write poetry throughout his lifetime.
He studied art with Julian Ashton, modelling with Rayner Hoff, bookbinding with Walter Taylor (c.1921-26) and made etchings from c.1921. Inspired by Tyrell’s 1923 exhibition of relief prints, he began doing linocuts in 1923 which were soon supplanted by wood engravings from 1924, notably The Seven Songs of Meadow Lane (J.T. Kirtley, Sydney 1924), written and illus. with b/w engravings by McGrath. In 1926 he travelled to England, studied at Westminster School of Art, London, and became an important modernist architect, writer and industrial designer in the UK. Official British war artist during WWII (mostly doing drawings of aircraft production). He died in Dublin on 23 December 1977. The biography by Donal O’Donovan, God’s Architect. A life of Raymond McGrath, Kilbride Books, 1995 is the most complete treatment of his life to date.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Michael Bogle
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 7 March 1903
- Summary
- Raymond McGrath studied under Raynor Hoff and Julian Ashton. He trained in architecture but also turned his hand to bookbinding, etching, linocut and wood engraving. After moving to the UK in 1926, he became an important London modernist architect before the 1939-45 War. He published a major survey of modernist domestic architecture and a later volume on architectural glass.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 23-Dec-77
- Age at death
- 74
Details
Latitude-33.87978 Longitude151.18541 Start Date1903-01-01 End Date1977-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Glebe, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
- Biography
- painter and printmaker, was born in Sydney on 25 December 1903, daughter of William Walker, a restauranteur, and Myra, née Tindall. She studied at Julian Ashton’s Sydney Art School in the early 1920s, where she contributed to the student magazine, Undergrowth , e.g. design of 1927 showing two women reading (ill. Butler, Sydney By Design [ SBD ], 10). Her teachers included Henry Gibbons, Ashton’s associate and successor as principal of the school, whom she married in 1922. They had 2 children and separated in 1937. In the late 1920s Gladys attended art classes given by Thea Proctor, who became a lifelong friend.
Gladys exhibited with the Society of Artists in the late 1920s and 1930s, and regularly with the Contemporary Group throughout the 1930s. She produced woodcut and linocut prints and watercolour paintings, e.g. In The Garden (a loving couple) 1928, linocut, National Gallery of Australia (ill. SBD , 30). In 1938 Proctor commented:
The watercolours of Gladys Gibbons are in the tradition of English watercolour painting, or it would be more correct to call it watercolour drawing, as they are light washes of colour over pencil drawing.
From the late 1930s Gibbons taught art, first at St Gabriel’s School for Girls, and later at Roseville (Sydney), Brighton (Melbourne), and at Ravenswood Girls’ School, Sydney. She died at Sydney in 1977 [1969 according to Roger Butler].
Writers:
Johnson, Heather
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 25 December 1903
- Summary
- Starting her art training at the Julian Ashton's Sydney Art School in the early 1920s Gladys married its future principal and became good friends with artist and teacher Thea Proctor. She regularly exhibited her work and taught in schools in Sydney and Melbourne.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1977
- Age at death
- 74
Details
Latitude50.110556 Longitude8.682222 Start Date1901-01-01 End Date1977-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Frankfurt, Germany
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1901
- Summary
- According to interviews and an investigation by architect Bruce Eeles, Herzger studied at the Bauhaus, Weimar in 1919-1920. Herzger drawings for Walter Gropius's design for the Adler motorcar are known. In 1939, she became a principal of Furnishing Weavers Ltd, the firm closed in 1949. She also worked in jewellery. Her design work in Sydney has not been closely studied but a portfolio assembled by Eeles has survived.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1-Jan-77
- Age at death
- 76
Details
Latitude50.110556 Longitude8.682222 Start Date1901-01-01 End Date1977-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1 January 1901
- Summary
- Herzger-Seligmann was a bauhaus-trained designer (1922-1924), working in Frankfurt-am-Main, then for the Gropius practice before he immigrated to the UK. She left Germany, arriving in Australia in 1937 working as a textile artist, jeweller and teacher.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1-Jan-77
- Age at death
- 76
Details
Latitude-27.777295 Longitude152.812909 Start Date1899-01-01 End Date1977-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Mt. Perry, QLD, Australia
- Biography
- To describe the life of Florence Broadhurst as eventful, or highly unusual would be an understatement. It would be more accurate to say that her life was a series of phases, each inhabited by a different persona: singer; dancer; actor; couturier; painter; charity worker and fund raiser; car and truck yard operator, fashionista and finally, wallpaper designer.
Florence Maud Broadhurst was born 28 July 1899 at Mungy Station, near Mount Perry Queensland, Australia. She was musical and had some success as a singer in local musical competitions.
In 1922, she left Australia for China and South East Asia where she performed in musical comedy under the stage name ‘Bobby Broadhurst’. She became well known for her singing and Charleston dancing. In 1926, Florence established the Broadhurst Academy in Shanghai. Here, she offered tuition in ‘violin, pianoforte, voice production, banjolele playing1 (taught by Florence), modern ballroom dancing, classical dancing, musical culture and journalism’.[1]
Three years later in England, Florence married her first husband Percy Kann, and began a new career as designer-cum-dress consultant for Pellier Ltd, Robes & Modes, in New Bond Street, Mayfair. With her second husband, Leonard Lloyd Lewis, a diesel engineer, Florence lived out the World War II years in England.
In 1949, she returned to Australia with Leonard and their son Robert. It was here that she took up painting, and toured around northern and central Australia. In 1954, the David Jones art gallery in Sydney, held solo exhibitions of her work. There followed further exhibitions, including group shows, in various galleries. During this time Florence became a founding member of the Art Gallery Society of NSW (1953), and a member of the Society of Interior Designers of Australia (c1954).
Around 1960, Florence established Australian (Hand Printed) Wallpapers Ltd in St Leonards, Sydney. Here Florence, with an initial staff of two, began designing and manufacturing the brilliant, flamboyant wallpapers that were to become her trademark.
The company moved to Paddington in 1969 and changed the name to Florence Broadhurst Wallpapers Pty Ltd. Both Florence and the company flourished. As designs and production techniques developed, the wallpapers found eager buyers in the international marketplace. Meanwhile, Florence became famous for her extravagant clothes and jewellery and vivid red hair.
On 15 October 1977, Florence Broadhurst was brutally murdered at her Paddington premises. The killer has never been identified.
Since her death, Florence Broadhurst’s reputation has been enhanced by a resurgence in popular appreciation of her extraordinary wallpaper designs, re-released by Signature Prints, who hold the licence to reproduce her work. The Powerhouse Museum in Sydney also holds a collection of her work, and a Broadhurst display was included in the exhibition 'Inspired! Design across time’ which was on show at the Museum between 2005 and 2010.
^ Anne-Marie Van de Ven (2006), ‘Broadhurst, Florence Maud (1899-1977)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Online Edition, published by the Australian National University. http://www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/AS10059b
Writers:
Rossiter, Philippa
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 28 July 1899
- Summary
- Acclaimed singer, dancer, actress, artist and designer. Broadhurst was most well known for her vibrant wall-paper designs which were sought after in Australia and internationally during the 1960s and 1970s. These designs continue to have a following as a result of their re-release by Signature Prints.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- c.15 October 1977
- Age at death
- 78
Details
Latitude-42.91702 Longitude147.60205 Start Date1896-01-01 End Date1977-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Frederick Henry Bay, Tas., Australia
- Biography
- cartoonist, illustrator, painter and publisher, was born in Port Frederick Bay, Tas, son of Herbert Jordan, a watchmaker and jeweller, and his wife. After his parents divorced and his mother remarried (in 1908) Syd took his stepfather’s surname. Most of his youth was spent in King Country, New Zealand where his stepfather worked on the construction of railway tunnels.
After moving to Sydney Syd studied at the Royal Art Society until he was 21. His first published cartoon, an attack on Billy Hughes, appeared in the International Socialist in 1912, when he was sixteen. By the time he was eighteen he was having cartoons published in the Bulletin (contributor 1914-26) and in the IWW newspaper Direct Action . His most famous (if not best) cartoon War! What For? was used as the cover of the second issue of Direct Action (Sydney, 10 August 1914) (ill. Harris 227, King 101). He continued to contribute anti-war cartoons to the paper throughout WWI, including several powerful indictments of wartime politicians and profiteers. His most notorious cartoon was (The Commonwealth Government is floating a further £10,000,000 for the War Chest. The prospectus calls upon Investors to “show a patriotic spirit…especially as no sacrifice is entailed…the rate of interest being far higher than in normal times.”) / FAT (intoxicated with “patriotism”: “LONG LIVE THE WAR! HIP, HIP, 'OORAY! FILL 'EM UP AGAIN.” Published in Direct Action on 4 December 1915, this attack – the culmination of a series of anti-profiteer war cartoons he drew for the paper (see file) – earned editor Tom Barker a sentence of twelve months hard labour under the War Precautions Act because it 'prejudiced national recruiting’. All his anti-war cartoons are (properly) rather gruesome, e.g. cartoon sympathetic to the returned soldier (maimed and unemployed), Bulletin 1 June 1922.
In 1918 Nicholls was employed to draw the titles and posters for Ray Longford’s film The Sentimental Bloke . In 1920 he went to the USA to study art title design for motion pictures. He returned in 1923 to become senior artist on Sydney’s Evening Standard . In September he created the comic strip Fat and his Friends for the Sunday News to rival Bancks’s Ginger Meggs in the Sydney Sun ; it was renamed Fatty Finn on 10 August 1924 and was for some time a real rival. Three Fatty Finn annuals were published in 1929-30, then the strip became a victim of the Great Depression.
Armed with his strip Middy Malone , a tale of piracy on the Spanish Main, Nicholls went to New York at the onset of the Depression in search of work. He was unable to secure a buyer for the strip, so he spent 12 months in America, where he 'ghosted’ for Ad Carter’s __Just Kids ** comic strip before returning to Australia in 1932. When Middy Malone was finally self-published in book form during the 1940s it sold over 80,000 copies. More Middy Malone books followed.
A foundation member of the Society of Australian Black and White Artists in 1924, Nicholls contributed to the Society’s first publication along with the other 24 male founding members (see Harry Weston ) – a book of cartoons commemorating the visit of the US Fleet in 1925. In 1934, with Stan Clements , he published Fatty Finn’s Weekly , a black and white eight-page tabloid with a spot colour cover considered to be Australia’s first locally produced comic book ( Sydney Morning Herald , 20 May 2002, 42).While continuing to draw cartoons, e.g. Smith’s Weekly 1940: “So you’ve lost your father little man? Don’t cry, we’ll find him – what’s he like?”/ “Aw, beer an’ 'orses!” Nicholls wrote and illustrated a reliable, detailed text on shipping, About Ships (1947).
In 1946 he attempted to fight increasing American syndication by establishing his own 'Fatty Finn Publications’. It published comic books using his own strips and some drawn by other Australian artists, including Keith Chatto and Monty Weld , but did not prove financially viable. He returned to freelance work in 1950, then joined the Sunday Herald (Sydney) where Fatty Finn appeared from December 1951 [ Sun-Herald (Sydney) from October 1953] until Nicholls died in 1977, having fallen to his death from his Potts Point, NSW, apartment (having long been troubled by failing eyesight rather than suicide).
Many of his 1970s Fatty Finn strips were presented to the Mitchell Library c.1979 by the Fairfax family, proprietors of the Sydney Morning Herald and associated publications (Mitchell Library Pic Acc 3088). At the time of his death he was preparing a book of pencil drawings of Australian historic buildings, many of which had been previously published in the Teachers’ Federation Magazine, e.g. St James – Sydney (ill. Rae, 73).
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Nat Karmichael
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2016
- Born
- b. c.1896
- Summary
- Cartoonist, creator of "Fatty Finn".
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1977
- Age at death
- 81
Details
Latitude-33.8961132 Longitude151.1801893 Start Date1895-01-01 End Date1977-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Newtown, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- painter, was born in Sydney on 31 August 1895, ninth child in a family of 10. In 1920-21 she enrolled at Julian Ashton’s Sydney Art School as an evening student while supporting herself by working as a designer of patterns in an embroidery factory during the day. Her teachers at the school included Grace Crowley and Anne Dangar . A promising student, she was quickly promoted from the Antique to the Life Class. The 1920s were exciting years, with knowledge of overseas developments in art filtering back to Australia. Dore was an early member of the Art Students’ Club, formed in 1923 as a forum for discussion of new art trends. In 1925 she and Nancy Hall established Undergrowth: A Magazine of Youth and Ideals , which came out bi-monthly until its demise in 1929. Dore’s November-December 1927 cover shows a woman watching a man at an easel (ill. Butler, SBD , 8).From humble beginnings Undergrowth became the voice of modernism in Sydney. During this time Dore also attended Roland Wakelin’s drawing and painting classes.
Like many women artists of her generation Dore Hawthorne never married. Unlike many others, however, she had no independent means of support and lived frugally. She possessed a strong social conscience and was particularly interested in C.H. Douglas’s economic theory of Social Credit, which stated that mal-distribution of wealth was the cause of economic depressions and had led the world into a long series of wars.
In the mid-1930s she obtained a position teaching art at Frensham School in Mittagong but found the routine stifling and left after several years (cf. Ruth Ainsworth ). About this time she built a cottage for herself in the Burragorang Valley, northwest of Sydney, an area in which she had made many walking trips with friends. Soon after the outbreak of World War II she applied for a job at the Lithgow Small Arms Factory, which manufactured Bren guns. She painted her Factory Folk series under the pseudonym 'Brendorah’, conflating her name and the gun that dominated her life.
When her employment was terminated in April 1945 she returned to Sydney. Some of her Factory Folk paintings and Portrait of a Mining Engineer, Lithgow 1949 (Deutscher-Menzies 2001 auction, lot 23) show her continuing interest in Lithgow and its workers. No.28 in the Factory Folk series, War Loan Rally Appeal 1945, oil on canvas on board, 63.5 × 78.5 cm, offered at Deutscher-Menzies auction in August 2001, is annotated verso:
no28
WAR LOAN RALLY APPEAL
BY DORE HAWTHORNE 1945 POST WAR
MYSELF IN BLUE CAP
NEXT TO FELLOW WITH
VERY WAVY RED HAIR
NEXT TO RIGHT LEG
OF APPEALING SOLDIER
THE FAT FACED FELLOW
BEHIND ME ON MY LEFT WAS NAMED BOBBY PINN.
In Sydney Dore 'lived with excruciating frugality, great creative energy and a Spartan spirit’ and this may have contributed to her collapse in 1968. Afterwards she lived in a convalescent home in Manly until her death on 23 July 1977. Nancy Hall wrote in a tribute to her friend in 1978:
Dore felt the ugliness of materialism and pollution as keenly as she felt everything that was fine and beautiful and much of her painting and writing was a great cry of protest.
Writers:
Rensch, Elena
Note: Primary.
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
1992
- Born
- b. 31 August 1895
- Summary
- Painter, teacher and co-founder of Undergrowth: A Magazine of Youth and Ideals, 1925-1929. Worked at the Small Arms Factory, Lithgow NSW manufacturing guns 1942-1945 and sketched and painted her fellow factory workers.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 23-Jul-77
- Age at death
- 82
Details
Latitude-36.75 Longitude144.266667 Start Date1895-01-01 End Date1977-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Bendigo, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- painter, was born on 18 February 1895 in Bendigo, eldest child of George Freeman, principal of St Andrew’s College and later Vice-Principal at Bendigo High School, and of Frances, second daughter of Charles Ross, a partner in a Bendigo store. She was educated at Girton College and Bendigo High School. In 1911-15 she studied art at the Bendigo School of Mines under Arthur T. Woodward, then was appointed assistant drawing mistress at her former high school. In 1916, however, she left Bendigo to study at the National Gallery School, Melbourne, where she remained until 1921.
Determined to study abroad, Madge worked with Elma Roach in 1922-23 to raise funds, the two painters holding joint exhibitions of their romantic Hilderesque watercolours and selling their painted and laquered 'Madgelma’ woodwork. Freeman had a painting included in the 1923 Exhibition of Australian Art in London. The following year she sailed to England and enrolled at the Slade School, London. In 1925 she was in Paris, studying under Adolphe Milich and exhibiting there.
In 1926 Madge married Lanfear Thompson, an engineer working on the African Gold Coast, and moved there. She continued to paint, and sent work back for a solo exhibition at the Bendigo Memorial Hall in 1928. In 1929 she returned briefly to visit her family following her husband’s premature death. Returning to Europe in 1930, Madge travelled around the Mediterranean, France and England for some time, sending back paintings for a solo exhibition at Sedon Galleries, Melbourne, in 1934. Late the following year she returned to Bendigo to live, paint and teach, holding classes at her studio in Barkly Place.
Madge had exhibited with the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors in 1923-26, then again in 1938, and regularly showed work in their annual exhibitions until 1971. She also exhibited with the Independent Group and for many years attended George Bell’s classes in Melbourne. For fifteen years she was convenor of the Art Circle of the Lyceum Club, Melbourne.
Madge Freeman remarried in 1940 and moved to Koongarra, a property at Longwarry, Gippsland, where her husband, Basil Davies, bred Ayrshire cattle. She also maintained a studio in the family home at South Yarra. In 1952-53 Madge and Basil travelled to England and Europe to look at art galleries and 'cows and bulls’. In 1956 they moved to Lower Plenty and three years later to Ivanhoe. From the late 1950s her health deteriorated and she painted less frequently, often reworking earlier paintings. She entered a convalescent home in the early 1970s, where she remained until her death in February 1977. She bequeathed her painting collection to Bendigo Art Gallery, which mounted a retrospective in 1981. When her husband died in 1979 he left funds for a Madge Freeman Prize to be administered by the gallery.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 18 February 1895
- Summary
- Mid 20th century Victorian painter who travelled extensively. Freeman exhibited with the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- Feb-77
- Age at death
- 82
Details
Latitude51.507222 Longitude-0.1275 Start Date1893-01-01 End Date1977-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydenham, London, England, UK
- Biography
- painter and printmaker (etchings, linocuts and monotypes and woodcuts), was born in Sydenham, London, on 28 August 1893, the son of an architect, Edgar Hawkins, and Annie née Weaver. He attended Alleyn’s School from 1906-10 and won art prizes every year. Because of his talent he was able to take extra art classes in place of scripture. His initial tertiary studies were at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts under A.S. Hartrick, F. Jackson and R.Savage. His student friends included David Jones and Frank Medworth .In 1914 he left Camberwell without graduating, and enlisted in the British Army. He served on the Western Front and on 1 July 1916 he was left for dead at Gommecourt at the Battle of the Somme. Two days later he crawled out of No Man’s Land. He was hospitalised, mainly at Bristol where a series of 20 operations by Major Hey Groves saved his arms from amputation. His right arm remained useless, so he learnt to paint with his left and took some classes at Bristol Art School before discharge. He was financially supported for the rest of his life by a British Army disability pension.
His etching and drypoint Refugees 1918 (edn 10; AGNSW), made England is inscribed in pencil '2nd etching. Done while in hospital 1918’. Carnival 1920, etching (AGNSW), and ( Fountain, Trafalgar Square ) 1920, etching and aquatint, (AGNSW) are also English works.
He attended etching classes under Sir Frank Short at the Royal College of Art, London from 1921-22 eg. Roadmakers 1921, etching (AGNSW), and Coffee Stall 1921, etching (edn 40; copies AGNSW, Josef Lebovic). His linocut, The wood engraver 1923, was in Bridget McDonnell’s exhibition Australian Prints (Melbourne 29 October-22 November 1996: not illustrated). Later he made linocuts in a style comparable to those by Frank Medworth who also migrated to Australia , eg. The Spring 1926 (AGNSW).
On 15 September 1923 he married Irene Villiers, a printmaker, and left England. They travelled and worked in St Tropez, Siena and Sicily.
His most productive period began after he moved to Malta in 1927(eg. The Two Minutes’ Silence c.1928, linocut [AGNSW], and Puberty Ritual (Drunken Maltese Boys) c.1928 [edn 10; AGNSW]). He wrote and illustrated with original b/w woodcuts, A Zoological Alphabet , self published, Malta [1929].In Malta he began to use the signature 'Raokin’, a phonetic version of the local attempt to say the name 'Hawkins’.
In 1933-34 the family travelled to Tahiti and lived for 18 months at Paea where they were adopted by the local Turai family and named 'Maui’. After travelling to New Zealand they then settled in Mona Vale at a house they called 'Maui Ma’. Here they lived until 1959. He made artist friends from his neighbours – Arthur Murch, Paul Beadle, Rah Fizelle and John Eldershaw – but did not at first exhibit. After Frank Medworth came to Sydney to head the East Sydney Technical College art school in 1939, he persuaded Hawkins to begin to show his work, and he first exhibited again in 1941. Weaver Hawkins became active in the fledgling Contemporary Art Society of NSW. From 1948 he was on the Committee and later became President. There were other connections as friendship with the artists Frank and Margel Hinder preceded the later marriage of his son Laric with the Hinder’s daughter Enid. Hawkins advocacy for art included giving many lectures and statements to UNESCO’s Australia’s Advisory Council for Visual Arts and its International Association of Visual Arts.He was a regular exhibitor at both the Blak Prize and the Sulman Prize.In 1956 he paid a return visit to Britain where he met again with David Jones, as well as visiting his brother Ernest in Turkey. On their return to Australia Weaver and Irene Hawkins settled at North Sydney, then Willoughby. Later they moved to Northbridge where he lived until suffering a stroke in 1975 when he moved to a nursing home at Castlecrag.Hawkins died at on 13 August 1977.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 28 August 1893
- Summary
- One of the great advocates for contemporary art in New South Wales. After he was left on the Western Front in World War I, he rehabilitated himself to paint with his left arm. He left England in the 1920s and travelled widely before settling in Sydney in 1935 where he actively supported younger artists in experimenting with modern art.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 13-Aug-77
- Age at death
- 84
Details
Latitude-33.8387588 Longitude151.2306477 Start Date1893-01-01 End Date1977-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Mosman Bay, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- china painter, leather and poker worker, embroiderer, fabric printer and book binder, was born at Mosman Bay on 26 April 1893, into the dynasty which controlled Sydney’s famous hardware store, Nock & Kirby. As a child, Olive roamed the bush surrounding her home at Lindfield on Sydney’s North Shore and developed a keen awareness of the native flora and fauna. Her observations were to provide her with a lifetime of inspiration and a serious interest through membership of the Royal Zoological Society.
Disappointed by Chatswood Public School’s failure to prepare her for tertiary study, Olive entered the family business at the age of sixteen, where she undertook clerical and financial duties and supervised the observance of industrial awards. With the encouragement of her family, who allowed her time off from work each week, Olive attended drawing classes at Hornsby Technical College under George Collingridge and china painting classes with Gertrude Brown, a former assistant to J. Arthur Peach, the first teacher of china painting at Sydney Technical College.
In 1925-27 Olive travelled extensively in England and Europe, visiting the Paris International Exhibition and potteries in London and Staffordshire. Seeing china painting and fabrics in England inspired her to design comparable works, but using Australian motifs. In 1929 Eirene Mort proposed her for membership of the Society of Arts and Crafts. Over the next four decades Olive Nock was a deeply committed member, exhibitor, office bearer and ultimately Patron of the Society. It offered her the outlet for her creative energy that had been denied her in any professional area. Many of the skills she acquired were self-taught. From the early 1930s she worked in an increasingly Art Deco style, influenced too by the Aboriginal bark shields she studied at the Australian Museum.
Olive Nock dedicated her life to increasing opportunities for men and women in the areas of craft, colour and design. She was a tireless demonstrator at exhibitions held by the Society of Arts and Crafts and willingly shared her knowledge and experience. Through her Red Cross activities, she assisted with the war effort and participated in repatriation schemes at Concord Repatriation Hospital.
In 1946, following the establishment of the Society’s Craft Training School at Double Bay and the appointment of Mrs Ann Gillmore Ross as its director, Olive taught classes there in design and colour. She undertook numerous commissions, including a bird’s-eye maple and satin fan hand-painted with blue wrens for Lady Gowrie and batik car pennants for the Australian Ambassadors to the USA and Canada. Many of her designs were reproduced on letterheads and cards used by the Society of Arts and Crafts.
Writers:
Betteridge, Margaret
Note: Heritage biography.
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 26 April 1893
- Summary
- A china painter, leather and poker worker, embroiderer, fabric painter and bookbinder. Whilst working at her family's hardware store she studied at Hornsby Technical College.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1977
- Age at death
- 84
Details
Latitude-33.8857968 Longitude151.2440867 Start Date1893-01-01 End Date1977-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Woollahra, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Painter, illustrator and designer, was born in Sydney in 1893 (see Australian Dictionary of Biography, 15). His interest in Aboriginal art as a source of general nationalistic art was inspired by materials collected by Sir Baldwin Spencer on various expeditions (especially Museum of Victoria) and by a set of Arnhem Land photographs obtained from C.P. Mountford (from expedition?) in 1948. His study of them led to prints, paintings, watercolours, fabrics, scarves, greeting cards, ceramic murals and even furniture in which 'rich colours “dug from the earth, powdered to a fine powder, mixed with cactus juice” were applied to works with a parrot feather brush’ (Baddelely). Baddeley catalogues his Motifs from NSW Aboriginal weapons 1949, watercolour on cardboard (private collection [p.c.]), The White Moth, Part 3 , n.d., pen and ink on paper (p.c.), The Kangaroo Hunt – Australian Aboriginal Legend n.d., gouache on paper (p.c.), Coo-ee! n.d. , gouache on paper (p.c.), Honey Ants Nest 1950, mixed media on paper (p.c.), and Ingar the Crab 1950, mixed media on paper (p.c.).
Mansell also painted murals and did theatrical designs. He designed the sets (and costumes?) for The Kulaman 1952, with music by Alfred Hill and words by W.E. Harvey & A.P. Elkin (sheet music in the Performing Arts Museum, Victorian Arts Centre, Melbourne). In 1956 he presented a large pottery dish with Aboriginal motifs and [some] colours to Dame Mary Gilmore on the occasion of her 91st birthday (now National Library of Australia [NLA]: see Joan Kerr, essay in Remarkable Occurrences , NLA, 2001).
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1893
- Summary
- Mansell was a painter, illustrator and theatre designer whose work diverse artistic practices, which ranged from painting to set design, were very much influenced by his interest in Aboriginal art. Murals by Mansell for Melbourne's Capitol Theatre (c.1939) are known.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1977
- Age at death
- 84
Details
Latitude-36.75 Longitude144.266667 Start Date1892-01-01 End Date1977-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Bendigo, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- painter, was born in Bendigo, daughter of Frederick Douglas Jones, a barrister and solicitor. She was educated at Girton College, Bendigo, and from 1912 studied art at the National Gallery School under Bernard Hall , winning several student prizes. In 1917, at the end of her studies, she won the coveted Travelling Scholarship, which offered overseas study for two years. Unable to take this up immediately because of World War I, she painted portraits in Melbourne. Her solo exhibition in 1918 included a portrait of Ola Cohn . A photograph of her painting a client in her Melbourne studio at about this time includes her winning scholarship painting. She also painted Prime Minister Billy Hughes (Parliament House, Melbourne) and Viscount Novar, Governor-General of Australia [ 1914-20 ].
Jones finally left for London in 1921 where she had a moderately successful career. She exhibited at the Royal Academy (1921, 1923), at the Paris Salon (1923), at the Royal Scottish Academy, at the Royal Institute of Oil Painters, with the New Society of Artists and with the London Portrait Society. A flamboyant personality, she was popular in London society – which led to several portrait commissions. Later in the 1920s she returned to Australia and in January 1926 was busy at work in Adelaide Perry 's 'Chelsea Art School’ at Bulletin Place, Sydney, painting a portrait of Mrs Hewson of Queensland and completing other Australian commissions. Although proposing to return to England in February, this seems to have been postposed. She was called 'a young Victorian artist who is revisiting Australia’ in the October issue of Home , which illustrated her 'Lady Keith Smith, a canvas painted in 1924’, Summer (a portrait given this title for exhibition, not an allegorical work) and 'A portrait of John, the son of Falkiner Hewson Esq’. In January 1926 Society reported on her painting of three-year-old Patricia Bousfield 'listening to some fairy folk who surely dwell somewhere in the woods near Bowral’.
Back in London, Jones continued to specialise in portraiture. The Australian Woman’s Mirror of 30 April 1929 mentioned her exhibition held with a 'sister-painter’ who also had Australian associations, the miniaturist Hon. Lady Henniker-Heaton (born Hon. Catherine Mary Sermonda Burrell, daughter of the 5th Baron Gwydyr) whose husband the John Henniker-Heaton, 2nd Baronet, was born in Sydney, (son of Rose Bennett, daughter of the proprietor of the Sydney Evening News and the weekly Australian Town and Country Journal and wife of Sir John, the 1st Baronet – who, as plain Mr Heaton, had been a NSW journalist in the 1870s-80s). Jones’s oil portrait of Senator D. Andrews was presented to Bendigo Art Gallery in 1930, the year her oil painting of Margaret Itarman was hung at the Royal Academy. She returned to Victoria in 1932, exhibited with the Victorian Artists’ Society then abandoned painting professionally, partly because of family bereavements.
During World War II Marion Jones worked in the Bendigo Ordnance Factory. Much of her London work, which had been left in storage, was destroyed during the blitz. 'The world has changed. There is no place for art and beauty’, she stated after the war. Despite living on for another three decades she never painted again. Extant work includes a self-portrait Moi Même (p.c.), which Peers calls 'Lambertesque’.
When Cui Bono was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1923, London critics interpreted it as a late example of the 'Problem Picture’ genre so popular in the Edwardian era. From the late 1890s people of all classes had flocked to the Royal Academy to see paintings depicting mental anguish in high society, especially examples by the Hon. John Collier. In both London and Australia they also attended Problem Plays, notably those by Sir Arthur Pinero in which, George Taylor wrote, 'the question of the wife’s chastity was stretched over three long acts’. Although a prone girl in a tutu labelled Cui Bono ( Who Benefits? ) does not pose a very profound problem, but part of the enjoyment, or otherwise, in solving Problem Pictures was the shallowness of the message. Ten years earlier Theo Cowan had exhibited a sculpture at the Chenil Gallery, London called The Problem , which, according to the Sydney Morning Herald of 10 June 1913, showed 'a young girl lying on a grassy bank, gazing into a bowl held up by a faun, the problem being the maiden’s choice of good or evil’. Jones, wisely, was more discrete about explaining her problem. Had her ballerina suddenly realised that those glorious, dominant pearls were the first step on the 'Road to Ruin’? If so, had the realisation come 'Too Late’ (another popular title of the day)? Is there perhaps a hint of criticism of ambitious middle-class mothers driving their inadequately talented daughters to despair? Whatever the answer, the ambiguity appealed to the British public and won the picture a certain fame. As Juliet Peers points out, Jones’s painting was reproduced in colour in the Tatler , mentioned in a contemporary novel and lampooned in Punch .
In fact, the painting’s Problem Picture characteristics were largely fortuitous. It is more accurate to state that Cui Bono is a reflection of Jones’s Melbourne training, both subject and style being in the manner of her painting teacher at the National Gallery School, Bernard Hall , a man fond of painting off-stage ballerinas and moody atmosphere. Jones had triumphantly graduated six years earlier by winning the 1917 National Gallery Travelling Scholarship ( Eugenie Durran was runner up), but she had only been in London for little more than a year when she exhibited Cui Bono , having been forced to remain in Melbourne painting portraits during World War I. The homage to Bernard Hall may have been deliberate, for Cui Bono was destined to return to Victoria. Jones offered it to the National Gallery of Victoria after it was shown in London as the original work required under the terms of her scholarship. It was a most acceptable proof of her prowess. The fact that it had been hung at the Royal Academy (and noticed!) could not fail to impress. Unfortunately, its popularity soon waned. Since Jones was a native of Bendigo, Cui Bono was despatched to that city’s more youthful and less well-stocked gallery where it remained until 1994 when it was then returned to the NGV.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
John47
jrwilliams
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2021
- Born
- b. 1892
- Summary
- Victorian painter, painted numerous portraits and exhibited in England, Scotland and Paris. Ceased painting around 1933, stating 'The world has changed. There is no place for art and beauty'. Father, Frederick Douglas Jones, Mother Annie Elizabeth (nee Craven).
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- c.1977
- Age at death
- 85
Details
Latitude-27.467778 Longitude153.028056 Start Date1890-01-01 End Date1977-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Brisbane, Qld., Australia
- Biography
- potter, china painter, needleworker, carver and metal-worker, was born Daisy Morris in Brisbane. Educated at the Brisbane Normal School, she studied art at the Brisbane Technical College under R. Godfrey Rivers . She married Edward Peter Nosworthy in 1908. Three years later, she went to England with her mother and daughter Susan (b.1909), where she studied under Barret Carpenter at the Rochdale School of Art, Lancashire, while supporting herself by working as a retoucher in a photographic studio. She returned to Brisbane in 1919. From 1922 she began studying pottery with L.J. Harvey at the Central Technical College; her potpourri jar was included in the College’s exhibit to the 1924 British Empire Exhibition at Wembley, London.
Daisy Nosworthy was one of the principal exhibitors of pottery in the Arts and Crafts Society of Queensland’s exhibitions in 1923-41 and again in 1946. As well, she exhibited pewter work, silver, weaving, carving, embroidery and leatherwork. She showed modelling, china painting, pottery and woodcarving in the exhibitions of the Queensland National Agricultural and Industrial Association in 1923-29 and won many prizes. Pottery was shown with the Queensland Art Society at its joint exhibition with the Arts and Crafts Society in 1922-23 and 1927-32. She exhibited collections of pewter work in 1931-51 and silver jewellery in 1948 and 1952. She also exhibited pottery with the NSW Society of Arts and Crafts in 1927 (when the Powerhouse Museum acquired a piece) and in 1931. She showed pewter at Sydney in 1940.
From about 1935 Daisy took lessons in working silver from S.S. Sawyer; in 1936 she began exhibiting pewter work and from 1937 silver. Pewter remains in the majority as it was simpler to make. Her delicate silver jewellery is typical of the Arts and Crafts style with tendrils of small leaves framing semi-precious stones.
During World War II Daisy worked as a colourist at the Noel Maitland Photographic Studio. She retired in 1948 to Redcliffe, a seaside resort near Brisbane, and devoted herself to gardening. Except for pottery, she maintained her craft interests and acted as a judge for the craft sections of the Redcliffe Show.
Writers:
Cooke, Glenn R.
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1890
- Summary
- A potter, needleworker, china painter, carver and metalworker. She studied at Brisbane Technical College and Rochdale School of Art.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1977
- Age at death
- 87
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1890-01-01 End Date1977-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- painter and art teacher, eldest daughter of Alistair Ronald Mackenzie and Rosalind Isabel Agnes, née Walker, was born in Melbourne. She spent her early years in WA and Victoria before moving to Dubbo (NSW) with her family at the age of twelve. Her youngest sister was Nan Mackenzie . An interest in the techniques of painting and drawing led her to train as an art teacher as well as a painter. Her classes at the Royal Art Society (RAS) in Sydney under Dattilo Rubbo and James R. Jackson were in the academic tradition of drawing from the antique. Early works were in charcoal, but oil painting was to become Isabel’s preferred medium. Between 1924 and 1928 she won three first prizes for landscape painting and one for still life from the RAS. She was secretary of the Fine Arts Club which met in the ballroom of Burdekin House in Macquarie Street.
When she began teaching in 1922, there were only twelve qualified art teachers in NSW schools. Her career spanned fifty-six years and she was active in gaining recognition and increased status for art teachers within the profession. She was Secretary of the Art Teachers Group of the Teachers’ Federation until 1940. In March 1936 she sailed for England on the Balranald armed with letters of introduction. She visited London schools where innovative methods of teaching art to children were being practised by the New Education Fellowshi
On her return Mackenzie was appointed lecturer at Sydney Teachers’ College (in 1941). In 1942 she was asked by the Director of Education at the College to write a series of articles on paintings in the Art Gallery of NSW for the Education Gazette , but conflict within the gallery prevented publication. That year she became responsible for the art department at the College and developed a correspondence course in art for soldier students which became the basis of a text she wrote in 1946 for children taking art as a correspondence subject. She left the Teachers College in 1955 but continued to teach privately until 1968. Her book, The Why and How of Child Art (Sydney 1955) aimed to help parents understand the work of their young children.
Isabel Mackenzie exhibited in many solo and group shows between 1924 and 1972. Her first exhibit, a view of the gun emplacement at Bradley’s Head, shown with the RAS as a student member, won first prize for landscape painting and was subsequently exhibited with the Society of Artists and the Watercolour Institute. In 1926, 1927 and 1928 she won further first prizes with the RAS.
In the 1930s she exhibited with the Society of Artists, the Watercolour Institute and the Women Painters. Her first solo exhibition, in 1933, was at the Macquarie Galleries; others followed in 1934, 1936, 1937 and 1942 and she participated in many group shows there in the 1930s-40s. In 1935 she had a solo exhibition at the Sedon Galleries, Melbourne. In 1936 her work was included in the Women Artists exhibition in Sydney, in 1938 in ’150 Years of Australian Art’ at the Art Gallery of NSW. That year she also participated in the inaugural Australian Academy of Art exhibition. She exhibited only once in the 1950s, with the Watercolour Institute, with which she mainly showed her work in the 1960s and early ’70s along with local council exhibitions at the Blue Mountains, Blackheath, Macquarie Towns, Penrith, Ashfield and elsewhere.
Writers:
Cuthbert, Penny
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1890
- Summary
- Female drawer and painter of landscapes and still-life who dedicated her life to improving art education in New South Wales, while continuing to exhibit until her death.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1977
- Age at death
- 87
Details
Latitude34.0536909 Longitude-118.242766 Start Date1888-01-01 End Date1977-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Los Angeles, California, USA
- Biography
- cartoonist, was born on 3 December 1888 in Los Angeles, California of English parents who met in Queensland, married in Sydney and left for America after the wedding. His architect father hoped to make money there but only found work as a carpenter (he became secretary of the American Carpenters’ Union). In 1892, when Stan was aged four, the family settled in Perth. Stan left school at 16 and worked as a clerk (draughtsman) in the WA Railways Department, studying Fine Art at Perth Technical College at night and doing freelance work for various Perth newspapers: the Sunday Times , the Western Mail and the United Licensed Victuallers Association Journal . He wrote in a private letter (quoted Lindesay 1994, 6): 'We had quite a considerable art colony in Perth in those days: one quite big enough to support a sketch club, of which I was secretary and treasurer’.
In 1912, Cross resigned from the railways to go to London and study at St Martin’s School for a year. (His daughter says it was actually the Slade and Lindesay and Blaikie are wrong, but Rainbow also says St Martin’s; Shiell (ed.), p.115, says he spent 18 months in London at St Martin’s and other studios.) While in London he had some cartoons accepted by Punch . He returned to Perth and worked freelance, contributing drawings to the Western Mail and the Sunday Times . In 1918, still in his early 20s, he was invited to Sydney by Claude McKay to join Cecil Hartt on the forthcoming Smith’s Weekly at £5 a week (a rather different story appeared in Smith’s 20/4/1935, 20). He became its highest paid artist and second art editor. Short-run series he devised included: 'Things That Make Stan Cross’ (political and economic criticism), 'Places We Have Never Visited’ (Law Courts, Parliament, the players’ room at a test cricket match, etc.), 'Museum of the Future’ and 'Firsts in Australian History’ (the first barmaid, the first strike, the first football match).
Cross was renowned for his Aboriginal (“Jacky”) jokes, which Blaikie calls merry and never cruel (ill. Blaikie, e.g. p.107) but which were condemned as stereotypes after Cross’s death, usually in letters defending Jolliffe 's superiority. Sue Cross says she and her son sighted a letter from a tribal Aborigine many years ago, since lost, thanking him for being the first to portray Aborigines as real people. Examples are: 'On the lot with the first All-Darkie Super Production’ 9 August 1930, 2, 'Governor Phillip Founds Australia’ 28 January 1933, 9.
Other subjects included anti-communist cartoons, e.g. Dignity and Impudence 26 November 1927 and one with Marx Turning in His Grave over 'Soviet Military Preparations’ 1 April 1922,1. Depression cartoons, e.g. 27 September 1930, 23: “Cheer up, Joe! Spare me days, anybody’ud think you owned the ___ depression!” Art v. progress joke showing two men looking at an industrial scene, Australian Landscape : Critic: “That’s not very artistic.” Australia: “No, but wouldn’t it be bonzer”’, Smith’s 28 July 1923, 3. A cartoon parodying Virgil shows two flappers, one scrawny the other fat, 21 January 1933, 11, with the note below:
Virgil, having gone into smoke to dodge a man who wanted to lend him £500 free of interest for 100 years, Stan Cross answered the urgent appeal of the art editor for a couple of flappers in deshabille for this page. Stan Cross’ flappers, it is confidently expected, will start Virgil drawing horses again with two left feet.
An anti-Nazi cartoon is dated 4 August 1934 ( German Frightfulness-Born in 1914, Still Going Wrong ), while Hollywood Brings Australia to the Films was published on 2 September 1939. SLNSW holds the original of An Olive Branch (couple having a 'domestic’) of 1937 (DG SV *CART 7).
Above all, Cross has been immortalised by “For gorsake stop laughing-this is serious!” ( Smith’s Weekly July 1933), Australia’s best-known single cartoon. Although the original is lost, tens of thousands of copies were printed on glossy paper and mailed throughout the world. See reprint by Smith’s titled The Joke of the Decade 12 August 1933, 7, with details of copies available for purchase and a photogravure (copy dated 5 August 1933 used in SH Ervin b/w exhibition 1999). Stan’s story of its creation was recounted in a letter to George Blaikie, dated 24 March 1967 (quoted Blaikie 65-66, Caban 40, and Lindesay (1994) 51-52, 55, original ML). It originated in editor Frank Marien inviting Stan to improve on a student’s flat joke about a falling builder having his leg pulled (Sue Cross claims the student was the artist Donald Friend, who certainly did draw cartoons in youth) – builders working on tall building sites being popular subjects for jokes at the time, especially in the US. A story about Cross’s version becoming popular in London too was published in Smith’s on 20 April 1935, 20. The ABWAC’s Stanley Award statuettes based on the two figures in the gag have been presented annually to the top black-and-white artists since 1985 (see Kerr, 1999).
Cross was keen on anatomical accuracy in his drawing (Caban, 40) and kept a life-size wooden dummy in the studio he shared with Hartt at Smith 's. It often appeared in the pub downstairs and stories about it abound, e.g. Henry Lawson reportedly tried to start up a conversation with it. Cross pioneered the comic strip in Australia in 1920 when he devised a running weekly commentary on the butter subsidy for Smith’s called 'You and Me’. 'Mr. Pott’ and 'Whalesteeth’ appeared in it and it led to his popular, syndicated strip 'Mr and Mrs Potts’ ('Mr Pott’ ill. Caban, 41). This was inherited by Jim Russell as 'The Potts’ in 1940 when Cross left Smith’s (in 1939) and Russell continued to draw it in the SMH until he died in 2001. Other strips by Cross were 'The Vaudevillians’, 'Norman and Rhubarb’ (begun 1928), 'Dad and Dave’ (including Dad and Dave’s trip to England) and 'Wally and the Major’. As 'The Winks’, he began drawing the last for the Melbourne Herald in 1940 (the first year he was working there). Later syndicated, it became the most popular daily and Sunday strip in Australia. Two originals drawn with Carl Lyon in 1938 and c.1938 (ML PXD 764) are presumably for it; another Cross original of c.1930s is in the same collection. Wally and the Major: An Advertiser Feature was published at Melbourne in 1945. Cross technically continued to draw the strip for the SMH until 1970, although after having a stroke in early 1960s resulted in Lyon drawing the strips in Stan’s name for a few months, then they were signed by both and finally Lyon took them over altogether, acc. Sue Cross. (Sue Cross also claims that he drew a strip, 'Rupert the Rabbit’, which was taken by the art editor and sold to the USA.)
Cross was a foundation member of the Society of Australian Black and White Artists in 1924, along with 24 other men. He was president from 1931 to 1954 of its successor (generally seen as a continuation, especially by the ABWAC), 'the Black and White Artists’ Club’, having succeeded Cec. Hartt and being succeeded by Jim Russell, other foundation members.
Although working for the Melbourne Herald from 1939, Cross was always based in Sydney. He also wrote books on accountancy, economics and English grammar and treatises on soil conservation. He painted watercolours and there is some speculation that Cross and George Finey held the first exhibition at David Jones’s Art Gallery. In 1970 he retired from the Melbourne Herald and joined his family at Armidale (NSW) where he died on 16 June 1977, aged 88. The epitaph on his tombstone reads, 'Stop laughing, this is serious’. In 1985 a statuette based on his most famous cartoon was designed for the Stanley Awards, presented by the ABWAC. His wife Jessie died in 1972. Cross’s papers are now in the NLA.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 3 December 1888
- Summary
- Significant mid 20th century newspaper comic strip artist. Created 'Wally and the Major', 'The Potts' and 'For gorsake, stop laughing: this is serious!'.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 16-Jun-77
- Age at death
- 89
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1883-01-01 End Date1977-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- Miniature painter, china painter and gardener, was born in Melbourne, youngest child of the Scottish sawyer Alexander Paterson and his second wife, Mary Ann née Purcell, a Londoner, who were married at St Arnaud. Her father and his first wife, Margaret, had come to Melbourne in 1862 as assisted emigrants from Scotland. Not long before Agnes was born her parents and siblings settled in the Warragul district of Gippsland. Her father died there when she was five. In 1909 Agnes married the telegraphist Stanley James Davis at Warragul; Gwendoline was born in 1911 and Stanley Douglas in 1921. Agnes outlived them all.
According to Ann Mitchell, Agnes was a brilliant gardener. With the assistance of her husband, she turned their home garden at Surrey Hills into a showplace. She is also reputed to have been an excellent painter on porcelain, as well as a miniaturist. Her miniature of Lieutenant-General Sir John Monash and his lover Miss Lizette Bentwitch, a 1927 watercolour on ivory signed by Paterson (Monash University), was exhibited with the Victorian Artists’ Society in April 1927, April 1926 and April 1931. The locations of two companion pieces – separate portraits of Monash (certainly by Paterson) and Bentwitch (probably by Paterson but this is uncertain since Lizzie was said to be a miniaturist of some skill herself) – are unknown.
Known portrait miniatures by Paterson include Mrs Arthur Boyes, May Maxwell, “Varna”, Colonel George Horne VD, MA, MD, Ch.B, an artist and child (identities unknown), Esther Paterson (Mrs G.H. Gill) – perhaps a distant relative – Kenneth, Mrs W. Mortill (known only in reproduction), William Patrick Melville Esq., Miss Gwendoline Davis (the artist’s daughter, known only in reproduction). She also painted a series of images of her daughter from infancy onwards.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1883
- Summary
- A twentieth-century miniature portraitist; also reputed to have been an excellent painter on porcelain.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1977
- Age at death
- 94
Details
Latitude-37.8611788 Longitude144.8898569 Start Date1883-01-01 End Date1977-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Williamstown, Melbourne, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- photographer, was born in Williamstown, Victoria, on 17 March 1883. That year, the family moved to the nearby Melbourne suburb of Moonee Ponds. In 1902-6 she was a student at the National Gallery School where she formed lifelong friendships with other women artists, notably Dora Wilson and Pegg Clarke . The earliest evidence of Hollick’s interest in photography dates from about 1907, when she began to make portraits in a small darkroom set up in the family home. The following year she commenced her professional career. In 1908-09 she travelled by car through west and north-western Victoria advertising her services as a portrait photographer at various country towns en route . Within three years she had established a studio in Moonee Ponds from which she operated for much of her career. In 1918, however, Hollick and her partner, Dorothy Izard, took over the Collins Street studio of May and Mina Moore . Here Hollick established her reputation as one of Melbourne’s leading photographic portraitists.
She produced society portraits of wealthy Melbourne women as debutantes, brides and young matrons as well as fashion plates and portraits of visiting celebrities; she took the official Australian portrait of the American aviatrix Amy Johnson on her world tour in 1930. In particular, she became renowned for her child photography. Her seemingly casual, candid portraits belie her adept handling of her subjects and her expertise in the use of both studio and natural lighting. Hollick’s photographs were regularly published in Art in Australia , Home and Harrington’s Photographic Journal during the 1920s-30s. She also participated in numerous photographic exhibitions and salons, including the London Salon of Photography (1920), the Chicago Photographic Exhibition and the Colonial Exhibition of the Royal Photographic Society in London (both 1927). In 1929 she was the only woman exhibitor in the Melbourne Exhibition of Pictorial Photography. She held her only solo exhibition at her Collins Street studio in 1928. The Depression forced her to close the city studio. In 1932 she recommenced working from her home in Moonee Ponds, where she continued to take photographs until 1950. Then, aged sixty-seven, she retired from business to travel.
Writers:
Wyk, Susan VanNote: Primary
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 17 March 1883
- Summary
- Photographer, during the early 1920s established her reputation as one of Melbourne's leading photographic portraitists. She became renowned for her child photography.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1977
- Age at death
- 94
Details
Latitude-45.874167 Longitude170.503611 Start Date1880-01-01 End Date1977-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Dunedin, New Zealand
- Biography
- painter and art teacher, Melbourne.
The Fancy Dress 1909, oil on canvas in Sotheby’s Fine Australian Paintings 22-23 April 1996, cat.294, is a portrait of Janet Agnes Cumbrae Stewart modelling an 'Arts Ball’ gown for the Sunday afternoon class of the National Gallery of Victoria [NGV] Art School. Formerly in the Baldwin Spencer collection, shown Fine Art Society’s Galleries, Melbourne, May 1919 (ill. fig.12).
The Portfolio by C. Wheeler, exhibited in 1909 Victorian Artists’ Society and 'a work recommended for purchase by the Felton Trustees [NGV], was a great thing in color, manipulation and design. The proper place for a work of this kind should be a public gallery; and it is a pity that the Felton commissioners’ choice was not ratified’: [Anon], 'The Art of the Year’, Lone Hand 1 April 1910, p.672. The Portfolio was in fact acquired by the [National] Art Gallery of New South Wales, while the National Gallery of Victoria puchased The Poem .
This artist’s biography is a stub. You can help DAAO by expanding it.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 4 January 1880
- Summary
- painter and art teacher, Melbourne. His artwork 'The Fancy Dress' 1909 was shown in the Fine Art Society's Galleries, Melbourne. Another artwork of his is 'The Portfolio' exhibited in 1909. Uncle of New Zealand landscape painter Colin Wheeler.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 26-Oct-77
- Age at death
- 97
Details
Latitude-33.481536 Longitude150.1564887 Start Date1951-01-01 End Date1976-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Lithgow, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1951
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1976
- Age at death
- 25
Details
Latitude-31.9559 Longitude115.8606 Start Date1905-01-01 End Date1976-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Perth, WA, Australia
- Biography
- [Biographic material based on 2012 correspondence with Lee Dunn, descendent and legacy information].
Buzacott was painter, printmaker, illustrator and commercial artist, was born in Perth. After his father died he moved to Melbourne with his mother to join his grandfather, a noted seascape painter, at Caulfield but spent his holidays with his grandmother at Kalgoorlie. He later remembered the impression that the isolated, barren life of the Kalgoorlie miners had on him. In Melbourne he attended Wesley College, where he was a champion athlete.
He attended a commercial art college (Leyshon White) and left Melbourne to study commercial art in Sydney (1924-26), working at Farmers during the day and studying at Julian Ashton 's Sydney Art School at night. After returning to Melbourne he drew fashion designs for various commercial art studios and became friends with a young developing group of commercial artists, including James Flett , Dominic Leon and Mervyn Wallis. Together they began experimenting with various printing methods, especially linocut, lithography and etching.
In October 1930 Buzacott helped found Strife , a magazine that lasted only one issue before being banned by the police. He drew woodcuts in it as 'N. Vellis’. In 1930 he exhibited with The Embryos, and in 1931 Buzacott, Dalgarno , Flett, Eric Thake , R.V. Francis, J. Vickery and Bill Dolphin, calling themselves 'The New Group’, held an exhibition at the Athenaeum Gallery. All except Dolphin (a violin maker), showed prints, drawings or oils. Buzacott was then sharing a studio with Noel Counihan and Roy Dalgarno and had become increasingly attracted to Marxist ideals. He used stark b/w wood and linocuts to convey the mood of the Depression and draw attention to its victims, e.g. Queensland Roadworker c.1931, linocut on tissue paper, NGA, and West Melbourne Street Scene c.1938, wood engraving, QAG, a dark image of cheerful people in slum housing (both ill. Merewether). He often used the pseudonym 'N. Vellis’ for his magazine illustrations too.
In late 1931 Buzacott was a foundation member of the Workers Art Club. In 1933 he met and married Winifred McClintock, Herbert McClintock 's sister. Three years later, he used two small inheritances to travel to England where in 1936-38 he studied with Iain MacNab at the Grosvenor School, London. There he met the Australian painter George Bell , a key figure in the foundation of the CAS where Buzacott was to exhibit, and with whom Buzacott briefly studied during WWII to develop his painting skills (according to McCulloch Buzacott trained with Bell in 1940.)
Buzacott returned home in 1938 and soon moved to Warrandyte, where he shared the late Penleigh Boyd’s studio with for a time. He continued to exhibit with a group formed in Melbourne in 1935, the New Melbourne Art Club, which included Flett, Dalgarno and Heffernan. In 1940 he won the BFAG Crouch Art Prize for a painting. In 1942 he exhibited at the Kadimah cultural centre in Carlton alongside Bergner , Counihan, O’Connor and Wigley .
During WWII he joined the Cartographic Corps of the army stationed in Bendigo and Brisbane. Buzzacott and other artists were trained in plotting aerial photographs which became the major source of wartime mapmaking.] Buzzacott also designed posters for the war effort (said to be unsigned). He exhibited in Melbourne with other soldiers known as The Five Group during the 1940s.He sold his paintings only to friends and acquaintances while continuing to make a living from commercial art and from illustrating pamphlets and books, including Alan Marshall’s These Are My People (Cheshire, 1944).
He was transferred to Brisbane with the Mobile Lithographic Printing Company. The intention was to have a fully equipped drawing and printing unit close to the front line. This unit produced 1:25,000 maps (artillery) and photo maps. Buzzacott made pocket money painting small portraits of American soldiers that they sent home. Roy Dalgarno also worked for the Camouflage Section in Brisbane at that time.
‘Carto Corps’ included many commercial artists including the artists Arthur Boyd and John Perceval. It was known as “The Zebra Corps” because all became Sargeants [three stripes indicating rank] as soon as they joined up. (information supplied by Jim Wright & Murray Young letters,1979).
He was transferred back to Melbourne to Design Division in 1943 (Grahame King letter 1979). He was Art Director for United Service Publicity (John F. Barnes, founder, Karl Morris, Director) founded 1945 by returned soldiers. He became a freelance commercial artist around 1946 and rented space in the studio of Jim and Joyce Wright 44 William Street. (Jim Wright letter 1979).
After the war Buzacott became a member of the VAS, along with others who stopped exhibiting with the CAS. By then, he was mainly painting landscapes. In 1949 He left Melbourne for Brisbane to work in commercial art. He later undertook work with Garnsey Green & Clemenger (founded ca.1955). He lived in Wynnum, near Brisbane, site of an artists’ colony that developed around John Manifold, a communist poet and musician who had fought as a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War. He continued to paint landscapes while employed on commercial art and teaching at QIT. He won the Redcliffe Art Prize in 1969. Later he moved to South Tweed, where he died in 1976.
Some of Buzacott’s paintings combine modernism and realism, e.g. Scene at Doncaster 1940, o/c, BFAG (like US country town painting, ill. Hansen, cat.144, and Merewether, cat.18). His work was included in exhibitions at the AGSA in1984, QAG 1985, McClelland Gallery 1981.
[Lee Dunn also notes that Buzacott painted a milk bar mural in the late 1950s or early 1960s for a milk bar in the Wynnum/Manly bayside area of Brisbane. It was described as large cartoonish and kind of anthropomorphised map of Stradbroke Island and Moreton Island]
[Biographic material based on 2012 correspondence with Lee Dunn, descendent and legacy information].
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
LeeDunn
Michael Bogle
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2020
- Born
- b. 1905
- Summary
- Buzacott was a printmaker, commercial artist (graphic designer), political illustrator, painter and teacher. A mural by Buzacott is also known. He travelled widely in Australia and Europe and settled in Queensland in his late career.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- Aug-76
- Age at death
- 71
Details
Latitude-27.5610193 Longitude151.953351 Start Date1903-01-01 End Date1976-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Toowoomba, Qld, Australia
- Biography
- Born in Toowoomba in 1903, Douglas Annand was a highly accomplished graphic designer, textile designer, muralist and sculptor. Having grown up in Brisbane, where he attended night classes at Brisbane Central Technical College, Annand moved to Sydney in 1930. In Sydney, Annand became highly successful as a freelance designer; his work included the development of corporate images for such well-known Australian companies as Union Oil, Farmer’s and David Jones, as well as designs for The Home magazine and the Australian National Travel Association [see NGA 2001 exhibition catalogue]. His design for the ceiling of the Australian pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exposition, along with his role as art director for the Australian Pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, gained Annand international recognition and brought Australia to the forefront of international design.
In anticipation of the Second World War, during the late 1930s Annand became involved in a camouflage group formed by zoology Professor William Dakin in response to the severe lack of camouflage and concealment strategies specific to the Australian environment. With members including Frank Hinder, Robert Emerson-Curtis, Sydney Ure Smith , Russel Roberts and Professor Leslie Wilkinson, the group dedicated itself to exploring issues of concealment and developing new techniques for camouflage in Australia, independent of any Government support. At the outbreak of war, the group became the foundation of the Camouflage Committee, which was formed by the Ministry of Home Security. Annand’s background in design, together with his strong interest in nature made him the perfect candidate for the role of a camouflage artist, and from 1941-1944 he was employed by the Royal Australian Air Force as a camouflage officer. During his years of service, Annand produced a large body of works documenting aerial surveillance of coastlines and islands off the Queensland coast. Through his attention to detail and understanding of colour and landscapes Annand provided a significant contribution to Australian camouflage research.
Following the war, Annand went back to his work as a freelance designer, whilst simultaneously expanding his range of skills and knowledge in a variety of new media. He produced textile designs, sculptures, murals, mixed media designs, and later became interested in architectural design and glass structures. Throughout his life, Annand illustrated a perpetual passion for all aspects of art and design, and this did not go unnoticed. Prior to his death in 1976 Annand won the Sulman prize three times, and his posters received prizes in Adelaide and Milan. The Australian War Memorial holds 72 of the studies and watercolours he completed during his work as a camouflage artist.
The Powerhouse Museum collection includes two Douglas Annand design archives, which are a valuable record of the design and architectural activity occurring in Sydney and Australia between the 1930s and 1970s. The first archive consists of material taken from Annand’s studio in Killara after he passed away. It includes ideas, sketches and exhibition catalogues, Annand’s designs for national and international architectural murals, posters and textiles, and objects relating to architectural commissions which Annand undertook during the 1950s and 60s.
The second archive includes material such as catalogues, notebooks, sketches and drawings, photographs, posters and correspondence relating to most of the projects Annand undertook during his career. The collection also includes artworks, sculptures, and textile, metal and glass objects.
The National Gallery of Australia in Canberra also holds a collection of Annand’s art-related material.
Addendum from Eye magazineDouglas Annand (1903-1976) was part of an Australian graphic design tradition concerned more with art and aesthetics than commercialisation. Unlike most of his colleagues, he chose not to work overseas and instead set new standards for Australian designers, creating images that were international in their philosophy, yet typically Australian. He was also a watercolourist, a textile designer, a muralist and a sculptor of originality and style. In 1937 Annand was commissioned to design the brochure and ceiling mural for the Australian Pavilion at the Paris Exposition designed unsuccessfully by architects Stephenson & Turner. In 1939 he was made design director for the Australian Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair, this time supervising Stephenson & Turner. This widely admired design was featured in Australian Art Annual 1939 and the Architectural Review selected it in its Special New York World’s Fair issue. He was rewarded in 1940 with a bronze medal from the Australian Commercial and Industrial Artists’ Association. In 2003, Melbourne’s Heide Museum and Gallery staged a retrospective exhibition of his work.Source—www.eyemagazine.com/feature.php?id=77&fid=439
Writers:
Dimcevska, Vicky, Assistant Curator, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, ACTGabrielle Eade, Powerhouse Museum
staffcontributor
Davina Jackson
Date written:
2008
Last updated:
2015
- Born
- b. 1903
- Summary
- One of Australia's best known graphic and poster artists, Douglas Annand also had a distinguished career as a camouflage artist during the Second World War. As a member of the Camouflage Committee formed by the Ministry of Home Security, Annand was instrumental in developing new techniques for camouflage in Australia.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1976
- Age at death
- 73
Details
Latitude-33.829075 Longitude151.24409 Start Date1903-01-01 End Date1976-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Mosman, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- This entry is a stub. Please help the DAAO by completing this biography
Writers:
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 1903
- Summary
- Enid Cambridge's gently modernist paintings on a domestic scale gave her many supporters in the first half of the 20th century.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1976
- Age at death
- 73
Details
Latitude-34.9275 Longitude138.6 Start Date1900-01-01 End Date1976-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
- Biography
- cartoonist and caricaturist, was born in Adelaide. After studying art at the National Gallery Schools in Melbourne he spent eight years as editorial cartoonist on the New Zealand Free Lance (1927-34), e.g. The Old Horse Takes the Road Again (United Political Party) 1928 (ill. Grant, 114), Slaying the Goliath of Unemployment 1929 (ill.119), Handicapped by their Friends 1931 (ill.122), The Universal Squeeze 1932 (ill.121) and A High Exchange Altitude Record? 1932 (Heath Robinson/ Emmett style inflation of a cow to help farmers). He returned to Sydney in 1934 and freelanced until employed by the Sydney Sun and Sunday Sun to draw the main political cartoons after Tom Glover died in 1938. His original Sun cartoons include ones about Sir Eric Spooner (Spooner Papers ML), done in 1934 as a freelance, and ones done on 13 October 1938 and in 1939 as straight political cartoons when Spooner had become deputy leader. A wartime cartoon of world leaders (reproduced Pix 12 May 1945, 30) calls him 'Stuart Peterson of Sydney “Sun”’. He was included in the National Gallery of Canada’s War Cartoons and Caricatures of the British Commonwealth at Otttawa in 1941. Two original cartoons dated 1944 and 1945 are in the Mitchell Library (PXD 764). The National Library of Australia, Canberra, has a plate of 'Ever feel like this?’ showing a huge bomb as an owl gazing at the world as a mouse, evidently from the Sun . F.F. Lynx, The Pen is Mightier (Lindsay Drummond Ltd, Great Britain 1946) and/or Joseph Darracott, A Cartoon War (London, 1989) illustrated his Keeps Rolling Along of 1943 showing Stalin as a bulldozer.
Peterson contributed to the Bulletin in the 1920s and 1930s (included in c.1930s list of Bulletin Artists, Px*D557 pt 5 '46’). 8 original cartoons of 1923-37 and 117 caricatures of 1923-28, many of NZ subjects, are in the ML Bulletin collection.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1900
- Summary
- Mid 20th century New Zealand and Australian newspaper cartoonist and caricaturist
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1976
- Age at death
- 76
Details
Latitude51.507222 Longitude-0.1275 Start Date1894-01-01 End Date1976-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Lambeth, London, England
- Biography
- Artist & engraver (1994 – 1976). Born into a London working class family in 1894, Frank Davies Manley was educated at local schools. His innate ability to accurately render an evocative image with a few well placed lines was evident as a teenager. Encouraged by his headmaster, he was accepted in 1909 at the prestigious De La Rue and Company to undertake a seven year apprenticeship as an engraver. He attended London’s Central School of Art & Crafts and Bolt Court School of Engraving & Lithography, later both to become part of London University of the Arts, for formal tuition as an adjunct to the apprenticeship. WWI intervened and the period of indenture was never completed.
After working in the publishing industry, Manley was recruited in 1928 by the nascent Commonwealth Bank Note Printing Branch in Melbourne and there his fine engraving ability proven, his role grew to include design. The first stamp wholly designed and engraved by Manley was the 1930 Kingsford Smith Commemorative Series and his last, Archer , was to mark the 1960 Melbourne Cup Centenary. Of all the stamps issued by the Australian Post Master for mainland and territorial use during this thirty year period, in excess of ninety were designed by Manley. He engraved a larger number of the dyes for printing plate production.
Manley’s designs included native animals, royal definitives, historical commemoratives, war and peace time acknowledgements and Australian iconic images for everyday postage.
Two hundred and twenty-three Australian artists anonymously submitted six hundred and sixty-three designs to a competition organized by the Post Master General in 1946 in an effort to find some exciting new stamp design ideas. Eight were short listed for production, but only two were seen to fruition. F. D. Manley’s Hereford Bull’s Head design issued in 1948 was one of these.
Bank note design and production fell within the scope of work carried out at Note Printing Branch during this period and of the notes in the series released 1933-34, Manley designed the rear face of each denomination. Of the series that was released 1953-54, Manley designed the front face of the ten shilling and ten pound notes and the rear face of the five and twenty pound notes. He also designed Government documents which required nationalistic, security quality graphics, such as war bonds and savings stamps, food ration coupons, postal notes and naturalization certificates.
The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology approached Manley in the post-war years to teach etching, engraving and die sinking to apprentices in the printing trade, a post he held for five years concurrent with his full time employment at Note Printing.
Manley was an active member of the Victorian Artist’s Society and a member of their governing board in the 1940s and 50s. He used his personal time to dabble in many artistic media. He excelled at fine detailed work that mirrored the techniques he applied in the workplace. He painted the Australian landscape in watercolour and oils, produced linocuts and etchings, some which he hand coloured, and in his later years he produced many ink and wash drawings of the facades of Melbourne’s historic buildings. In 1964 the Victorian State Library purchased a watercolour painting of the Melbourne Town Hall for its collection.
After his retirement, in January 1960 Manley was invited to join the Stamp Advisory Committee which has the ultimate power over the choice of prospective and finished stamp designs. He served on the committee for five years.
Between February and June 2007, the Post Master Gallery in Melbourne held an exhibition featuring the work of the master engravers of the Note Printing Branch of the Reserve Bank, those who had skillfully incised the dies used to produce all Australian postage stamps in the period 1937 to 1973. The 'Artists of Steel’ exhibition subsequently went on tour of Australia to major cities and regional towns. Speaking about the exhibition, curator Richard Breckon (Australia Post Historian) named Frank Manley as the pre-eminient artist of steel, having engraved and/or designed almost all stamps released in the 1930s and 1940s and a large number from the 1950s.
The enormous body of work attributed to Frank Davies Manley is a valuable legacy to philately, engraving, art and design.
Writers:
Gay, Sandra
Date written:
2009
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 24 October 1894
- Summary
- Manley was a prolific designer of Australian postage stamps 1929 - 1959.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 19-Jan-76
- Age at death
- 82
Details
Latitude52.561928 Longitude-1.464854 Start Date1890-01-01 End Date1976-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- England, United Kingdom
- Biography
- Watercolourist, teacher and illustrator. Born in Sydney in 1898, Phyllis Tindall was the youngest child, and only known daughter, born to Charles and Mary Tindall. Her early interest in art seems to have come from her father who was a notable watercolour artist best known for his many images of ships on Sydney Harbour. Her older brother, M.C. Tindall, was also an artist.
Despite her birth name, Phyllis was known professionally as 'Nessie Tindall’, this forename being a Scottish colloquial shortening for the fabled Loch Ness monster, and may be a nickname given to Phyllis by her father who was born in Scotland. Nessie made her artistic debut aged (approximately) ten at the annual spring show of the Royal Art Society (RAS), where she exhibited four watercolours priced from three to ten guineas. In the July/August 1913 issue of The Salon (the journal of the Institute of Architects of NSW) Nessie Tindall was listed as being the First Prize Scholarship Winner of the RAS Students’ Annual Exhibition. A well observed pencil study of a nude woman by the artist was illustrated on page 37 of this 1913 publication.
Nessie exhibited almost every year with the RAS from 1910-22 and advertised her availability to teach “outdoor lessons in landscape painting” in the Society’s annual exhibition catalogue several times during that period, the first time being in 1915 when she was aged only seventeen. In 1915 she was living at her parents’ home in Gordon Road, Lindfield, while working from a studio at Norwich Chambers, 56 Hunter Street, Sydney.
Tindall’s last involvement with the RAS was in 1922 when she exhibited two works at the annual spring show. Late that year her father, along with several other longstanding members, was removed from the RAS executive council. This snub to her father’s reputation may explain why she stopped exhibiting with the RAS, even though her father returned to exhibiting with the Society in the late 1920s. While her father was a foundation member of the Australian Watercolour Institute (AWI) in 1924, Nessie never exhibited with the AWI, despite being proficient in the medium. In the 1925 Sands Directory she was listed as “lady tracer” (for the record a lady-tracer was an early twentieth century position; women would copy detailed plans in architectural or engineering offices by carefully tracing the original, this trade ended with the invention of mechanical copying machines after World War II).
During the early 1920s Nessie contributed several cartoons to The Bulletin . These were all ink wash joke blocks, such as: 'She was no gambler’ (22 July 1920, pg 18); 'When great minds, etc’ (7 October 1920, pg 16); 'A stitch in time’ (28 October 1920, pg 14); 'Great work’, (24 July 1924, pg 19); and 'A woman of her word’ (21 August 1924, pg 16).
In 1928 she married bank clerk Oswald Ernest Piper. It is unclear whether she abandoned her art after her marriage. While electoral roles in 1930 and 1936 list Tindall doing “home duties” rather than working as an artist, Sands Directory lists her working from a studio at 10 Bligh Street up to 1932. The last known work created by the artist is a simple pen line image of flannel flowers that was used as the frontispiece for A first-year Australian Botany by Elsie A. Cooke and Myrtle Gillham (Dymocks Book Arcade, Sydney, 1932). Nellie Tindall died, aged in her in her early fifties, in 1950.
Writers:
Clifford-Smith, Silas
Date written:
2009
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1890
- Summary
- Sydney based watercolourist, illustrator and teacher active during the first half of the twentieth century. The artist was the daughter of the Scottish born marine watercolourist C.E.S. Tindall.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 17-Jul-76
- Age at death
- 86
Details
Latitude-22.1646782 Longitude144.5844903 Start Date1890-01-01 End Date1976-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Queensland
- Biography
- Kenneth McConnel (1895, 1898* or 1899-1976) was born in Queensland and graduated from the University of Sydney in 1924 or 1925, as a student of Leslie Wilkinson and AS Hook, after serving in the First World War. He spent four years in London, working at Sir Ashton Webb’s office and attending night lectures. On return to Sydney in 1928, he became a partner with Joseph Fowell, who had been working with Wilkinson when McConnel was a student. Fowell and McConnel won the design competition for the BMA Building in Macquarie Street, which was the first Australian building to win an RIBA Medal (Bronze) in 1933. Further partners were taken on and the firm was known as Fowell, McConnel and Mansfield when it completed the Orient Line Building in Spring Street, Sydney in 1940 (with London architect Brian O’Rorke). This work won the NSW RAIA Sulman Medal in 1943 and the RIBA Bronze Medal in 1947. In 1938 however, McConnel withdrew from the firm because of ill health, but he recovered enough to serve in the army during World War II and afterwards joined the NSW Housing Commission. In 1949, he set up a new practice – focusing on houses; many on country properties. Between 1949 and 1973, he also designed a variety of residential buildings for the War Veterans Home in Dee Why. To cope with an expanding workload, Melbourne architect Stan Smith joined the practice in 1950 (partner 1952) and Peter (RN) Johnson in 1951 (partner 1954) and the practice was formally named McConnel Smith and Johnson in 1955. Initially they worked in McConnel’s garage at Edgecliff; moving to nearby stables in 1952.Sources—Decoration and Glass biography, 1 July 1935, p41.—Jackson, Davina. 2004. Information supplied by McConnel Smith and Johnson, November.—NSW Architects Registration Board database, December 2004. This lists his birthdate as 1899; sometimes dates were listed for 1 January of the year after the actual birthdate. He was last registered in 1976; contradicting other information that he died in 1973.—Taylor, Jennifer. Undated. Article on McConnel Smith and Johnson for a monograph not yet published.
Writers:
Davina Jackson
Date written:
2015
Last updated:
2015
- Born
- b. 1890s
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1976
- Age at death
- 86
Details
Latitude-37.425 Longitude143.891667 Start Date1889-01-01 End Date1976-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Creswick, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- painter, illustrator and gallery director, was born at Creswick (Vic.) on 31 December 1889, the second youngest child of Dr Robert Charles Lindsay and his wife Jane Williams. Early childhood ear infections left him with permanent deafness in one ear, which he sometimes used to his advantage. Because he was so much younger than his artist siblings Daryl had little contact with them as a child, and did not join them in their Melbourne illustrating careers. Indeed he was at first more interested in horses than art, and spent some years working as a jackaroo. Even though his hearing problems should have precluded him from a military career he enlisted in the AIF, in the Service Corps and served in France. In 1916, while on leave in London, he met with his sister Ruby and her husband Will Dyson , who was Australia’s first official war artist. On 31 December 1916, Daryl’s birthday, his brother Reg who was a gunner, was killed. within weeks Dyson had organised for Daryl to become his batman. This new position moved him away from the front line and also introduced him to art, encouraging him to draw alongside him. C.E.W. Bean, Australia’s official historian for World War I, appointed him as an artist alongside his mentor. Daryl also drew studies for army surgeons, creating an accurate medical record of injuries. This led to being appointed as the official medical artist to the Sidcup Hospital for facial reconstruction. He subsequently befriend the plastic surgeon, Harold Gillies, who was also a landscape painter. This connection led to a friendship with Sir Henry Tonks of the Slade. Daryl subsequently studied drawing at the Slade one day a week and through this connection as well has his family links, came to mix socially with artistic and literary London.
In early 1919 Daryl and Ruby paid a short visit to their Irish relatives. She became ill on the journey home, and died soon after, an early victim of the Spanish Influenza. He returned to Australia the same year, and held his first exhibition of dawings at the Decoration Galleries in Melbourne. In 1921 he returned to London where he became he became engaged to Joan a Weigall, a cousin of the Boyds. They married on 14 February 1922 and as Joan Lindsay she became one of Australia’s most loved writers.
In 1925 they built their home at Mulberry Hill, at Baxter on the Mornington Peninsular. Here Daryl painted: landscapes, still lives and his most popular subject matter, race horses. Friends, including the artist George Lambert , came to stay and it was here that Lambert drew his portrait of the elderly Jane Lindsay.
When the Great Depression made life too expensive they leased Mulberry Hill, and moved to Bacchus Marsh where he scraped a living as a black and white artist and made paintings on a small scale. Although without money, he was not without influence and in 1930 was able to lobby to have his brother Norman 's novel Redheap banned in Australia. He invented the 'Ben Bowyang’ comic strip for the Melbourne Herald in 1933 with gags supposedly by C.J. Dennis, who rarely delivered them. Once they had money saved Daryl and Joan Lindsay travelled by cargo boat to Europe. In London Daryl made many studies of the de Basil company’s ballet dancers. The subsequent exhibition was a resounding commercial success. After returning to Australia and Mulberry Hill, Daryl was persuaded by Sir Keith Murdoch to take the post of curator at the National Gallery of Victoria. After Murdoch engineered the removal of J. S. (Jimmy) MacDonald, Daryl Lindsay was offered the post of Director in 1942. Daryl Lindsay encouraged the scholarship of his curator of prints and drawings, Dr Ursula Hoff, and also worked with Professor Joseph Burke to lift the standard of art scholarship in this country. Through his friendship with Sir Robert Menzies and as a member of the Commonwealth Art Advisory Board he advanced the cause of national gallery for Australia and ensured that its first interim director was his nominee, James Mollison.
In his old age Daryl continued to paint, and also kept a connection to the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery where he was Trustee. The last young gallery director he mentored was Ron Radford, later director of the National Gallery of Australia.
Writers:
Kerr, JoanMendelssohn, Joanna
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 31 December 1889
- Summary
- Artist, illustrator and the most influential gallery director in 20th century Australia. The second youngest of the 10 Lindsay children.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 25-Dec-76
- Age at death
- 87
Details
Latitude-25.5942221 Longitude151.3008262 Start Date1885-01-01 End Date1976-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Bowen, North Qld., Australia
- Biography
- photographer, was born in Bowen, North Queensland, youngest daughter of Isobel and William Agar. She trained at the Bain Photographic Studios in Toowoomba, run by James and Annie Bain, becoming their chief photographer. In 1918 she moved to Sydney and opened her own studio at Denison House, George Street, where she employed several people, including her sister Alice as a retoucher.
Agar’s stylish portrait photographs – with strong, dramatic cross lighting and theatrical, almost unnatural, poses – appeared regularly in Sydney magazines such as Home and Society in the 1920s. These photographs (of brides, society misses and 'wannabes’) are highly distinctive, each unmistakably Agar’s work although revealing very little about the sitter. Her niece recalls that Agar herself was as glamorous as any of her photographs – as is evident from her self portrait.
In April 1933 Agar 'slipped off quietly’ and married James W. Hardie, an accountant. Not for her the wispy veils and long bridal trains of the brides she had photographed:
She wore a frock of parchment satin covered with a velvet coat of the same shade with a lovely collar of sable, into which she had tucked a spray of orchids. Her small brown velvet hat matched her furs, and the 'tout ensemble’ was very charming indeed.
Agar subsequently retired from her photographic career. At this, according to Cato, 'the leading camera men of this country breathed a sigh of relief’. She died at Edgecliff, Sydney, in 1976.
Writers:
Callaway, Anita
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1885
- Summary
- Glamorous and highly accomplished photographer best known for her images of Sydney socialites and brides. Such was her skill that when she retired upon marriage Cato claims 'the leading camera men of this country breathed a sigh of relief'.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1976
- Age at death
- 91
Details
Latitude-33.8894781 Longitude151.1274125 Start Date1881-01-01 End Date1976-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Ashfield, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Born in 'Moonagee Hall’ Ashfield, New South Wales. Richardson trained as a nurse and nursed in hospitals and privately for eleven years. She came to Western Australia frequently to visit her family and stayed in 1924 to nurse an aunt who had demetia and could not be left alone. Richardson remained with her to 1936 and during this time started to paint wildflower photographs. These were published in 1929 in a book with Helen Odgers. The originals are with the Department of Agriculture. Richardson then decided to paint properly and studied with Florence Fuller and later with A. B. Webb. She exhibited three oil paintings A Spring Day, Pelican Point and Queen’s Lilies with the West Australian Society of Arts in 1936. In 1937 the reviewer remarked, “Ida Richardson’s no 31 Geraniums is a distinct improvement over previous work”. In 1939 when she showed with the Western Australian Women Painters and Applied Arts Society Charles Hamilton noted that her Bowl of Roses was the best of the “relatively unimportant” oil paintings. Richardson moved to Albany, Western Australia in 1940 and attended Albany Summer Schools. This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Dr Dorothy Erickson
Date written:
2010
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1881
- Summary
- Miss Ida Worsley Richardson was born in 1881. She was a painter and a nurse. Richardson exhibited with the West Australian Society of Arts in 1936.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1976
- Age at death
- 95
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1950-01-01 End Date1975-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1950
- Summary
- Philippa Cullen was one of the performers closely associated with Aleks Danko and other performance artists in the 1970s. She died suddenly while visiting India in 1975,
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1975
- Age at death
- 25
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1938-01-01 End Date1975-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- Wendy Paramor was the only woman artist to flourish in the very male atmosphere of Sydney’s Central Street Gallery in the late 1960s, yet she did not personally benefit from the reassessment of women artists in the mid-1970s. By the time the world became a friendlier place for artists who were also single mothers, she had died too soon.She was born in Melbourne, but when she was five her family moved to Sydney’s north shore,and she attended school at SCEGGS Redlands and then Wenona. When she left school at the age of 15 her father insisted that she take a secretarial course, but the following year she enrolled in art school. As was common in the 1950s she enrolled at both East Sydney Technical College, and the smaller atelier classes of the Julian Ashton Art School.In 1960 she joined the exodus of young Australians seeking adventure in Europe. For most of her time there she was based in the south of France, but also received a grant from the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, so was based in Portugal. She was able to exhibit in Lisbon, Coimbra and Oporto. Before she returned to Australia she travelled to New York, where she also exhibited. She returned to Australia in 1963. The work she had seen in Europe, and especially the USA, profoundly influenced the direction of her art, and she easily gravitated to the radical USA influenced artists who formed the nucleus of the Central Street collective in 1966. The year before she had held her first solo exhibitions at both Watters Gallery in Sydney and the Bognar Gallery in Los Angeles.Although she was exhibiting in Central Street, Wendy Paramor was physically removed from the stark white gallery walls and the narrow city lanes. In 1966 she removed herself to West Hoxton, in the south west of Sydney, in a house designed for her by Philip Cox. It was here, in 1967, that she brought her newborn son Luke home. She made the decision not to marry his father, the artist Vernon Treweeke.In 1968 three of her sculptures were included in The Field, the groundbreaking exhibition of Australian abstract art at the National Gallery of Victoria. Her work was selected for major exhibitions including International Young Contemporaries in Tokyo in 1969, the Marland House Sculpture competition and the innovative Mildura Sculpture Triennials of 1970 and 1973. This was the time just before new wave feminism once again made women artists visible, and she received neither critical acclaim not commercial sales.In 1973, the year Luke turned six, she was diagnosed with a cerebral tumor. In the last two years of her life she returned to semi-figurative work and landscapes. She died on 28 November 1975 at the Wolper Jewish Hospital in Woollahra.In 2000 Alan Oldfield, who had been a close friend, curated a major exhibition of her sculpture for the Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, a western Sydney arts organisation that was not even imagined when she was living in its neighbourhood.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 12 December 1938
- Summary
- Wendy Paramor was the only woman painter and sculptor to flourish in the hard edge colour field abstractionist Central Street. She died young, of cancer, at a time when this art was out of fashion. More recently her oeuvre has been reassessed and she is now recognised as a significant artist of her time.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 28-Nov-75
- Age at death
- 37
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1925-01-01 End Date1975-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- Brian Finemore, the first curator of Australian art, was born on 8 October 1925 in South Yarra. His old friend, Stephen Murray-Smith, wrote that his birthplace “was about as far from the centre of Melbourne as he ever cared to wander”. He lived his entire life either in the city or close to it. In his later years when he moved to a flat at East Melbourne he proclaimed: “Imagine a man of my age and position being forced to live in the suburbs!”He attended school at St Patrick’s College in East Melbourne, and in 1948 became one of the first undergraduate students to enrol in Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne. His initial years at university saw him more engaged with social life and the performing arts than study and he did not graduate until 1959. His final results were however sufficiently distinguished to gain him an appointment to the National Gallery of Victoria. He was initially appointed Assistant Curator of Australian Art, but the position was soon changed to a full curatorship as he easily extended his role to collecting, exhibiting and advocating for Australian art. By the time of his death Finemore had been personally responsible for the acquisition of over a third of the works in the Australian collection of the Gallery. He took an essentially provincial Victorian collection and gave it a national focus. On occasion he would pay for his own research travel to Sydney so that he could gain a national perspective. When the gallery was not prepared to pay exhibiting artists a stipend, he did on occasion pay them out of his own salary. Finemore also focussed attention on the quality of Australia’s colonial art, especially the work of Eugene von Guerard and S. T. Gill. He was also very involved in the art of his own time. Two of his later exhibitions, The Field (1968) and Object and Idea (1973, effectively defined the art of their time. His other great contribution was as a mentor, as he happily shared his knowledge and his insights with younger colleagues. Finemore was however very much a man of his generation, and shared the “progressive” distaste for the art of Albert Namatjira, perhaps because those who most intensely championed Namatjira’s work came from the suburbs, and he loathed the suburbs.His friend and colleague, Gordon Thomson, called Brian Finemore “the last of the boulevardiers”, and he relished the cosmopolitan style.Brian Finemore was murdered at his flat on 23 October 1975. Two years after his death the National Gallery of Victoria published a collection of his writing on art, under the title Freedom from Prejudice.
Writers:
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 8 October 1925
- Summary
- Brian Finemore was the first curator of Australian art. He both shaped the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria and mentored a new generation of curators. He died in 1975.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 23-Oct-75
- Age at death
- 50
Details
Latitude43.7009358 Longitude7.2683912 Start Date1920-01-01 End Date1975-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Nice, France
- Biography
- Jean (Georges Henri) Fombertaux (1920-1975) was born in Nice, France, gained his diploma of Architecture from the Sydney Technical College in 1948, when he was working for Lipson & Kaad. Shortly after he was registered that year, he left for an architect’s job in South Africa, returning in 1951. He set up in private practice and later joined HP Oser & Associates, becoming a partner there in 1961. For further information, his daughter is Francois Fombertaux, ABC TV.Source—Correspondence and clippings archived by the NSW RAIA’s 20th Century Building Register, accessed 2004.
Writers:
Davina Jackson
Date written:
2015
Last updated:
2015
- Born
- b. 1920
- Summary
- Jean Fombertaux was a notable architect in Sydney during the 1950s and 1960s, a partner of Oser and Fombertaux.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1975
- Age at death
- 55
Details
Latitude-37.9006286 Longitude145.0886389 Start Date1913-01-01 End Date1975-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Oakleigh, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 30 July 1913
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1975
- Age at death
- 62
Details
Latitude48.2 Longitude16.366667 Start Date1908-01-01 End Date1975-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Vienna, Austria
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 13 August 1908
- Summary
- Michael Gerstl was a Viennese designer who emigrated to Australia in 1947 to set up Gerstl, a cabinetmaking business with many European immigrant clients. Commissions for hotel groups saw it grow to over 3,500 clients and expanded premises. Remembered for use of exotic, detailed timber veneers, the range of their work was, in reality, broad, reflecting the variety of architects and clients the company served.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 9-Jun-75
- Age at death
- 67
Details
Latitude52.561928 Longitude-1.464854 Start Date1906-01-01 End Date1975-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- England, UK
- Biography
- painter and commercial artist, born in England 12 October 1906, where she trained as a commercial artist. Her English commercial work includes Dainty Doris Goes Shopping 1927. In 1936 she left her first husband for Bill Courcier (with whom she had four children); they emigrated to Sydney in 1937. Long had a solo exhibition at Macquarie Galleries in 1943. She won third prize for portrait of seaman in the 'War at Sea’ section of CEMA’s (Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts) 'Australia at War’ exhibition (NGV, then AGNSW 1945). She was regularly hung in the Archibald Prize exhibition and with the Sydney Society of Artists; also a member of CAS Melbourne. Lived in Paddington, Sydney, until 1967 when she and Bill moved permanently to their cottage in Bundeena. They finally retired to Cambridge (UK), where she died on 3 June 1975.
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
2011
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 12 October 1906
- Summary
- Known for her commercial work in England, Long worked mainly as painter after emigrating to Australia. Her work was regularly included in the Archibald Prize.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 3-Jun-75
- Age at death
- 69
Details
Latitude36.29776655 Longitude22.96564518 Start Date1900-01-01 End Date1975-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Potamos, Kythera, Greece
- Biography
- Dimitrios Nikolois (James Nicholas) Fardoulys was born at Potamos, on the Grecian Island of Kythera in 1900 the youngest of the four sons born to Nikolois Fardoulys and Rosini née Konninos. Opportunities for the next generation were limited in this farming community so he was sent to Australia at the outbreak of WWI, aged fourteen years. His journey was disrupted by an enforced stay in Colombo before he finally made his way to Warwick where he was under the care of an uncle, Mick Catsoulis. For the next twelve years he worked in cafes in Queensland and New South Wales including the Golden Gate Café, Southport, which he operated for a year in 1922. He also worked on farms and sheep stations which were later to be the inspiration of some of his paintings.
In 1925 Fardoulys married Gladys Elizabeth Mary Knight (1904-70) who performed as a ventriloquist with a travelling troupe and joined them in their tours of country Queensland and northern New South Wales. Later they operated the Olympia Café in Goondiwindi (then owned by Mick Catsoulis) until it burned down in 1931. The family, which now included two girls and two boys, settled in Brisbane the same year and for the next twenty-nine years Fardoulys worked as a taxi driver.
It was after his retirement and following the example of his fellow naïve artist Charles Callins (1887-1982) that he took up painting seriously in 1960. He recalled of his school days in Kythera: “Art was compulsory, and I was pretty good at school as a youngster in black and white. From that I went to oils without any tuition whatever.” He also admitted that when in Brisbane during the early years of the Great Depression “I used to do a little painting to amuse myself and could always sell one for £2 or £3. This kept us going” (in Bruce 1968).
Matilda Joe at Cleveland was included in the HC Richard’s Prize at the Queensland Art Gallery in 1961, the first in what became a significant body of work. He regularly participated in group exhibitions in Brisbane including the Queensland Art Gallery’s HC Richards and LJ Harvey Prizes from 1965 to 1972 and received special encouragement from the members of the Contemporary Art Society of Australia (Queensland Branch). A widely recognised work, Blue Roses , was acquired by Ray Hughes (later a prominent Sydney art dealer) after being exhibited in the Society’s Annual Autumn Exhibition in 1965.
Brisbane’s principal art critic of the period, Dr Gertrude Langer, became familiar with Fardoulys’s work and she awarded him a joint first prize at the 1964 Warana-Caltex Queensland Art Competition for The story of the Nativity in the north-west . She continued to demonstrate her enthusiasm for his work in her review of his first solo exhibition at the Johnstone Gallery, Brisbane, two years later – it was a sell out:
“The collection is a joy. Fardoulys has the wonderful innocence and intensity of vision characteristic of the genuine artists of the people. Like them he paints straight from the heart and has no recourse to methods devised by others to express his own feelings… An instinctive sense of sequence, rhythm and balance give his work a charming decorativeness…” (Langer 1966).
Langer also praised his work in the concurrent Warana Caltex Prize and awarded him the 'Traditional oil’ category for The strawberry pickers, Glasshouse Mts for the 1969 exhibition.
Other solo exhibitions of his work were held at the Design Arts Centre, Brisbane, in 1968 and 1970, Bonython Art Gallery, Sydney in 1969 and, jointly with Charles Callins the year following his death, at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane in 1976.
Although Fardoulys’s work had been well received in Brisbane, he attributed his greatest promotion to the efforts of the humourist Barry Humphries. When Humphries was in Brisbane during October 1965 for his production of Excuse I, Another Nice Night’s Entertainment for J C Williamson Theatres he brought The land of milk and honey from the Contemporary Art Society (Queensland Branch) Annual Interstate Exhibition held at Finney’s Auditorium. Subsequently Humphries wrote from London to commission the portrait used for the cover of his 1968 publication The Barry Humphries book of Innocent Australian Verse ( The Sunday Mail , Brisbane, 16 Oct 1966, p 17). By this time Fardoulys was already represented in the collection Art Gallery of New South Wales; The Cattle rustlers, Carnarvon Ranges was purchased by the gallery after the then Director, Hal Missingham, judged the 1966 HC Richards Memorial Prize.
Fardoulys was very proud of his categorization as a naïve painter and stated his qualifications for being so considered: “I work for depth and clarity as far as the eye can see. You must be able to see all the detail, even from a distance. There is no haze in my paintings.” But he also asserted that “All my paintings are purely imagination, and they all have a story. To be a 'primitive’ you give all the detail and more or less a story as well” (in Bruce 1968). His paintings are distinctive for the colourful palette he favoured. He did not mix colours, generally working directly from the tube without a palette and using very small brushes. Fardoulys’s output was slow as he could only produce one small painting a week, larger works would take two weeks or more if he suffered from his not infrequent attacks of asthma. The sale of works was of great financial advantage as he and his wife relied on the old-age pension. Consequently he found it difficult to assemble enough pieces when he had to pull works together for an exhibition.
As he stated, his works were imaginative, though his imagination was inspired by actual incidents. He heard the story on the ABC of Grace Bussell who in 1876 rode her horse through raging surf to rescue forty-eight people from the steamer Georgette near Cape Leeuwin, Western Australia, and from this story he produced Heroine of the ages – Grace Bussel 1876, which he exhibited first in the Queensland Branch of the Contemporary Art Society in 1964 (P Fardoulys pers. comm. 2009). Imagination also inspired his paintings of key adventures in Australia’s colonial past such as The start of Burke and Wills 1860 ( 1972, Queensland Art Gallery) and Through plain and canyon the Redford drive goes on 1870 (1971, National Gallery of Australia). Although covered wagons were in use in the years of Australian settlement their portrayal in The start of Burke and Wills 1860 and Migration to Queensland 1840 (location unknown), like the occasional vulture in his early works, probably owes more to the influence of western movies.
Pharlap’s win in the 1930 Melbourne Cup had already entered Australian mythology and in 1968 Fardoulys painted The surge of the crowd – the red terror – Melbourne Cup 1930 (location unknown). Fardoulys also essayed paintings on Indigenous people in works such as The story of the Nativity in the North-West , Jedda , A gallery in the Never Never , A tucker walkabout and Indigenous pride as well as imaginative works in The cross currents, Magellan Straits, South Pacific , Symbolism of peace in the Green Vastness and Reincarnation . Despite his assertions of imagination in his works he unashamedly copied images of horses or cattle from newspapers to give a sense of reality to his work ( The Sunday Mail , Brisbane, 16 Oct 1966, p 17) but the disjuncture of these images imparts a great deal of the charm to his works.
His favoured subjects were decorative panels of exotic birds and his part-Persian cat, Doula. He recalled:
“My cat is a famous cat you know. He is in a lot of paintings. They want him. He is about fourteen years of age. He has been painted dozens of times, you know, by request. ... There was an exhibition about a year ago. There were big abstracts on the walls and that sort of thing, and the only painting that sold was my cat.” (in Lehmann 1977, p 58).
Increasingly poor health by 1974 saw Fardoulys’s output much reduced. He died on 15 September 1975 and was interred at the Mt Gravatt Cemetery. Callins and Fardoulys were widely accepted as Queensland’s leading naïve artists: they were paired in an article in The Bulletin in 1968 and were the focus of a survey exhibition at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, in 1976.
Writers:
Cooke, Glenn R
Date written:
2009
Last updated:
2010
- Born
- b. 1900
- Summary
- Naive painter James Fardoulys was born in Greece in 1900 and came to Australia in 1914. His work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of NSW and the Queensland Art Gallery.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 15-Sep-75
- Age at death
- 75
Details
Latitude-33.8225666 Longitude151.1923402 Start Date1898-01-01 End Date1975-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- St Leonards, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- cartoonist, drew cartoons for Smith’s Weekly in the 1920s, e.g. 'Smith’s Tutankhamania; Cleopatra has some trouble with an extra large pearl’ 10 November 1923, 17; (fat lady to artist) '“And do you really paint pictures in the nude?”/ “Rarely; usually in this gown”’ 24 November 1923, 16; '“Awfully topping nudes you did for me, old boy. I’ve got them hung in the dining-room. Only trouble is the bally gardener insists on having all his meals with us”’, Smith’s Weekly 14 June 1924, 23.
Whiting published Bags! , a book of jokes about trousers (Melbourne: Ramsay Publishing, n.d. [1926?]). A cartoon of a woman, man and caddie on golf links appeared in Table Talk 1931 (ill. Lindesay 1979, 189). Several of his originals are in the Mitchell Library’s Bulletin collection. William Moore notes that caricatures by Ray Whiting were favourably received when shown at Melbourne in 1934.
Whiting served in the AIF during WWII. A cheerful and lively Bulletin cartoon, published 16 December 1942, which shows a soldier querying a mate’s bent bayonet – “Jerry?”/ “Bully!” (original PxD547/7) – is signed 'Ray Whiting Western Desert A.I.F. '42’.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 7 October 1898
- Summary
- Whiting was a mid 20th century newspaper and wartime cartoonist who contributed to Smith's Weekly, Table Talk and Bulletin. He served with with Australian Imperial Forces during WW2.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1975
- Age at death
- 77
Details
Latitude47.4925 Longitude19.051389 Start Date1897-01-01 End Date1975-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Budapest, Hungary
- Biography
- cartoonist and illustrator, was born and educated in Budapest where he worked primarily as a cartoonist and illustrator. He had contributed to about 100 books, including editions of Poe and Baudelaire, before he migrated to Sydney in 1939. The Jew with a Fiddle ( Der Yidel mit der Fiedel ) 1960s, watercolour and crayon, and Morning Prayer 1960s, watercolour, are illustrated in Josef Lebovic, Australian Miscellany collectors’ list no.55 (1996), cats 102-103. In Australia he exhibited his b/w work mainly with Holdsworth Galleries. His work has also been shown with Josef Lebovic.
This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1897
- Summary
- Mid 20th century Hungarian cartoonist and illustrator who migrated to Sydney in 1939. Before arriving in Australia Szigeti contributed illustrations to nearly 100 books, including editions of Poe and Baudelaire.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1975
- Age at death
- 78
Details
Latitude-38.1913998 Longitude144.5571182 Start Date1895-01-01 End Date1975-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Bellarine Peninsula, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1895
- Summary
- Artist and masseur
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1975
- Age at death
- 80
Details
Latitude-32.8983333 Longitude151.7344444 Start Date1890-01-01 End Date1975-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Mayfield, Newcastle, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Painter, illustrator, printmaker and writer, was born Margaret Arnott at Mayfield, NSW, on 6 June 1890. She visited England frequently and made etchings, linocuts, screenprints and woodcuts. She exhibited linocuts with the Younger Group of Australian Artists in the Education Dept Gallery, Sydney, in 1924-25. As Margaret Oppen she made bookplates, including Bookplate for Eirene Mort c.1930 (wood engraving, NLA S9651) and a linocut bookplate for Edith Potter in 1934 of butterflies with an inscription in German, 'I love the little denizens of air’ (ill. The Age of Ex Libris: Bookplates from the Library’s Collection , Baillieu Library MU 1996, n.p.). She was included in Deutscher’s Survey of Relief Prints, 1900 50 in 1978. Her granddaughter is the artist Monica Oppen.
This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 6 June 1890
- Summary
- A painter, illustrator, printmaker and writer, Margaret Arnott visited England frequently and exhibited with the Younger Group of Australian Artists in Sydney. Her granddaughter is the artist Monica Oppen.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1975
- Age at death
- 85
Details
Latitude-27.467778 Longitude153.028056 Start Date1885-01-01 End Date1975-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Brisbane, QLD, Australia
- Biography
- painter and commercial artist, was born in Brisbane. lways known as Frank, she was educated at All Hallows Convent, then studied art at the Central Technical College under Godfrey Rivers. She exhibited with the Queensland Art Society from 1902 until leaving Australia in 1905 to continue her studies in Paris and London. For two and a half years she wrote regular articles for the Brisbane Courier on her travels and art studies. She joined two mixed studio classes at Colarossi’s for nine months, followed by a shorter period at L’Ecole des Beaux Arts, briefly attended La Grande Chaumiére and was taught black-and-white work by Steinlen. After a summer spent sketching and painting in Brittany, she moved to London to study in Frank Brangwyn’s studio, where a teacher called Swan advised her to 'draw with her brain and not her fingers’ – advice she repeated back home on several occasions.
After returning to Brisbane in late 1907, Frank began doing freelance work for the Courier and the Sydney Bulletin, commercial catalogues for Finney’s department store, illustrations for the Queenslander and travel brochures for the AUSN shipping line. In March 1916 Lone Hand published an article by Freda Sternberg in which she was called 'an exceptional business woman’ as well as artist. She was then living in Sydney working for Smith and Julius drawing catalogue illustrations for David Jones and Farmers, covers for Woman’s Mirror, modelling bowls and jugs and painting and illustrating. She also drove her own car.
In 1921, aged thirty-five, she married Andrew Clinton, a naval captain. They had three sons before separating in 1928. From then on, she supported her sons herself. She was said to be one of Australia’s highest paid working women. She painted throughout her long commercial career, holding her first painting exhibition at Sydney in 1922 with Alice Norton. She showed regularly with the Royal Art Society from 1923 until the 1950s; in 1930 she won its George Taylor Memorial Prize of 25 guineas for her oil painting, Rehearsal. She joined the Society of Women Painters in 1919 and exhibited with them annually from 1921. She also held several solo exhibitions.
Her speciality when 'painting seriously’, she said in 1930, was 'children [often her own] in natural surroundings’. Her oil painting, Sydney Water Babies, was reproduced on the cover of B.P. Magazine in December 1930. Feeding Time (c.1920, private collection) is the best known of her many pictures of children among chickens or other animals. She also painted portraits of women; an undated double-sided oil, Chapeau and Interior with Seated Woman in White, is in the Fred and Eleanor Wrobel collection, Sydney.
Wishing to promote more commercial opportunities for younger women artists Payne led the movement that transformed the Sydney Society of Women Painters into the Women’s Industrial Arts Society (thereby alienating Ethel Stephens and other Fine artists). She became the first president in 1935 and gave a series of ABC radio broadcasts for the society. She was friendly with many women artists, including Jessie Traill, Ethel Carrick Fox and the writer Dorothea Mackellar. She championed Daphne Mayo and Lloyd Rees early in their careers in Brisbane. In 1937 she was awarded the King’s Coronation Medal for her work in the arts. In 1946 she helped Billy Hughes in his campaign for the Federal seat of North Sydney.
Writers:
Philp, Angela
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1885
- Summary
- a painter and commercial artist who was born in Brisbane, Queensland. Payne is said to have been one of Australia's highest paid working women of her time.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1975
- Age at death
- 90
Details
Latitude-38.1511747 Longitude146.7878527 Start Date1884-01-01 End Date1975-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Rosedale, VIC, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1884
- Summary
- Crochet and knitting demonstrator based in the Apollo Bay area in Victoria. A design for The Weekly Times Crochet Book (1924) was used in one of the posters for the D'Oyley Show in 1979
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1975
- Age at death
- 91
Details
Latitude-33.8583992 Longitude151.1807353 Start Date1883-01-01 End Date1975-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Balmain, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- illustrator and cartoonist, regularly appeared in the Bulletin and Lone Hand from c.1911 to the early 1930s. Her Lone Hand work includes a one-off strip Ferry Passengers (about different passengers at different times of day, by 'Grace Burn’ [ sic ]) 9 (October 1911), 562, and Renouncing the Vanities (part of a story on Spring Hats illustrated by 'G. Burns’) 10 (February 1912), 322.
Her Bulletin cartoons were far more numerous. They include: The Solution (re temperance) 19 January 1911, 10; Love Versus Pity : 'FIRST LADY: “Whom did you vote for?”/ SECOND LADY: “Oh, dear, I WAS worried! The Liberal was such a darling; but he has money, and the poor Labor man has six children”’ 23 March 1911, 18; The Emancipation of Woman . '“Hurrah! Out of hobbles into trousers”’ (re oriental dress) 27 April 1911, 10; The Urgency of City Reconstruction (re large size of ladies’ hats) 8 June 1911, 11; Where Woman Makes Her Presence Felt . 'Mrs Suburbia after a day’s shopping catches the same train as the business man-and pays her penny fare’ (despite gigantic hat) 31 August 1911, 10; The Pride of the Family 21 September 1911, 11; Her First Cigarette (bilious young thing) 25 January 1912, 11; The Comforter . 'ARTIST: “I wish I had never taken up art.”/ SHE: “Well, there is no direct evidence that you have, is there?”’ 27 June 1912, 10; Cheap Labor (gentry objecting to notice asking everyone to keep streets clean) 24 October 1912, 13; (almost Arthur Rackham drawing style) After the Accident. 'WIFEY (as hubby hits the ground): “There! How careless of you, John! Didn’t I tell you I had on my new hat?”’ (aeroplane accident) 5 February 1914, 22; Comparisons . '“Dear me! What a hideous costume those poor natives wear! Thank Heaven I live in a civilised country”’ (black and white women in almost identical outfits) 4 June 1914, 11; Impudent Hussies (re women threatened by clergyman “Wowser” with Hell for smoking), 'That’s all right; we’ll never be short of a light!’ 12 December 1914, 20; The Temptation of a Modern St Anthony (surrounded by girls) 12 December 1914, 28; A Christmas Card . 'War conducts the orchestra’ 24 December 1914, 11; (clothes) 27 May 1915, 10; His Place in the Sun (re man in swimsuit sleeping on an Australian beach while three destroyers approach) 16 May 1918, 13; 'Your friend is too sweet for words …’ Mitchell Library [ML] original, annotated published 17 October 1918; The Evolution of the Office Girl (in 1915, 1918 & 1922), published 23 February 1922, 18; The Debutante Old and New. '(1) When a girl left school, (2) she used to “put up” her hair and lengthen her skirt. (3) Now she bobs her hair and shortens her skirt’ (3 figures again, like Evolution ) 9 March 1922, 18; How Santa Claus Came (chimney labelled Australia, Santa is a beardless Jap with sack labelled 'Made in Japan’) 30 December 1920, 9; The Girl Who Got the Job c.1922 (large Bulletin original ML 'sent to etcher 31/8/22’: reprinted Heritage 'War’ chapter); (Pierrot and Pierrette) 29 January 1926, 36; Filled the Bill c.1924 (Bulletin original ML Px*D447), published 21 January 1926, 17; (2 young women dressing) No Comfort In It . '“Can you live within your income?”/ “Yes. But I’m terribly overcrowded”’ 13 January 1927, 17; The Higher Mathematics (a woman’s age) 29 December 1927, 34; Nursed it when it was a baby 2 July 1930; (women in boudoir, one at mirror) PETER AND PAUL . '“How do you mean her love is Apostolic?”/ “Why, it palls as his cash peters out!”’ 21 September 1932; (dark realism in 2 frames, one showing three shabby bent men outside unemployment bureau, the other rich couples living it up) THE UNEMPLOYED , 3 February 1932.
On the verso of the Bulletin original Filled the Bill c.1924 (ML Px*D447), published 21 January 1926, 17, is a glued-on joke signed 'Sucre’, who was paid for the gag. It’s better than the gag 'Sucre’ (M. S.(?) Nally, 297 New South Head Road, Edgecliff) did for Betty Paterson (et al.). More significantly, almost obliterated on the back is the address 'Mrs Syd Sullivan, Tryon Road, Lindfield’. Burns married Syd Sullivan , another cartoonist working in quite a different in style, in Mosman, NSW, in 1912. Grace Burns is included in c.1930s list of Bulletin artists (ML Px*D557 pt 5, '4’).
The Edward Burns contributing cartoons to Scribner’s (NY) in 1930s might have been a pseudonym for Burns, or a mistake by Moore.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
1992
- Born
- b. 1883
- Summary
- Early 20th century Bulletin cartoonist.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1975
- Age at death
- 92
Details
Latitude-37.864 Longitude144.982 Start Date1915-01-01 End Date1974-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- St Kilda, Melbourne, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- This entry is a stubb. Please help the DAAO by beginning to write
Writers:
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2014
Last updated:
2014
- Born
- b. 19 January 1915
- Summary
- Laurie Thomas was a pioneer for professional standards in the two state galleries he headed, Art Gallery of Western Australia and the Queensland Art Gallery. Later he was the most influential art critic of the Australian and that newspaper's nominee for director of the Australian National Gallery.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 20-Aug-74
- Age at death
- 59
Details
Latitude-36.3569068 Longitude144.7010197 Start Date1911-01-01 End Date1974-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Rochester, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- painter and cartoonist, was born in Rochester, Victoria, on 9 December 1911.
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Note: Heritage biography.Staff WriterNote: Additional information.
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
1992
- Born
- b. 9 December 1911
- Summary
- Mid 20th century painter, illustrator and cartoonist. Probably the most prolific female cartoonist of her generation, Horseman was almost certainly the most visible. Never out of work, she enthusiastically diversified into whatever was offered in these exceptionally misogynist years of cheap syndicated imports.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 7-May-74
- Age at death
- 63
Details
Latitude-37.585285 Longitude141.4037762 Start Date1906-01-01 End Date1974-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Casterton, Vic, Australia
- Biography
- “I don’t have any detailed biographical material but I do have three small paintings that I think he painted. My father was a psychiatrist in Melbourne in the thirties, forties and early fifties. He specialised in child psychiatry. I know that he knew Mervyn and that Mervyn gave him some works. Dad might well have known him from the left wing art circles that he was part of. However, I think that Mervyn might well have been a patient at Mont Park mental hospital at some stage. When I was a child, we lived at Mont Park. My three paintings are filed away in my flat file but I have scans of them.” [Supplied by contributor Neil Phillips]
Mervyn also exhibited with theSeven Watercolourists Society : [Australian Gallery File].Other AuthorsSeven Watercolourists SocietyContentsFile holds the following annual exhibition catalogues:-First (1931), [Second] (1932), Third [1933?] (2 copies), [Fifth], (1935).
Some artists exhibiting with the Society were :- Geoffrey R. Anderson, James F. Farrell, E. Bonaventure Heffernan, Harry E. Hudson, Dominic Leon, John A. Munro, Mervyn Officer, Rex Battarbee, John A. Gardiner, C. Dudley Wood, James D. McMahon, and by invitation W.H.A. Constable.
Files contain material such as art exhibition catalogues, invitations, press clippings, media releases and/or other ephemeral items relating to Australian artists and galleries, where there are more than three artists exhibiting at the one exhibition. Other material may be collected under individual artists in the Australian Art and Artists file.
Notes
A society based in Melbourne, Victoria. Their first annual exhibition was held in 1931. Alternative spellings of the Society’s name are :- 7 Water-colorists OR 7 Watercolourists.
[https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/32484979?keyword=%22Mervyn%20Officer%22]
Writers:
Neil_Phillips
Michael Bogle
Date written:
2021
Last updated:
2021
- Born
- b. 4 December 1906
- Summary
- Mervyn Officer is described as a commercial artist in an 1941 obituary for his father, the Secretary of the Victorian Graziers Association. He was a student at the National Gallery School (1926, 1927) also illustrated theatre programmes (1926). By 1931, he was exhibiting landscape works at Tavistock House and abstract watercolour works at the Athenaeum Gallery in 1932.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 6-Aug-74
- Age at death
- 68
Details
Latitude-42 Longitude173 Start Date1904-01-01 End Date1974-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- New Zealand
- Biography
- Painter, was born in New Zealand to Australian parents uninterested in art on 7 January 1904. Forced to go to work aged 14, he took up a position with an oil company that required him to complete a science and mathematics degree despite always yearning for 'a life of art’. When he discovered the existence of art classed in Australia in his late teens and became a long-term student at Dattilo Rubbo 's classes at the Royal Art Society, where he met Alison Rehfisch , who became his lover. In 1926 he won the Royal Art Society’s student exhibition prize.
6ft 7 ins tall and weighing 20 stone, he was 'the guardian angel of the Royal Art Society. Big, blond [sic], blue-eyed obliging George – if anything went amiss in the place, we said, “Let George do it.” “Let George do it” was the class catchword’ (Power, p.43, quoting Margaret Coen but not acknowledging source). Alison left husband and daughter to go with George to Europe to study and paint. They stayed away five years.
In the 1980s Stephen Scheding owned The Fisherman’s Dawn, Concarneau , oil on hessian 50 × 60 cm, signed 'DUNCAN’.
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 7 January 1904
- Summary
- Painter, was born in New Zealand to Australian parents in 1904; a student of Dattilo Rubbo.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1974
- Age at death
- 70
Details
Latitude51.7957409 Longitude-0.078521 Start Date1900-01-01 End Date1974-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Hertford, England, UK
- Biography
- cartoonist, illustrator, printmaker (etchings and woodcuts) and journalist, was born in Hertford, England and educated at Portsmouth High School followed by training as a fashion artist at Portsmouth Technical College. Coming to Australia at the age of 18, she worked as a fashion illustrator and occasional Bulletin cartoonist. Dorothy Ellsmore married Mick Paul , another Bulletin cartoonist and son of Emily Letitia Paul, in 1925 – “And I married an encyclopaedia as well as an artist”, she commented in 1927. Before her marriage, when living in Manly, she signed her Bulletin cartoons 'Dorothy Ellsmore’, afterwards 'Dorothy Ellsmore Paul’.
Occasional political cartoons by Dorothy appeared in the Bulletin in 1922, eg The Coal Position . 'INDUSTRY: “Oh, dear, this suspense is killing me”’ ['Capital’ and 'Labour’ fighting over 'Industry’ – a young woman suspended over a cliff] 8 June 1922, 8. She also drew a cartoon showing NSW as a young woman deciding whether to become 'Extravagance’ or 'Economy’ (the two women flanking her), published 27 April 1922, 9. But she usually drew more naturalistic, 'feminine’ 'society’ cartoons, eg With Her To Help Him . 'MISS WHITE: “I don’t believe there is a thing in the world that George would not dare do with me to help him.”/ MISS BLACK: “Yes, he proposed to you, didn’t he dear?”’ (original ML Px*D503/11), published 13 March 1924; Over-Worked . 'MISS WHITE: “What’s the matter with Dauber? He’s not looking at all himself lately.”/ MISS BLACK: “No, he’s painted a self portrait and he’s trying to look like it”’, ML original Px*D503/13 (colour), published 26 February 1925. The ML Bulletin collection has 78 original cartoons by Ellsmore Paul, dated 1922-32 or undated. NGA has five prints c.1930. Also did bookplates (which NGA may have).
Encouraged by her husband, Dorothy studied painting under Lawson Balfour , Julian Ashton and Sydney Long at Ashton’s Sydney Art School. (She was included in the 1933 Sydney Art School Retrospective exhibition with a drypoint Nude .) Possibly as a result, her cartoons are stylistically schizophrenic. (Or did it have something to do with the fact that she was perfectly ambidextrous?) In black and white work, she said, she most liked the Americans Raleigh and Gruger while among overseas contemporary painters William Orpen was most revered, especially for his portraits. In a 1927 interview she added that the Australian artist she most admired was George Lambert , especially his self-portrait, which she considered was 'the best portrait ever painted by an Australian’. The male in her 1930 cartoon of a couple at the beach Safety in Numbers (ML original) closely resembles Lambert – evidently a deliberate in-joke. A journalist noted she had 'a quaint humor of her own’ after Dorothy told her a story about a policeman visiting the Pauls to check that the occupation of 'domestic duties’ on the electoral rolls really did apply to Mick, not to her.
Ellsmore Paul illustrated stories in a naturalistic style, eg illustration captioned 'Big Ben’s daughter found herself sitting in the dust of the stockyard with the man’s head upon her lap’ for a story in the Sydney Mail of 5 February 1929, 17 (which also has a stylish flapper illustration by her), or a drawing of two flappers with a man on the beach for 'The Flapper’s Romance’, Wentworth Magazine December 1929, 4-5. She did regular illustrations for the Australian Women’s Mirror in the 1920s. Most of all, she drew society cartoons for the Bulletin , eg The Ruling Passion . 'THE DOCTOR: “Well, young lady, what do you imagine is the matter with you now?”/ THE INVALID: “I’m not sure, doctor. Is there anything quite new?”’ 1 April 1926, 18; (blonde artist – possible self portrait? – painting a portrait of a brunette friend) “An artist’s life is terribly poverty-stricken. I have to pinch whenever I want a new frock.”/ “Oh, but do be careful dear. They’re so hard on shoplifters now” 23 December 1926, 16; Well Balanced [two very stylish modernistic women fencing]. '“But, dear, he has such offensive ways.”/ “Yes, dear, but such defensive means”’ 15 December 1927, 3 (paid 45/-); More Of This Depression : '“I MUST have pretty things – you married me for my looks, remember!”/ “Well, you married me for my money – and there’s been a slump in both markets”’ 23 July 1930; Another Case Of Safety In Numbers : '“So you think it is better to pay six small bills than one big one. On the principle that it makes six creditors happy instead of one, I suppose.”/ “Oh, no – because it is easier to dodge one creditor than six” (A3 original ML Px*D503/27) published 11 October 1930; The Mistress of Her Fate 29 July 1931. These are among her 78 original Bulletin drawings in ML (Px*D503).
Some of Ellsmore Paul’s cartoons in Aussie are extremely elegant and stylised (a whiff of Souter?). She was also very fond of puns. Her Aussie cartoons include: two stage performers in gym clothes with giant modernistic balls – yet there is also a far straighter cartoon of three women in short evening dresses by her in the same issue, 15 December 1927, 31 & 43; (woman at dressmakers) “Yes, miss, you just leave yur trousseau to me and there’ll be no mistakes; I never make no bloomers” 15 February 1928, 47; (couple in train – snooty female) 15 January 1929, 18; (formal dance setting) '“What happened to all those nice Jones girls?”/ “Oh, one is living, and two are married!”’ 15 April 1930; (woman and lawyer crossing street) '“But why was the revolver loaded in only one chamber?”/ “Great Scott, man! How many husbands do you think I have?”’ 15 September 1930; (elegant couple at home) '“Do you know, my dear, that in these hard times you’re spending more than you ever did.”/ “Of course, isn’t this the rainy day we’ve always been saving up for!”’ 15 January 1931: two women dressing: '“I’ve changed my mind.”/ “Excellent! Does the new one work any better?”’ 15 June 1931, 17; (modernistic linear drawing of a flapper in pyjamas reclining on a lounge with an angry man in a dinner suit behind her) '“Sowing your wild oats, indeed! I’ve never heard of such a thing – didn’t I tell you I wouldn’t have it!”/ “It’s quite all right, Father, as I am trying to tell you, the crop failed.”’ 15 December 1931; (stylised beach scene) '“They say the bustle is coming in again.”/ [elegant & expressively lethargic woman] “Not into our office; I work for the Government!”’ 15 December 1931.
Some of Dorothy Ellsmore-Paul’s cartoons are more naturalistic, e.g. a crowded mass of women’s heads (more like Esther Paterson ) '“I’ve never heard a word uttered against her.”/ “Goodness! Has she no friends?”’ Aussie 15 October 1931. Several cartoons use figures in fancy dress, eg The Mistress of her fate [English Victorian hunting dress], published Bulletin 29 July 1931, and especially ones in Aussie : (crinolined powdered lady and early Australian military man) '“But, why were you so surprised? I told you that I was coming as my grandfather, and that Grannie used to say I am the image of him!”/ “Yes, but I had no idea the convicts wore such attractive uniforms!”’ 15 November 1928, 25; (early colonial scene comparable to Ure Smith or Thea Proctor figures) 15 [illeg.]ary 1930, 43; (more crinolines) 15 September 1932, 45; (fancy dress ball) 1931; 18th century curls and hats (date obscured).
Ellsmore-Paul also wrote art criticism, including 'The etched work of Sydney Long’, Attic Sydney 1928 and reviews in the Sydney Mail . For the Australian Women’s Mirror she wrote about domestic decoration, e.g. 'The Lily in Design’ 8 May 1934, 13, and 22 May 1934, 13, and 'Art in the Home’ (mildly cynical do-it-yourself advice) 8 November 1927, 18. In 1932 she and Mick Paul exhibited bookplates at David Jones It is unknown if the bookplates were Paul’s own work, her husband’s, both and/or her/their collection as she noted in 1927 that she was a collector of bookplates. She also claimed to have ambitions to be a sculptor then too, despite being already involved in etching.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1900
- Summary
- Early 20th century cartoonist, illustrator, printmaker and journalist, Ellsmore Paul was married to fellow cartoonist Mick Paul. She regularly contributed to the Sydney Bulletin in the 1920s.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1974
- Age at death
- 74
Details
Latitude52.9534193 Longitude-1.1496461 Start Date1899-01-01 End Date1974-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Nottingham, England, UK
- Biography
- Watercolorist Ellen Chappell was born in Nottingham, England and came to Australia as a child. Her brother was the sculptor Victor Wager. She studied art at Perth Technical School under J. W. R. Linton and A. B. Webb. Chappell exhibited watercolour scenes with the West Australian Society of Arts in 1922 and 1923 under the name Ellen Wager. She married John Chappell and exhibited thereafter as Ellen Chappell. She exhibited with the Western Australian Women Painters’ and Applied Arts Society in 1939 when the critic Charles Hamilton described her work as, “[f]lower paintings are not numerous, but M. Kimber and E. Chappell have some good ones. E. Cappell’s Kangaroo Paws are her best being strongly and cleanly painted though rather over-detailed in style.” She was a member of the Perth Society of Artists and exhibited regularly from 1950 into the 1960s. Chappell also had a number of solo exhibitions. Her oeuvre was Western Australian wildflowers and landscapes, which were described as “strong and vigorous”. Chappell exhibited Banksias and Sunflowers in the Art Competition at Art Gallery of Western Australia in 1950. She was a member of the Perth Studio Club – a group of women artists who met weekly and shared a studio in the Turf club building in Howard Street. Chappell was art mistress at St Hilda’s School for five years. She also was a member and President of the Western Australian Women’s Society of Fine Arts and Crafts in 1951. Chappell did not enjoy good health and was not always being able to work. A painting of hers was used on a 1962 souvenir calendar for the British Empire and Commonwealth Games held in Perth. Chappell’s work was also included in an exhibition entitled 'Wildflowers in Art’ shown at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in 1991 to coincide with an International Protea Conference.
Writers:
Dr Dorothy Erickson
Date written:
2010
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1899
- Summary
- Ellen Eva Chappell was born in 1899. She exhibited with the Western Australian Women Painters' and Applied Arts Society in 1939. Chappell was a member of the Perth Society of Artists and exhibited regularly from 1950 into the 1960s. She was a member of the Perth Studio Club.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1974
- Age at death
- 75
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1895-01-01 End Date1974-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Australian-born painter Norah Simpson was born on 5 July 1895 in Sydney. She studied under Dattilo Rubbo at his Rowe Street School in 1911 and travelled to London with her parents in 1912. She attended the Westminster Technical Institute where she studied under Spencer Gore, Harold Gilman, and Charles Ginner. She visited Paris and, through introductions to dealers and collectors from Gilman, viewed works by Cézanne, Gauguin, van Gogh, Matisse and Picasso. Simpson collected books and photographs of the work of these artists and, in 1913, returned to Sydney full of enthusiasm for what she had seen in Europe.
Simpson played an important role in providing first-hand information about Post-Impressionism to young Sydney artists such as Grace Cossington Smith , Roy de Maistre and Roland Wakelin . In 1915, she returned to London and studied with Walter Sickert at the Westminster Technical Institute and also at the school that Gilman and Ginner ran in Soho. In 1919, she lived and worked in Glasgow and was in Paris in 1920. In 1920, Simpson married Edward Richardson Brown and travelled with him to Paris to paint. Following the birth of her son, Donald, she gave up painting and devoted most of her spare time to politics. Sometime before the Second World War she started living with William Henry Cockren whom she married in 1950. Norah Simpson died at Crossways, Instow, North Devon, on 19 February 1974, at the age of 78.
Writers:
Gray, Dr Anne Note: Head of Australian Art, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, ACT
Date written:
2006
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1895
- Summary
- Painter Norah Simpson studied under Dattilo Rubbo in Sydney before studying in London under Walter Sickert. While in Europe she collected books and photographs and viewed works by Cézanne, Gauguin, van Gogh, Matisse and Picasso and on her return to Sydney played an important role in providing first-hand information about Post-impressionism to young Sydney artists such as Grace Cossington Smith.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1974
- Age at death
- 79
Details
Latitude-36.6194331 Longitude142.4678219 Start Date1894-01-01 End Date1974-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Murtoa, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- painter and art teacher, was born Amalie Sara Field at Murtoa, Victoria.
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1894
- Summary
- Painter and art teacher, born in Murtoa, Victoria. Her work encompassed meldrumism, landscape, still life and nude subjects.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 16-Jun-74
- Age at death
- 80
Details
Latitude56.1550362 Longitude-3.9480672 Start Date1891-01-01 End Date1974-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Bridge of Allan, Stirlingshire, Scotland
- Biography
- He was born 29 September 1891, the youngest of nine children of Annette Thorpe and James Fairweather, Deputy Surgeon General of the Indian Medical Service. In keeping with the culture of the time, the baby was left behind in Scotland with his aunts while his parents returned to India. The family was not reunited until 1901, when his father completed his Indian service. They then moved to Jersey, where his mother’s family lived, but the young Ian was sent to school in London. In 1912 he joined the Army and was sent to Officer Training School at Belfast. He was commissioned as an officer in June 1914. Two months later he was captured by the Germans, and spent the rest of the war in POW camps in Germany. He used this time to begin studying Japanese, learning drawing and illustrating Prisoner of War magazine, which alternated with attempts to escape. In 1918 he was repatriated to the Hague, where he began to formally study art. At the end of the war he enrolled at the Commonwealth Forestry Institute, in Oxford, but changed directions and a year later he enrolled at the Slade School in London under Henry Tonks. While studying art by day, he spent his evenings at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London learning Japanese and Chinese. He was beginning to see the inadequacy of the western visual tradition. One of the most important friends he made in London was H.S.Ede, a young curator at the Tate Gallery, who was to become a life-long friend and supporter. Thanks to Ede, Fairweather held a successful exhibition at the Redfern Gallery in London and at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh in 1937, at a time when he was essentially a vagrant artist in South East Asia.Fairweather’s wandering took him to Canada, where he worked as a farm labourer, and then to China. He travelled to Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong, before setting out for Bali. He landed in Australia for the first time at Broome in 1933. Fairweather arrived in Melbourne in February 1934. The quality and originality of his art impressed fellow artists George Bell, William Frater and Arnold Shore and he had a successful exhibition at Cynthia Reed’s gallery. Within six months he had left for Davao in the Philippines, which he travelled to via Sydney. After painting there for some months he returned to Beijing, then Formosa (Taiwan) and Hong Kong, fascinated by the Chinese calligraphic tradition. He also travelled to Borneo. In Manila, in 1937, a house fire destroyed much of his earlier work. Fairweather was not especially mindful of his health. He lost a part of a finger after it was infected. Back in Australia, in Brisbane, he could not afford paints.In June 1939 he travelled north to Cairns and lived with Aboriginal people near Alligator River. At about this time he turned from oil paintings to using gouache, often painting on the fragile surfaces that make his art a challenge to conservators.In May 1940 Fairweather left Australia to join the British war effort. After a short stay in Singapore, he was transferred to India, and ended up as a captain in a prisoner of war camp for Italians. He was discharged in 1943 and returned to Melbourne. Again, thanks to Ede, his work had been exhibited in London, including at the National Gallery in 1940. He travelled north again to Cooktown, but had problems with obtaining materials so he tried soap and casein as a way of holding the pigment.Frustrated with poverty, Fairweather applied for the vacant position of Director of the National Art Gallery of New South Wales. Hal Missingham was appointed in his stead, while Fairweather took a job as a labourer in an aircraft factory.In March 1945 he set off in a lifeboat, without any plan for the voyage, and landed at Bribie Island, off the Brisbane coast. He stayed for seven months, but after his diaries were stolen he travelled down to Melbourne where he stayed with the community of artists, including fellow Scot Jock Frater, who were supported by Lina Bryans at her Darebin Hotel studio at Heidelberg. He stayed two years.At the end of 1947 Fairweather travelled north to Cairns. He had made arrangements with Macquarie Galleries in Sydney to both exhibit his work and to organise materials. He was to hold annual exhibitions with Macquarie from 1949 until the rest of his life. In 1949 he moved to Townsville and then Darwin, where he lived in an old boat. On 29 April 1952 Ian Fairweather set off to sail to Timor in a raft he had made from discarded junk. It was assumed he had died from from his own foolish misadventure. Sixteen days later he arrived at the beach in Roti, Indonesia. The years after World War II were less than kind to adventurers. Fairweather was interned, sent to Singapore and then after a spell in a home for derelicts, was deported to England.He dug ditches to raise the money so he could return south. Fortunately his British relatives helped with funds and he was able to return to Australia. He arrived in Sydney and went straight from there to Bribie Island. Here he built two thatched roof open-walled huts, and this became his home and his studio. This period at Bribie Island was the most productive time of his life, as he was able to easily work and there was no shortage of materials. Unfortunately his fame led to many curious onlookers. In 1965 he briefly left Australia for Singapore and England, but he soon returned. In 1966 he travelled to London to investigate the possibility of basing himself there, but again returned to Bribie. His last major painting, House by the Sea, was painted in 1968. In his last years he was both honoured for his art, and financially well rewarded, although he had little understanding of how successful he was.He died of a heart attack on 20 May 1974.
Writers:
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2021
- Born
- b. 29 September 1891
- Summary
- The Scottish born artist Ian Fairweather travelled extensively throughout South East Asia and China before finally building a thatched hut on Bribie Island off the Queensland coast. Here he painted his mature works, combining elements of Buddhism Taoism and even western visual arts traditions.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 20-May-74
- Age at death
- 83
Details
Latitude57 Longitude-4 Start Date1890-01-01 End Date1974-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Scotland, UK
- Biography
- Dick Wittman, 'William Frater: A Life With Colour’. Melb Uni Press, 2000.
'Jock Frater was on of the first modern painters who opposed the fashionable and academic schools of painting. During the 1930s he exhibited with the Contemporary Art Group along with Arnold Shore and George Bell. During a very conservative period in Australian Art John Frater advanced the cause of innovation and modernism.’
Writers:
Michael Bogle
7write6
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2022
- Born
- b. 1 January 1890
- Summary
- Frater's career began with an apprenticeship in glass design in Scotland. He arrived in Melbourne 1910, worked with Brooks, Robinson and Co. in stained glass, later with E.L. Yencken, Melbourne. Best known as a figurative painter following training at the George Bell School, Melbourne. Elected President of the Victorian Artists Society.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1974
- Age at death
- 84
Details
Latitude-33.9019365 Longitude151.2558816 Start Date1890-01-01 End Date1974-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Waverley, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- painter, daughter of artists Joseph A. Bennett and Jessie Bennett . Active circa 1906-1922. The Art Gallery of NSW holds Poppies , watercolour on cardboard, 62 × 47.8, purchased 1914.
This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1890
- Summary
- Bennett, the daughter of artists Joseph and Jessie Bennett, was a painter whose watercolour work 'Poppies' was purchased by the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1914.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1974
- Age at death
- 84
Details
Latitude-37.864 Longitude144.982 Start Date1888-01-01 End Date1974-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- St Kilda, Melbourne, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1888
- Summary
- Marjorie K Smyth was a modernist painter and designer who exhibited in Sydney in the 1920s and 1930s.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1974
- Age at death
- 86
Details
Latitude41.0091982 Longitude28.9662187 Start Date1887-01-01 End Date1974-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Constantinople (Istanbul), Turkey
- Biography
- sculptor and carver, was born Ernestine Haim in Constantinople (Istanbul) in December 1887, daughter of a Yugoslavian father and an Italian mother. The family lived first in Vienna, then in Berlin where Tina attended the Woman’s Art School, women not then being permitted to enrol at the Berlin Academy. Her carved limestone bust of her sister was hung in a Berlin Secessionist exhibition (c.1905). She later spent about three years studying at the Académie Julian, Paris (c.1912-14).
Forced to return home at the outbreak of World War I, Tina worked as a portraitist and made reproductions for the Berlin Academy of some of the treasures unearthed in the Tel Amarna excavations, including a copy of the head of Nefertiti which was on display for years at the Bode Museum while the original was kept in the vaults. In about 1915 she married a Prussian academic painter, Julius Wentscher (spelt 'Wentcher’ in Australia) but continued to exhibit as Haim. After the war, the couple travelled to Greece, Italy, Egypt and Abyssinia. In Greece she met painters and poets bent on reviving Greek folk culture and made two miniature bronze copies of the Delphic Charioteer.
In 1931 the Wentchers won a cruise to South East Asia at a Press Ball and left Germany for an intended six months visit. The holiday was extended as the political situation in Germany worsened. They spent three years in Bali and Java, then visited China, Thailand, Cambodia and Malaysia, remaining at the last for five years. Tina (as Haim-Wentscher) received numerous commissions for portrait busts and held several exhibitions in Malaysia. She also worked in 'the native beeswax … to produce portraits and figure designs of tremendous delicacy and intensity’, O’Connor notes. Virtually all were lost during World War II, apart from some small pieces brought to Australia. Peers considers these 'late reflection of the Jugendstil ' to be her best work. With her husband, she also produced large dioramas of life on Malaysian plantations for the government to exhibit at the 1937 Glasgow Empire Exhibition and the 1939 San Francisco World Fair.
In 1940, following the outbreak of war, the Wentchers were deported to Australia and interned until 1943. On their release they set up professionally in Melbourne, holding a joint exhibition at the Kozminsky Galleries. Tina joined the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors. Her Bessarabian Boy , a small bronze head acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria, was stolen in 1945 so she made a pewter replica at her own expense in 1946. That year, she and Julius were naturalised.
Tina Wentcher’s first solo exhibition was held in 1951 at Georges Gallery, Melbourne. She exhibited with the Contemporary Art Society, the Victorian Artists’ Society, the Society of Artists (NSW) and elsewhere. A joint exhibition with her husband was held at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1974. After she died the Association of Sculptors of Victoria set up an annual prize in her memory. The Queen Victoria Hospital and the Royal Children’s Hospital, Melbourne, own commissioned works. The McClelland Gallery, Langwarrin holds numerous small sculptures, including several executed in South-East Asia.
Writers:
Kerr, JoanNote: Heritage biography.
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1887
- Summary
- Sculptor and carver. Trained in Paris and Berlin and well travelled through Greece, Italy, Egypt, Abyssinia, and S.E. Asia before settling in Victoria following the outbreak of WWII. Produced portrait busts and figure designs.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- Apr-74
- Age at death
- 87
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1886-01-01 End Date1974-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- painter and illustrator, was a student at Julian Ashton and Sydney Long’s Sydney Art School in 1908.
This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a full bio.
Writers:
Callaway, Anita
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
1992
- Born
- b. 1886
- Summary
- Ruby Winckler was a painter and illustrator who exhibited with the NSW Society of Artists. Winckler spent some time in America after accepting a commission to illustrate two books 'The Arabian Night's Entertainment' and S.S. Vanderbilt's 'Who's Who in the Land of Nod', both published in 1915 in Boston.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1974
- Age at death
- 88
Details
Latitude-33.914121 Longitude151.2410046 Start Date1886-01-01 End Date1974-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Randwick, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- The third son of Thomas Squire Morgan and Louisa née Koch, James Squire Morgan was born in Randwick, Sydney, on 25 November 1886, and spent his childhood living at the family home, 'Morganville’, on Bishops Avenue in Randwick. Thomas Morgan was partially responsible in the 1880s for the development of the Mount Morgan gold mine in Queensland. James Squire Morgan was educated at Sydney Grammar School and Sydney’s Fort Street High School. Not long after leaving school he decided to become an artist, and from 1905 to 1909 he studied with Julian Ashton and Sydney Long at the Sydney Art School (later known as the Julian Ashton Art School). By this time Morgan seems to have been known personally, and professionally, as Squire Morgan. While his relationship with the influential Julian Ashton is unknown, Morgan was clearly on good terms with Long, and during the early 1920s acted as his agent in Sydney. Morgan’s debut as an artist was at the Society of Artists’ (SOA) 1908 spring show at the Society’s rooms at Sydney’s Queen Victoria Markets, where he exhibited five works. One jocular work, Washing Day, was mentioned in the Sydney Morning Herald (14 October 1908) and in John Barlow’s review in Art & Architecture magazine: 'An equally humorous, if perhaps not quite so quaint drawing, is one by Squire Morgan, which he calls Washing Day. Half-a-dozen puppies have been given a bath, and are being hung out to dry, pinned up by the ear to the line by clothes-pegs’ (Barlow, 1908). He exhibited with the SOA again in November 1910 where he exhibited two works, The Destroyers and Magpies (the latter work being a subject much associated with Sydney Long). Little is known of Morgan’s activities from 1911 to 1921. His later membership of the London based Society of Graphic Arts suggests he may have been resident in the UK sometime during this period. The interwar period saw a growing local interest in etching and printmaking. This interest led to the formation of the Australian Painter-Etchers’ Society (APES) in August 1920, with Lionel Lindsay as President and Gayfield Shaw as Honorary Secretary and Treasurer. Inspired by the possibilities of printmaking, Morgan mainly abandoned painting in the 1920s in deference for a career as an artistic printmaker. Despite missing the first APES show in 1921, Morgan exhibited six works at the June 1922 exhibition and was listed on the catalogue as a member of the Society. One of these works, The Deserted Hut, was illustrated in the August 1922 issue of Art in Australia. Shaw stepped down as Honorary Secretary and Treasurer in 1923 after a dispute with Lindsay, and was replaced by Morgan. Despite hosting many successful exhibitions, APES seems to have been a victim of bitter internal squabbles indirectly caused by competing egos. Not long after Morgan became Secretary and Treasurer, the founding President, Lionel Lindsay, resigned from the Society in November 1923 citing 'cliqueism’ in the organization: 'Lionel Lindsay told a Guardian representative last week that he was tired of the cliqueism that existed in the society. He specially referred to the “Pommy Clique”, which The Guardian understands is comprised of Sid Long, Squire Morgan, [G.H.] Godsell, [Thomas] Friedensen, and others.’ (Daily Guardian, 29 November 1923, pg 6). Whatever the reasons for the split, Morgan acted as Secretary and Treasurer of APES until October 1931 when he became the President of APES after the resignation of Sydney Long from the leadership position. In 1934 APES merged with the Graphic Art Society and became known as the Painter-Etchers’ & Graphic Art Society of Australia (PEGASA). The new merged society’s president was John Longstaff, while Morgan became one of four vice-presidents of the amalgamated group. Morgan continued to exhibit his prints with PEGASA, as he had done with its predecessor, and by late 1937 he was elected their last President. Perhaps reflecting the declining interest in etching, PEGASA held its last exhibition in 1938. As a protest against the formation of the Australian Academy of Art, and the selection policy of the existing art societies, fifteen Sydney based male artists, including Morgan, formed their own breakaway art group known as the 'XV Independent Artists Group’ in 1938. Unconnected with the Melbourne based 'Independent Group’, the fifteen Sydney dissidents’ debut exhibition was held in October 1938 at the Blaxland Galleries, located in Farmer’s department store, Sydney. More than fifteen artists eventually exhibited with the 'XV Group’. Known members were: Howard Ashton, Richard Ashton, Will Ashton, J. Lawson Balfour, Arthur d’Auvergne Boxall, George Finey, James R. Jackson, Fred Leist, Norman Lindsay, Percy Lindsay, Sydney Long, Squire Morgan, W.E. Pidgeon, H. Roy Rousel, A. Dattilo Rubbo, G.K. Townshend & B.J. Waterhouse. The diverse group was all-male but allowed some women to exhibit as 'guest exhibitors’. One member, Howard Ashton, writing in the catalogue of the first 'XV Group’ exhibition expressed, in perhaps a parody of European modernist art manifestos of the early twentieth century, what the Sydney based dissidents believed in: 'This Group of artists sets out to prove nothing and to challenge nothing. It is composed generally of professional painters who are not concerned with 'isms, are not devotees of any school, whose views on art, apart from certain fundamental matters of good craftsmanship, are as divergent as their styles. They are, in fact, a group of independents, as their title denotes’ (1938). Morgan was listed in catalogues as the Honorary Secretary of the 'XV Independent Artists Group’ although there are no known public comments attributed to him. While the 'XV Group’ was formed in opposition of the main art societies, by the early 1940s many of its members (including Morgan) had joined the long established Royal Art Society (RAS). Morgan’s first involvement with the RAS began in 1924 and he occasionally exhibited with the group during the 1920s. From 1940 Morgan became a regular exhibitor with the RAS, and by 1942 was listed as a member of their Council. By the late 1940s he was listed as an Associate (A.R.A.S.), and in 1957 was elected Fellow (F.R.A.S.). While Morgan only occasionally exhibited his work after the 1960s, he became an honorary life Vice-President of the RAS in 1961. From 1946 to 1970 he was also a member of the NSW Travelling Art Scholarship Committee and Applied Art Advisory Committee of East Sydney Technical College, Sydney. While far from being a prolific artist, Morgan produced at least fifty prints during his career, mainly using the etching technique, although he did produce some dry points and aquatints. The most popular theme in his work was landscape views of the New South Wales coast and Sydney’s rural hinterland. Popular sketching spots included Sydney’s northern beaches, especially Dee Why, and the Canberra region. Being an artist mostly associated with print making, Morgan’s work is rarely mentioned in classic studies of Australian art history, and criticism is only found in reviews of art society exhibitions. No solo exhibitions by the artist are known. Morgan’s etchings and drawing are included in several public collections, including the Art Gallery of NSW, Mitchell Library, and the National Library of Australia. On the 21 November 1925, Morgan married Gladys Hall and the couple had one daughter, Jascha. As well as his artistic activities, Morgan’s recreational activities included (according to various editions of Who’s Who) a love of the violin, chess, cricket, photography and motoring. Morgan’s interest in driving saw him become a Vice-President of the Royal Automotive Club of Australia (1947-70) and in 1961 he became an honorary life member of the organisation. While he had lived in central Sydney for most of his career, Morgan moved to a house at 5 Punch Street in Mosman for the final decade of his life. James Squire Morgan died in hospital on 18 March 1974. He was survived by his daughter, his wife having predeceased him. He was cremated at the Northern Suburbs Crematorium, Sydney, on 22 March 1974. No obituaries or lengthy profiles are known.
Writers:
Silas Clifford-Smith
Note:
Date written:
2009
Last updated:
2011
Status:
peer-reviewed
- Born
- b. 25 November 1886
- Summary
- Prominent interwar period etcher who studied under Julian Ashton and Sydney Long.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 19-Mar-74
- Age at death
- 88
Details
Latitude-37.8611788 Longitude144.8898569 Start Date1885-01-01 End Date1974-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Williamstown, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- Art dealer, sister of artist Arthur Vincent (Vincent) Sheldon (1895-1945), who both lived in Brisbane.
This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 24 May 1885
- Summary
- Art dealer, Eliza Jeanette Sheldon and her artist brother, Edwin Arthur Vincent, lived in Brisbane, Queensland. She owned the Sheldon Gallery (1921-23) and the Gainsborough Gallery (1928-39) and actively promoted modern art in Queensland.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 30-Jul-74
- Age at death
- 89
Details
Latitude55.8455828 Longitude-4.4239646 Start Date1884-01-01 End Date1974-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Paisley, Renfrewshire, Scotland, UK
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. c.1884
- Summary
- Scottish trained Sydney architect who oversaw the design or remodelling of many commercial buildings, including stores for David Jones, Gowings and Woolworths.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1974
- Age at death
- 90
Details
Latitude-30 Longitude135 Start Date1879-01-01 End Date1974-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- South Australia
- Biography
- painter, art critic and town planner, was born in South Australia on 18 January 1879, fourth of the eight children of William and Julie Rossi. She studied art at the Adelaide School of Design and had established a modest reputation as a portrait painter before moving to Western Australia in 1905, where she continued her painting studies under Florence Fuller . Daisy received a number of portrait commissions and a large portrait by her won a certificate at the 1907 Women’s Work Exhibition at Melbourne. Encouraged by Fuller, Rossi went to London and studied at the Grosvenor School under Walter Donne, winning first and second prizes for poster drawing. She visited France and saw the work of the Impressionists. On her return to Perth, she secured work in the Art Department at Fremantle Technical School in 1911. She held a solo exhibition in 1915, and her work of this period shows the strong impact that French Impressionism had made on her. Included were oil paintings of WA wildflowers, the subject for which she is best known locally.
In December 1918, at the age of thirty-nine, Daisy married the architect George Temple-Poole but continued to use 'Rossi’ as her painting name. In 1920 their only child, Iseult, was born and Daisy became immersed in family life. As well, she became the first woman member of the Town Planning Board and wrote for various magazines and newspapers. In 1920 a devastating studio fire destroyed most of the work she had done in Europe.
Why should Australia always be represented by dull colored bush, huge, unwieldy eucalypts? We should have more frequently artists who will rise up and say, “Australia shall be shown in riotous, beautiful, blatant coloring”
- she stated in an interview in 1924. That year she was represented in the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley, London, with two wildflower pictures and a series of panels. But bad eyesight troubled her and soon afterwards she ceased to paint. For several years she taught art to kindergarten students at her 'Rossi School of Art’.
Rossi was interested in women’s issues, believing that women should be more involved in decision making. In a 1918 interview, she said:
Man has no more right to say that all women should be domestic workers against their inclination than that women should insist on all men becoming gardeners or handy men around the house.
After her husband died in 1934 she lived in the suburb of South Perth. In her seventies she began to paint wildflower studies again. In the late 1960s she moved to Victoria to be near her daughter. She died in 1974 at the age of ninety-five.
Writers:
Gooding, Janda
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 18 January 1879
- Summary
- Daisy Mary Rossi was the first woman member of the Town Planning Board in Perth, WA. She made a number of interesting statements such as, "Why should Australia always be represented by dull colored bush, huge, unwieldy eucalypts? We should have more frequently artists who will rise up and say, "Australia shall be shown in riotous, beautiful, blatant coloring".
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1974
- Age at death
- 95
Details
Latitude-43.53 Longitude172.620278 Start Date1879-01-01 End Date1974-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Christchurch, New Zealand
- Biography
- Influential New Zealand painter, art teacher, psychotherapist, cartoonist and illustrator, contributed (from New Zealand) to the Sydney Bulletin from c.1900, e.g. gags re: street urchins and an office clerk (ill. Lindesay 1979, 118, 120). Others include: 'THE ONE: “Since I have taken that treatment I have been a different woman.”/ THE OTHER: “I am so glad. And how pleased all your people must be”, 12 November 1914, 29; 'SUPERFLUOUS ADJECTIVES: (Little Girl) “What is redundancy, Pa?”/ (Artist) “Redundancy, my child, is the use of more words than are necessary to express one’s meaning – such as WEALTHY dealer, POOR artist”’, 24 June 1915, 34. For the NSW Bookstall Co. he illustrated – with Norman and Lionel Lindsay and Norman Carter – the 1909 edition of Steele Rudd’s Our New Selection , a reprint of the first edition, published by the Bulletin Newspaper Co. in 1903 which used earlier illustrations and text from the Bulletin .
This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1879
- Summary
- Influential early 20th New Zealand painter, art teacher, psychotherapist, cartoonist and illustrator, Booth contributed cartoons (from New Zealand) to the Bulletin and other Sydney publications. In 1909 he, Norman Lindsay, Lionel Lindsay and Norman Carter illustrated the reprint edition of Steele Rudd's "Our New Selection."
- Gender
- Unspecified
- Died
- 1974
- Age at death
- 95
Details
Latitude30.3671977 Longitude32.1565462 Start Date1921-01-01 End Date1973-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Ismailia, Egypt
- Biography
- This entry is a stub. Please help the DAAO by completing this biography.
Writers:
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 18 January 1921
- Summary
- For much of his life Tony Tuckson's reputation was as the Assistant Director of he Art Gallery of New South Wales, passionately advocating for Aboriginal art. It was only near the end of his life that the wider arts community realised that he was an artist of great significance.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 24-Nov-73
- Age at death
- 52
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1914-01-01 End Date1973-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- cartoonist, served in the RAAF in Australia and New Guinea during WWII. On his return he was appointed to the Victorian Air Board where he illustrated many RAAF magazines before returning to civilian life. He worked as an artist for Sir Frank Packer’s ACP, drawing political cartoons for the Daily Telegraph c.1949-50 (examples Rae, p.83) and illustrations for the Australian Women’s Weekly and other Consolidated Press publications. According to Alex King, when Jim Bancks died suddenly in 1952, Packer held a competition among several artists to select a suitable person to continue to draw Ginger Meggs . Vivian’s entry was chosen. He drew the comic for ACP’s Sunday Telegraph for 21 years, without acknowledgment, until his own death in 1973.
Married with two daughters. His hobbies were carptentry and sailing, and he built, over many years, a 32 foot yacht entirely with his own hands.
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 19 February 1914
- Summary
- Ron Vivian was a mid 20th century Sydney cartoonist who is credited with keeping "Ginger Meggs" in print after the sudden death of Jim Bancks. Vivian drew the comic fo Sydney's Sunday Telegraph for 21 years without acknowledgement until his own death.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1973
- Age at death
- 59
Details
Latitude36.5297438 Longitude-6.2928976 Start Date1911-01-01 End Date1973-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Cadiz, Spain
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. c.1911
- Summary
- Peter Fox, photographer, born in Spain and raised in Germany, arrived Australia 1937 and granted refugee status as a stateless person. Fox operated from a studio in Collins street from 1942 expanding to several locations and a camera store. He developed touring service through Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia using specially fitted buses and teams of operators and sales staff.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- c.14 July 1973
- Age at death
- 62
Details
Latitude41.0195659 Longitude-92.4116886 Start Date1898-01-01 End Date1973-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Ottumwa, Iowa, USA
- Biography
- painter born in Iowa (USA) in 1898. Also known as 'Mas’.
This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a full bio.
Writers:
DAAO staff writer
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
1992
- Born
- b. 15 December 1898
- Summary
- Artist, social activist, art collector and Trustee of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Evatt's best known work was an oil painting entitled 'Footballers' which she made while studying under George Bell.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1973
- Age at death
- 75
Details
Latitude53.9825271 Longitude-1.385249993 Start Date1896-01-01 End Date1973-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Yorkshire, England, UK
- Biography
- photographer and landscape designer, was born in Yorkshire, on 4 December 1896, second daughter of William and Margaret Walling. Her businessman father was disappointed that Edna was not a boy and (in contrast to her sister) treated her as if she was one anyway. She grew up at Bickleigh, near Plymouth, learning woodworking and exploring the Devonshire countryside with him. In 1911, aged fourteen, she moved to New Zealand with her family. Her father soon transferred to Melbourne and the rest of the family joined him in 1914. They settled at Arundel, in Commercial Road, South Yarra.
In 1916-17 Edna attended Burnley Horticultural College. After gaining her certificate and working as a jobbing gardener for a year, she began to get landscape designing jobs. An early client was Dame Nellie Melba. In 1921 Walling designed and built a rustic house for herself, called Sonning, on a three-acre block of farmland at Mooroolbark, east of Melbourne. After it was destroyed by fire in 1936, she redesigned, rebuilt and expanded it. She gradually converted eighteen acres adjacent to Sonning into Bickleigh Vale village.
Despite an unconventional lifestyle – she wore jodhpurs, jacket, shirt and tie, never married and lived in primitive style at Sonning with a group of friends/employees – Edna made a name for herself as a landscape gardener in the English tradition of Gertrude Jekyll and William Robinson among wealthy Melbourne families, including Mrs Keith Murdoch (now Dame Elisabeth), Mrs Harold Darling, Sir Clive and Lady Steele and Sir William and Lady Irvine. Many clients owned large homesteads in the Western District of Victoria, the Riverina (NSW) and elsewhere. Some of her beautiful watercolours of proposed garden designs survive. She carried out many in conjunction with the builder Eric Hammond.
In 1926 Walling began writing regularly for Australian Home Beautiful . As well as many articles for a range of magazines and newspapers, she published four books illustrated with her own photographs, garden plans and drawings: Gardens in Australia (1943) – which went into several editions – Cottage and Garden in Australia (1947), A Gardener’s Log (1948) and The Australian Roadside (1952). She lived at Sonning until 1951 then shifted to The Barn on her nearby Bickleigh estate, partly because of the lack of privacy resulting from featuring her home in such detail in her 1947 book. In 1948 she acquired sixteen-acres at East Point, near Lorne on the Great Ocean Road, and built a cottage there; a late unpublished manuscript, 'The Happiest Days of My Life’, is about it.
Walling planned several villages yet few were realised. After moving in 1967 to Bendles at Buderim, Queensland to escape encroaching suburbia, she planned an Italian-style village but age prevented it proceeding beyond a few sketches. Here she was cared for by Mavis Morris while Lorna Fielden, a Bickleigh neighbour who had edited her books, came to live nearby. A devout Christian Scientist, Edna Walling died on 8 August 1973 regretting that she was unable to finish all her projects or begin new ones.
.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 4 December 1896
- Summary
- Early 20th Century landscape designer in the English tradition of Gertrude Jekyll and William Robinson. Walling wrote many articles for a range of magazines and newspapers, she published four books illustrated with her own photographs, garden plans and dra
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 8-Aug-73
- Age at death
- 77
Details
Latitude-34.6717242 Longitude138.8905114 Start Date1894-01-01 End Date1973-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Williamstown, SA, Australia
- Biography
- Personal
Leila Constance McNamara was born on 7 June 1894 in Williamstown, South Australia. She lived mainly at 11 Arthur Street, Medindie, South Australia. She travelled to Sydney, Melbourne and Hobart during the 1920s to 1950s. She died on 11 November 1973 in Adelaide, SA.
Career
McNamara studied under James Ashton, Will Ashton and Leslie Wilkie in Adelaide in the 1920s or thereabouts. With Leslie Wilkie she studied painting from life. In Sydney she studied with Dattilo Rubbo, James R. Jackson and modelling with Joseph Choate.
She painted mainly in oils on canvas, and also made drawings and watercolours. Her subjects were still lifes, landscapes and seascapes, painted mainly in a post-impressionist or late impressionist style. She is known to have signed works “McNAMARA” or “L.McN”. She became a Member of the Royal South Australian Society of Artists in 1915, a Fellow in 1923, Vice-President 1954-1961, and Life Member from 1962. She exhibited with the Society from 1915. She was an early member of the United Arts Club, formed in Adelaide in 1923. She also taught privately in Adelaide.
Writers:
Rost, Fred
Date written:
2011
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 7 June 1894
- Summary
- Leila Constance McNamara (1894-1973), painter and teacher, active mainly in Adelaide, South Australia.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 11-Nov-73
- Age at death
- 79
Details
Latitude-38.3826241 Longitude142.4814191 Start Date1893-01-01 End Date1973-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Warrnambool, VIC, Australia
- Biography
- painter, made a second visit to Central Australia with his friend John Gardner in 1934 and they were invited to show their art at Hermannsburg Mission. In 1945 Battarbee set up a gallery, the Tmara-Mara Gallery, in his Alice Springs home to sell the work of the Arrernte (Hermannsburg Aboriginal) artists.
Battarbee died in the Old Timers Home, Alice Springs.
This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1893
- Summary
- An early advocate of indigenous art, Rex Battarbee represented Arrernte artists in his Alice Springs home, which he later turned into the Tmara-Mara Gallery.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1-Sep-73
- Age at death
- 80
Details
Latitude-42.5571184 Longitude146.8344 Start Date1893-01-01 End Date1973-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Hamilton, Tas., Australia
- Biography
- painter, was born at Hamilton, Tasmania, on 9 March 1893, third of the five children of Lilla Edith, née Thorne, a schoolteacher from a pioneering family in the Carlton district, and William Nassau Holmes, a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, who became a schoolteacher, then headmaster, in Tasmania. During her childhood the family lived at Devonport and Scottsdale, until finally settling near Hobart at Dilkhoosha, 62 Charles Street, Moonah. This remained Edith’s home until her death.
Her artistic talents were encouraged by her painter mother, who had 'a good sense of colour’ particularly in the decoration of the family home, as Edith recollected:
One room, very vivid in my mind, daffodil wallpaper with a lovely white design, rich texture, and in the room ruby velvet chairs on a light brown carpet, and ivory black shelves in the walls with pink French china with romantic figures as a pattern, and an easel in one corner of the room with a study of flowers.
Edith studied art at the Hobart Technical College under Lucien Dechaineux in 1918-19 and 1922-24 and under Mildred Lovett in 1925-26, 1928-31 and 1935:
Lucien Dechaineux was the Art Master when painting in tone was most important, which was of great help to me later … Mildred Lovett … was most interested in my work and encouraged me in every way … [She] had a modern outlook and at first was not well received in Hobart, but later she was appreciated.
She also studied at Julian Ashton 's Sydney Art School under Henry Gibbons and Ashton himself (1930-31) and there met Thea Proctor and George Lambert.
During the 1930s Holmes shared a studio in Collins Street, Hobart, with Mildred Lovett, Florence Rodway , Violet Vimpany , Dorothy Stoner and Ethel M. Nicholls. She travelled regularly to Melbourne where she held her first seven solo and joint exhibitions (1938-51) and met Eveline Syme , Danila Vassilieff, Arnold Shore and George Bell. Her work created a great deal of interest in Melbourne in the 1930s and 1940s, although this seems to have declined in the 1950s. Other than that, she remained little known outside her own state.
Holmes exhibited annually with the Art Society of Tasmania (1927-72) and was a council member for many years (1930-52). She was a founding member of the off-shoot Tasmanian Group of Painters in 1940 and exhibited regularly with it until 1969. In 1954 she was awarded a special prize in the Tasmanian Sesquicentenary Art Competition and in 1972 a prize by the Contemporary Art Society (Tas). She went overseas for the first time in 1958 with her aunt, Mrs Ada Newberry, visiting England and France and holding an exhibition in Tasmania House, London. Other trips followed in 1960 and 1971.
Holmes actively participated in the Victoria League, the English Speaking Union and the Women’s Non-Party League; she was a life member of the United Nations Association. She died in Hobart on 26 August 1973. TMAG (Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, Tas) has a good pencil portrait of the elderly Edith Holmes by Patricia Giles.
Writers:
Backhouse, Sue
Note: Primary
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 9 March 1893
- Summary
- Painter, she spent most of her life in Tasmania, but also exhibited in Melbourne where her work was popular in the 1930 and 1940s.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 9-Aug-73
- Age at death
- 80
Details
Latitude-36.3594929 Longitude146.687012 Start Date1891-01-01 End Date1973-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Beechworth, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- painter, printmaker and art teacher, was born in Beechworth, Victoria on 23 June 1891, second of the five daughters of Richard Hull Perry and Eliza Adelaide, née Reardon. Her father, a solicitor, died when she was an infant and her mother moved to Melbourne with the children. The family moved to Dunedin, New Zealand after her mother remarried in 1904. Adelaide returned to Melbourne to study at the National Gallery School under Bernard Hall and Frederick McCubbin in 1914; in 1920 she won the prestigious National Gallery Travelling Scholarship. After teaching at Ipswich Grammar School (Qld) in 1919-21, she went to London in 1922 and enrolled at the Royal Academy. She also worked in Paris and exhibited at the Salon (Societé des Artistes Française); but, as she said in 1965, it was the English Royal Academy painters – Charles Sims, Walter Sickert, Gerald Kelly, Glyn Philpot and Ernest Jackson – who 'taught me all the art that I know’.
Returning to Australia in 1925, Perry settled in Sydney (where her family was then living) and remained there for the rest of her life. On 1 January 1926 she opened her own studio and art school in Bulletin Place, which she called 'The Chelsea Art School’. She exhibited in the first Contemporary Group show, organised by Thea Proctor and George Lambert , and at Sydney’s Grosvenor Gallery in 1927. She also showed with the more conservative Society of Artists, to which she was elected a member in 1928. She was happy to join the Australian Academy of Art – that litmus test of conservatism – when it was formed in 1937.
For four years from 1930 Perry taught part-time at Julian Ashton 's Sydney Art School with Thea Proctor, taking day classes and encouraging the students 'to work from the real object, in the traditional manner, and base their work on the old masters as much as possible’. Though primarily known as a painter, she also produced linocuts and woodcuts from the late 1920s and taught others these techniques. Her pupils included Vera Blackburn , Lisette Kohlhagen and Mary Cooper Edwards. An article on her work appeared in Art in Australia in September 1927, while three of her prints-a woodcut, a wood engraving and a linocut – illustrated Ethel Anderson 's 'The Subject in Art’ in Art in Australia in September 1929. Her pleasant view of women and children at the beach, Coledale Beach and Village 1929, oil on double sided board (with unfinished portrait study verso), was said to have been illustrated on page 31 of the former – though the article predates the image (another version of it?) – when auctioned at Christie’s Sydney on 14-15 August 1994, lot 194B.
Perry opened another school-the Adelaide Perry School of Art-at Pitt Street, near Circular Quay in May 1933, which continued until forced to close because of the war. Later she had a small studio in Castlereagh Street then took on teaching art full-time at the Presbyterian Ladies College, Croydon, where she remained until retiring to her Hunter’s Hill home in 1962. She continued to paint landscapes, still life and occasional portraits until her death, on 19 November 1973. Her body was cremated at the Northern Suburbs Crematorium.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
1992
- Born
- b. 23 June 1891
- Summary
- Painter, printmaker and art teacher with her own studios and art schools in Sydney. Perry also studied, worked and exhibited in London and Paris. Her work is well represented in Australia.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 19-Nov-73
- Age at death
- 82
Details
Latitude53.449444 Longitude-7.503056 Start Date1889-01-01 End Date1973-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Ireland
- Biography
- Mary Troy a still life, landscape and figurative painter, was born in Ireland. She studied art at the Sorbonne, Paris, and in London where she exhibited five paintings of flowers or genre/figure scenes at the Royal Academy between 1937 and 1942. She also exhibited 48 times with Cooling and Sons Gallery, London (no longer extant). She taught art in NSW from about 1935 (or 1943?) to 1953. Her oil on board work Country Town, New South Wales c.1940s was offered at Sotheby’s on 14 August 1990 and there is some speculation that the town in question might be Bathurst.
A finalist in the 1951 NSW Jubilee Art competition, Troy’s Caroline Chisholm Pioneering New Australians was described as 'all theatre – a comedy in one act, and very charming at that’ ( Sun 16 July 1951). Her entry in the 1952 Wynne Prize, the 'dark and dramatic’ Winter Morning near Blackheath 'seems to derive more from the reds and dark swirling shadows of the Vlaminck in another part of the Gallery than from a winter morning near Blackheath’, the Bulletin commented (30 January 1952: article headed 'Archibald Prize’). The Goldfish 1957 (oil on hardboard 55.9 × 76.8 cm) is in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW (see Art Gallery of New South Wales Acquisitions 1958, 15). Troy is said to have had her first solo show in Sydney in 1958, at David Jones Art Gallery. (Craig states that she exhibited in Sydney from 1958, but she obviously showed work competitively before this.)
Home after Shopping n.d. (oil on board, 107.5 × 68 cm) was offered at Christie’s Melbourne on 30 July 1990. Craig lists five undated oils sold at Lawson’s in 1991-92, including Artist and Model Relaxing (64 × 76 cm) – possibly the Sotheby’s self-portrait – while Poppies and Fruit was sold at Gregson’s, Perth in November 1992.She died in 1973
Writers:
Staff Writer
MuchAdo
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2021
- Born
- b. 1889
- Summary
- Irish born Mary Troy was a still life, landscape and figurative painter. She studied at La Sorbonne in Paris and was a regular exhibitor at London's Royal Academy. She was held a number of solo exhibitions, both in Sydney and London and in 1952 her 'Winter Morning in Blackheath' was hung in the Wynne Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1973
- Age at death
- 84
Details
Latitude-41.2333395 Longitude146.5417751 Start Date1887-01-01 End Date1973-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Latrobe, Tas., Australia
- Biography
- Born at Latrobe, in Tasmania, on 8 December 1887, Ebenezer Marchant, known as ‘Ebb’, was the son of Philip Marchant. Before his third birthday, his mother died, and at the age of eight, Philip moved the family back to Gawler, where he re-established his career as a local photographer. It was in his father’s studio that Ebenezer worked. He married Elvira Elsa Klaebe on 2 September 1922 and together they had a son, Trevor, who was born in 1923.
The Marchants were a large South Australian family that spanned three generations of photographers, as well as a fourth generation that was also associated with the photographic field. His brother Samuel Bowering Marchant and son Trevor Marchant were both photographers. One of his granddaughters, Coralie, was a colourist, whilst another granddaughter, Janine, was a technician in a photo laboratory.
In the years leading up to his father’s death in 1910, Ebenezer took on various responsibilities in the studio, eventually taking on the running of the business. He is credited with producing a one-piece, 180 degree panoramic photograph with the use of a Cirkut panoramic camera in the late 1920s. The enlargement he produced measured six feet in length and ten inches in width.
Ebenezer is recorded as having many talents and interests including conjuring, hypnotism and gardening. He also enjoyed music and was skilled in playing the organ, piano and violin.
Though his son Trevor continued the photographic tradition for some time, his move from Gawler to Adelaide to pursue printing and processing marked the end of the family’s link with studio portraiture.
Writers:
Nerina_Dunt
Date written:
2013
Last updated:
2013
- Born
- b. 8 December 1887
- Summary
- Ebenezer Marchant was part of a large family of photographers who worked primarily in South Australia. Originally an assistant in his father’s studio in Gawler, Marchant took over the family business in 1910.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1973
- Age at death
- 86
Details
Latitude-32.4925 Longitude137.765833 Start Date1886-01-01 End Date1973-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Port Augusta, SA, Australia
- Biography
- potter, sculptor, enameller, china painter, illustrator and author, was born on 14 July 1886 at Port Augusta, SA. Known as 'Lalla’ – a name she sometimes used on less-valued pots – she moved to Victoria when young and lived much of her life in the family home, Palermo, in the Melbourne suburb of Kew, later with her sister, Alice, a doctor. She trained in art and craft at the Working Men’s College, Melbourne. Her training did not include pottery, which was only taught there after Alan Finlay was appointed in 1910 (who may have then given her some lessons); her mother was a potter and she first made pottery at home.
Correll exhibited sculpture at the 1907 Women’s Work Exhibition in Melbourne and won second prize (after Margaret Baskerville ) in class 21, 'figures in bas relief’, for Day Dreams . Both pottery and enamels were shown with the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors (MSWPS) in 1910-12, and her enamels were presented to members of the MSWPS as gifts. She continued to show her pottery with the Yarra Sculptors’ Society and the Arts and Crafts Society of Victoria until after World War II.
Correll’s early work tended to be hand built and fired by Mr Walker of the Tessellated Tile Company at Mitcham, although Peers states that in the 1920s her pots were fired by Blanche Davies, a fellow member of MSWPS. They included richly coloured art nouveau bowls, some decorated with animals à la Castle Harris . In 1941 she built a kiln at her Kew home, and it was here that she produced her distinctive lightly coloured, hand-modelled figure groups of modern life. The work she fired there is often marked 'Australian China’.
Valeria Correll also wrote and illustrated a children’s book, Gay Gambols: A Nonsense Story , published by Edward Vidler at Melbourne in 1923. She died at Melbourne on 29 April 1973, survived by her sister who donated some of her pottery to the National Galleries of Australia and Victoria.
Writers:
Miley, Caroline
Note: Heritage biography.
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 14 July 1886
- Summary
- Potter, sculptor, enameller, china painter, illustrator and author, born in Port Augusta, SA. Resident of Melbourne, Victoria, she produced distinctive lightly coloured, hand-modelled figure groups of modern life.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 29-Apr-73
- Age at death
- 87
Details
Latitude-36.840556 Longitude174.74 Start Date1884-01-01 End Date1973-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Auckland, New Zealand
- Biography
- Amateur woodcarver who was born in Auckland, New Zealand to George Francis a Welsh sea captain and his wife Catharine Isabella Tait of the Shetland Isles. George Francis was working on ships plying between New Zealand and Mauritius for many years and three daughters Pansy, Catherine Isabella (known as Lily) and Ivy were born in New Zealand. Three more children were born when the family were living in Wales (Myrtle, Hazel and Richard). Pansy was educated at boarding school at Longford in Gloucester. The three girls were accomplished musicians. Pansy played the banjo; others played the harp, piano or sang. The family came to Australia during the gold boom. Their home was “Hazelmere”, 79 South Street, Fremantle, Western Australia. It was and is a large and gracious home. Pansy as the eldest daughter lived with her parents at this address until her death in 1973. She helped run the household and was a good cook and keen gardener. The garden was typical of the time, figs, grapevines and citrus fruit with a fowl yard. Pansy also spent a few years with her father in Broome where he had pearling luggers. In 1908 she passed a woodcarving exam at Fremantle Technical School. She may have been studying with George Stirzaker at Fremantle Technical School for some time before sitting the exam as seemed to be the case with many woodcarvers or she may have been inspired to take up the discipline after seeing examples in the 1906 Industries Exhibition or the 1907 Exhibition of Women’s Work where examples of such industry were displayed. There were a number of good professional woodcarvers in Perth at this time. The most famous being William Howitt who won medals at many international exhibitions. There were also very many amateur carvers who exhibited with the Western Australian Society of Arts in the first decade of the century and even more who attended classes and made purely for their own homes. Pansy was one of these. Over the years Pansy carved a very considerable number of pieces of furniture. The first works were panels carved in the classes that were then applied to furniture built to take them. Two examples of this type of work are the music cupboard in the West Australian Museum carved with Pan playing his pipes on the upper section and the inset panel of Pan’s face on the door. A more ornate version is still held by the family. This is a china cabinet deeply carved with almost three-dimensional dolphins and scallop shell on the pediment and lower definition panels of the Loch Ness monster and foliage on the frames of the glass doors. Pansy carved for herself and other members of her family. For Catharine, called Lily, she carved a harpist’s seat that featured arum lilies. For her cello playing niece, Iris Francis, she carved an elegant chest 'glory box’ with a large panel of irises and a two-door music cupboard with inset panels of irises. For her father she carved a holder for his telescope which is carved with “so far and yet so near”, and a scallop shell while three-dimensional dolphins protrude to form a cradle to hold the telescope. A small coffee table is carved on the top with the seated figure of Iris as a muse. Bellows for the fire feature the Greek god of the winds, Boreas and another a dolphin motif. An oval hall mirror is deeply carved with what appear to be tiger lilies. A turn-of- the-century settle has pansies carved on it. The chair and chest are particularly attractive. The Western Australian Museum’s (Ch 82.187) jarrah stand is carved with kangaroo paws and other wildflowers. There are other pieces: a bath stand, and a small table, a third bellows in oak, a small coffee table, another music cabinet and glory box.
Writers:
Dr Dorothy Erickson
Date written:
2010
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1884
- Summary
- Pansy Georgina Francis was born in 1884 in Auckland, New Zealand. In 1908 she passed a woodcarving exam at Fremantle Technical School. Over the years Francis carved a very considerable number of pieces of furniture.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1973
- Age at death
- 89
Details
Latitude55.9340823 Longitude23.3157775 Start Date1923-01-01 End Date1972-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Siauliai, Lithuania
- Biography
- Olegas Truchanas, wilderness photographer and conservationist, was born on 22 September 1923 at Siauliai, Lithuania, the son of Eduard and Tatjana Truchan. Affected by the social upheavals of World War II he fled to Germany in 1944 where he studied law briefly at the University of Munich.
Migrating to Australia as a displaced person, Olegas landed in Melbourne in 1949. He chose to settle in Tasmania and worked a two-year contract as a labourer at the Electrolytic Zinc Company at Risdon. In 1951 he left Risdon to take up a job as a meter reader with the Hydro Electric Commission, eventually progressing to the position of engineering clerk.
Like many other post war emigrants, Olegas arrived in Tasmania with a sense of loss and dislocation. However through early exploits with his camera into the largely unexplored south-west Tasmania he quickly developed a new sense of place, which grew to become a lifelong passion for the protection of this unique wilderness environment.
In 1956 Olegas married Melva Stocks. Later with their three small children, they spent some of their leisure time bushwalking and skiing. They built a home in Hobart on the eastern flank of Mt Wellington. It was destroyed in the 1967 Hobart bush fires, together with all of Olegas’s photographic works.
From 1950 until 1954 Olegas exhibited black and white portrait and landscape photographs with the Southern Tasmanian Photographic Society. Using photographic skills gained in Germany he dominated these competitions, winning many awards. He was also a member of the Tasmanian Miniature Camera Circle, a club established in Hobart for devotees of 35 mm photography.
Beyond Tasmania, Olegas was one of eight Australian photographers to receive an award at the 'Jubilee International Salon’ exhibition in Canberra in 1951. Between 1951 and 1953 he won many competitions organised by The Australasian Photo-Review, who published eight of his black and white photographs, including Oily Waters on the cover of the February 1954 edition. A prestigious boxed portfolio of photographs by Dr Julian Smith Fifty Masterpieces of Photography was one of Olegas’s treasured prizes.
A move was necessary from his black and white photographic work, to record in colour his explorations along Tasmanian wild rivers, then later Lake Pedder, the flooding of which in 1972 attracted attention throughout Australia and internationally.
From the early 1950s until 1971 Olegas presented numerous public slide shows of south-west Tasmania. With the threat of hydro-electric development in this area, these presentations became a persuasive medium in showing what could be lost forever. The shows drew increasing audiences intrigued with the mystery and wonder of this little known corner of Tasmania. Topics included a recently discovered natural alpine garden at Mt Anne, the Arthur and Frankland Ranges, Bathurst Harbour and the Old River by canoe, the Denison and Gordon Rivers, the distinctive crescent shaped beach of Lake Pedder as well as Tasmania’s unique wild flowers and spectacular geological features.
In the late 1960s the Dutch born emigrant photographer Frank Bolt proposed annual camping trips to Lake Pedder for artists, photographers, writers and musicians. Olegas Truchanas was a member of the group that evolved loosely around Tasmanian watercolour artists led by Max Angus and included Harry Buckie, Elspeth Vaughan and Patricia Giles.
Arising from the 1970 artists camp were the key double exhibitions of their work 'Lake Pedder 1971’ held in November that year at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in Hobart and at Saddler’s Court Gallery, Richmond, Tasmania. The waters were rising into the Lake Pedder impoundment and further hydro-electric development was proposed for the Lower Gordon River. At the exhibition opening at Saddler’s Court Gallery Olegas made his much feted speech about the threats to the natural environment.
…This vanishing world is beautiful beyond our dreams. It contains in itself rewards and gratification never found in the artificial landscape, or man made objects so often regarded as exciting evidence of a new world in the making. This is where my friends who paint, who have painted Pedder, I am sure will agree with me entirely. The natural world contains an unbelievable diversity, and offers variety of choices, provided of course that we retain some of this world, and that we live in the manner that permits us to go out, seek it, find it, and make those choices…
In December 1971 after spending the holiday break with family and a small group of friends at Lake Pedder, Olegas prepared for a solo canoe trip down the Gordon River. He intended rephotographing his river images collection destroyed by bushfire five years earlier. On 6 January 1972 Olegas Truchanas accidentally drowned in the Gordon River aged 48 years.
Following his death books such as The World of Olegas Truchanas and Scott Millwood’s 2003 film Wildness confirmed and further enhanced Truchanas’s reputation outside Tasmania as a passionate advocate for environmental protection. His images began to feature in art museum exhibitions. Perhaps the most important was the exhibition 'In the Balance: Art for a Changing World’ where his work was exhibited amongst other Australian and international artists concerned with current environmental issues.
His work for this exhibition, Lake Pedder – the Audio Visual, revealed the dramatic effects of light, rain and shadow on the ever changing mood of this mysterious and stunningly beautiful landscape.
Olegas was an important and influential photographer whose vision, creative skills and untiring devotion to the protection of Tasmania’s wilderness was to inform and inspire future generations. Fellow conservationist and friend Peter Dombrovskis acknowledged Olegas Truchanas as a leading influence in his own photographic practice.
The Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston hold the Truchanas Family Collection, which includes Olegas’s extensive 35 mm colour slide archive of south-west Tasmania, taken between 1967 and 1971. The National Library of Australia, Canberra holds digital copies of the Lake Pedder audio visual collection.
Writers:
arvh
Date written:
2014
Last updated:
2014
- Born
- b. 22 September 1923
- Summary
- Olegas Truchanas was renowned for his slide presentations which brought ever-increasing attention to Tasmania's unique south-west landscape. Using a collection of colour slides accumulated from his trips in the area, he unveiled the beauty and distinctive value of this wilderness in a subtle and powerful manner. He believed that if people could see this exceptional landscape, they would be moved to protect it.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 6-Jan-72
- Age at death
- 49
Details
Latitude-27.467778 Longitude153.028056 Start Date1916-01-01 End Date1972-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Brisbane, Qld, Australia
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 11 June 1916
- Summary
- Brisbane born artist Francis Lymburner first came to prominence as one of the members of Sydney's Charm School in the late 1940s. His subject matter favoured performers – actors and harlequins were among his favourite. His romanticised vision of human figures, especially circus people, did not find favour in later years although he was always admired by his fellow artists
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 10-Oct-72
- Age at death
- 56
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1908-01-01 End Date1972-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Sydney, NSW?
- Biography
- cartoonist, son of Hal and Vi Eyre , began his career as a cadet reporter on the Sydney Evening News then became a cartoonist on the Melbourne Herald . He had cartoons in the Sydney Morning Herald from 1944 (ill. Coleman & Tanner, 49-51) and was employed as its leader page cartoonist until his death, sharing the position with George Molnar . The first original Australian cartoon published in the SMH on 21 October 1944 was by Eyre Jr; it showed a tidal wave of occupied countries about to overwhelm Hitler (ill. Souter, 257: of historic interest). From then on cartoons appeared sporadically in the Herald until the Bulletin cartoonist John Frith was appointed full-time in December 1944. Eyre Jnr had a regular cartoon feature, 'Family Man’, in the Sun Herald . Art Gallery of Western Australia have 2 undated cartoons acquired from the Sun-Herald : “All right you volunteers, the deal’s off!” and “Follow the Band”.
Eyre Jr’s SMH cartoons on the 1954 Royal Visit are illustrated in Souter (328-29). Cartoons on the creation of the DLP (“He’s disgustingly advanced for four months isn’t he?” SMH 1957) are in King (170). National Library of Australia has 145 of Eyre’s original ink and wash cartoons published in the SMH c.1960-65. Mitchell Library (Pic Acc 3088) has hundreds of originals of 'The Family Next Door’ done in the 1960s-70s, donated by the paper in c.1979. When Eyre Junior died in 1972, “emeric” (Emeric Vrbancich ) took over as the Herald 's editorial cartoonist.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1908
- Summary
- Mid 20th century Sydney and Melbourne newspaper cartoonist. Son of Hal and Vi Eyre, cartoonist and ceramicist respectively. The first original Australian cartoon published in the Sydney Morning Herald was by Eyre.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1972
- Age at death
- 64
Details
Latitude-41.441944 Longitude147.145 Start Date1908-01-01 End Date1972-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Launceston, TAS, Australia
- Biography
- Artist and teacher born 26 February 1908 in Launceston, Tasmania. The son of shipping and general merchant Robert Norman Smith, Jack Carington Smith had four brothers [one died in childhood] and two sisters. He attended Launceston Church Grammar School, as his father had before him. In 1925, aged seventeen, he relocated to Sydney were he worked as a clerk for the Shell Oil Company for three years. In the evenings he attended art classes at the East Sydney Technical College. In 1928 Carington Smith suffered a gangrenous appendix and returned to Launceston after the operation. While recuperating, he made the decision to become an artist and devote his life to art. He returned to Sydney, resumed his night classes and began working as a commercial artist. Over a period of eleven years, Carington Smith studied four nights a week under the guidance of Fred Britton, Douglas Dundas and, later, Fred Leist. In 1936, he was the first night student to win the New South Wales Government Travelling Art Scholarship. The terms of the scholarship secured him a place in the Royal Academy School, London, where he studied under Fred Ernest Jackson. While in London he also attended Bernard Meninsky’s classes at the Westminster School. Carington Smith’s wife, Ruth [née Walker], whom he married in 1934, accompanied him with their baby daughter, Jill. They travelled to France and Italy before returning to Sydney in 1939. Upon their return, Carington Smith held his first solo exhibition at the Macquarie Galleries in Sydney. The exhibition was opened by his former teacher Dundas and showcased work completed abroad. He received some success and continued to exhibit regularly with Macquarie Galleries until 1971. With a young family and seeking financial security, Carington Smith accepted the position of Head of the Art Department at the Launceston Technical College. The following year, 1940, he took a similar position, Head of the Art Department, at Hobart Technical College. The Art Department separated from the Hobart Technical College in 1963 and became the School of Art, with Carington Smith continuing as Head of the Fine Art Department. Teaching was stimulating for Carington Smith: his experiences abroad had enlightened him, resulting in his desire to instil in his students the importance for artists to travel. Carington Smith was a prolific painter who straddled genres and mediums. In 1949, he won the Sir John Sulman Prize for Mural Painting with his landscape Bush Pastoral. Dundas observed of Carington Smith’s technique: “His unerring appreciation of tonal values, fostered by his early training, was a key factor in all his work, particularly in oils, and nowhere is it more apparent than in these paintings of the night.” (Dundas 1973, p262) Strange Night won the 1953-54 Tasmanian Sesquicentenary Art Prize. Over time, Carington Smith’s work became more abstract. His large abstract Garden Fantasy won the 1965 Tasmanian Art Prize. Sue Backhouse, author of his 1976 retrospective, recounts his comparison of music and art and his progression towards abstraction: “It seems reasonable to me that the painter should put colour and tone on the canvas in places that, in the moment of inspiration or clear thought, he feels they should go. it needs the public to rid its mid of the pre-conceived idea of what a painting should be and to think more, as it does a piece of music, appreciating the emotional, dramatic or poetic value of its arrangement in tone and colour.” (Backhouse 1976, p19). Carington Smith established a reputation in portraiture through commissions and art prizes. Over the years he painted numerous portraits, including over sixty commissions of academics, explorers (Sir Edmund Hilary, 1960), architects (Leighton Erwin, Architect for the Royal Hobart Hospital, 1954), administrators and businessmen. In 1959, the Commonwealth Government commissioned him to paint murals for Australia House in London. Joseph Burke, Professor of Fine Arts, University of Melbourne, observed in 1963: “He is also one of the few contemporary painters who can execute a portrait which is simultaneously an authentic likeness, a psychological study and a work of art.” (Burke 1963). He preferred to familiarise himself with his sitter before painting them. His portrait of Leslie Greener, which was awarded the 1966 Helena Rubenstein Portrait Prize, is reported to have taken fifteen two-hour sessions. In 1955, Carington Smith was awarded two portrait prizes, the Adelaide Melrose Prize for his portrait of Professor A.L. McAulay, and the first Women’s Weekly Prize for Portraiture (1500 pounds, at the time the largest sum offered in the world for an art prize) for Arrangement in Green. In 1963, he was awarded the prestigious Archibald Prize for his portrait of Professor James McAuley. Carington Smith was honoured with a solo exhibition of his paintings in the 1962 Adelaide Festival of the Arts. The following year, a retrospective of his work was organised by the Adult Education Board of Tasmania. He was represented in the 1956 Arts Festival of the Olympic Games exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. His work was included in several travelling exhibitions, including 'Contemporary Australian Painters’, which toured Canada in 1957-58; the 'Matson Line Exhibition of Australian Painters’, held in San Francisco 1959; the 'Contemporary Australian Art’ exhibition at Auckland City Art Gallery, New Zealand, in 1960; and the 1962 Transfield Art Prize, which was displayed at Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 1964, he became a fellow of the International Institute of Arts and Letters in Switzerland. Despite the international and interstate exposure, Carington Smith spent the majority of his life in Tasmania, a place he cherished deeply. Towards the end of his life he travelled to Europe twice, first in 1964 and again in 1969. On his first visit, Carington Smith and his family travelled via caravan through France, Italy, Spain, Yugoslavia, Holland, Greece and Great Britain. Shy and introspective by nature, he was highly respected among his peers. Lloyd Rees (in Gertsakis 1985) wrote of Carington Smith: “Among my most precious Tasmanian memories are visits to the Carington Smith home. We would think and talk far into the night. The tranquil beauty of this has come through in pictures by Jack that are almost abstract in quality, the room itself seeming to merge with the river beyond. To my mind these works associated with his home are unique in Australian painting, and how truthfully they express the man, reserved and gentle, but behind them a disciplined and determined authority.” Due to deteriorating health, Carington Smith retired from teaching in 1970. He continued painting and was awarded the Sir Warwick Fairfax Prize in 1971 for his abstract The Human Image. He died in Hobart on 19 March 1972. His ashes were scattered into the sea off Cloudy Bay, Bruny Island. He was survived by his wife, two daughters and son.
Writers:
E J CollertonNote:
Date written:
2009
Last updated:
2011
Status:
peer-reviewed
- Born
- b. 26 February 1908
- Summary
- Prolific mid 20th century painter based in Hobart and Sydney. Jack Carington Smith won numerous awards and prizes including the 1949 Sir John Sulman Prize for Mural Painting and the 1963 Archibald Prize.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 19-Mar-72
- Age at death
- 64
Details
Latitude55.953333 Longitude-3.189167 Start Date1902-01-01 End Date1972-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
- Biography
- Painter and gallery administrator, was born on 18 July 1902 in Edinburgh, eldest son of Alfred Richmond Campbell, commercial traveller, and his wife Isabella Jane, née Thompson. Educated in Edinburgh at George Watson’s College and at Wallasey Grammar School, Cheshire, England, in 1916 he migrated with his family to Brisbane, where he worked as a commercial artist. Determined to become a painter, he moved to Melbourne and from 1922 to 1940 lived mainly by his art. The success of his first solo exhibition at Sedon Galleries in 1928 enabled him to travel to Europe with Rupert Bunny [ ADB 7]. He lived in Paris and London and sketched through France, Spain, England and Scotland. Under the influence of Pissarro, Monet, Turner, de Wint and Wilson Steer his work became impressionistic and atmospheric, but he had to paint cheap portraits to make ends meet in the Depression and returned to Australia in 1932.
On 13 June 1933 Campbell married Jean Elizabeth, daughter of J.H. Young [ ADB 13] at Waverton, Sydney, then working as an assistant in her father’s Macquarie Galleries. They lived in Sydney and on islands off the Great Barrier Reef, Queensland, which Campbell painted. By the 1950s he was regarded as a leading Australian watercolourist. Having taught part-time in Sydney, Campbell moved to Tasmania in 1941 to head the art department at Launceston Technical College. He was appointed curator of AGWA in 1947 and became president of the Perth Society of Artists. In 1949 he became first director of QAG, then director of the AGSA (1951-67). He was on the Commonwealth Art Advisory Board in Canberra from 1952 to 1972.
Campbell died in Royal Adelaide Hospital on 30 September 1972 and was cremated. Six retrospective exhibitions have been held since his death acc. Finnimore.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 8 July 1902
- Summary
- Painter and gallery administrator. Born in Scotland and resident of New South Wales, South Australia, Tasmania and Queensland. By the 1950s he was regarded as a leading Australian watercolourist.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 30-Sep-72
- Age at death
- 70
Details
Latitude-23.3782137 Longitude150.5134227 Start Date1899-01-01 End Date1972-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Rockhampton, Queensland, Australia
- Biography
- photographer and author, was born Mary Ernestine Hemmings at Rockhampton, Queensland. After studying to be a stenographer, she became J.F. Archibald’s secretary in Sydney in 1919. She began her journalistic career working for Smith’s Weekly and the Sydney Sun in the 1920s. After the publication of The Great Australian Loneliness in 1937 – written after several years travelling through the remotest stretches of the Australian continent – Ernestine Hill was arguably one of Australia’s most popular writers until the 1950s. Her other books include My Love Must Wait (1941), Water into Gold (1943), Flying Doctor Calling (1947) and The Territory (1951). The Great Australian Loneliness was used as briefing material for visiting American troops in World War II, and My Love Must Wait – a novel about Matthew Flinders – was a bestseller. She was also a regular contributor to Walkabout magazine and editor of the women’s pages of the ABC Weekly . Yet Ernestine Hill has been written out of orthodox Australian literary history, as Meaghan Morris notes. Indeed, the whole genre of popular travel writing has fallen out of critical favour. Hill’s voyage of discovery – personal, political, historical, cultural, geographical – also produced an archive of over 3,000 photographs (Fryer Library, Queensland University), which are quite unknown, as well as many manuscripts, letters, articles and other pieces of writing.
Ernestine Hill’s portrait, painted in 1970 by Sam Fullbrook , is in the Queensland Art Gallery. She died on 21 August 1972, aged seventy-three.
Writers:
Bruce, Candice
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1899
- Summary
- Photographer and author. After the publication of The Great Australian Loneliness in 1937, she was arguably one of Australia's most popular writers until the 1950s.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 21-Aug-72
- Age at death
- 73
Details
Latitude51.507222 Longitude-0.1275 Start Date1897-01-01 End Date1972-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Hammersmith, London, England, UK
- Biography
- Douglas Laurie Cummings, born in Hammersmith in London, was a sign writer, watercolourist, policeman, photographer and graphic artist. He obtained a commercial illustrator’s diploma and took art lessons at Hammersmith School of Art at night before enlisting in the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry Regiment in World War I. He fought on the Somme and was taken prisoner-of-war. He emigrated to Western Australia with his wife Nell in 1921 as a soldier-settler. They lived at Talley Farm in Denmark (South-West WA) at first but soon moved to Perth where their son was born in 1924. Cummings joined the police force and became a sergeant. He was appointed official police draughtsman drawing plans of traffic accidents. He also drew cartoons for the police column of the West Australian newspaper. He designed the Pitman & Walsh Memorial which was erected in Perth in 1929. A complete set of the originals of over fifty-six drawings of homesteads commissioned in 1929 by the Western Mail is held by the Royal Western Australian Historical Society. He also painted shop windows, parking signs and other similar commissions. In 1930 he exhibited an oil painting titled Departure for United Kingdom. He exhibited the oil paintings Bathurst Point Lighthouse and Jetty, Rottnest in the Claude Hotchin Art Prize in 1949 and The Causeway, Rottnest and Henrietta Rocks, Rottnest in the Art Competition at Art Gallery of Western Australia in 1950. In addition to painting he was a keen photographer. The Art Gallery of Western Australia has a watercolour by him and a drawing of a lighthouse. His watercolours are pleasant but not distinguished. RED SECTIONS
Writers:
Dr Dorothy Erickson
Date written:
2010
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1897
- Summary
- Sign writer, watercolourist, policeman, photographer and graphic artist who exhibited with the West Australian Society of Arts and designed the Pitman & Walsh Memorial in Perth.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1972
- Age at death
- 75
Details
Latitude-33.829075 Longitude151.24409 Start Date1897-01-01 End Date1972-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Mosman, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Architect, worked in Sydney, on for example extensions to Women’s College Sydney University.
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1897
- Summary
- Architect, worked in Sydney, on for example extensions to Women's College Sydney University.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1972
- Age at death
- 75
Details
Latitude-37.8753817 Longitude142.2915453 Start Date1893-01-01 End Date1972-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Penshurst, VIC, Australia
- Biography
- The son of William Waller, contractor, and Sarah Napier, he spent his early years on his father;s farm. In 1913 he began studies at the National Gallery School, Melbourne, and first exhibited at the the Victorian Artists’ Society in 1915. On 31 August of that year he enlisted in the AIF, but before he left for France he married a fellow student, Christian Yandall, better known as the artist Christian Waller. He was wounded in action at Bullecourt in May 1917, and lost his right arm. While convalescing in France he learnt to write and draw with his left. On discharge in 1918 he exhibited a series of war subjects.In the 1920s he turned to linocuts as well as beginning to design murals. He completed his first major mural for the Menzies Hotel in Melbourne in 1927, followed by _Peace after Victory _ at the State Library of Victoria in 1928.In 1929 the Wallers travelled to Europe to study stained glass, and were especially impressed by the mosaics in Ravenna and Venice. From then on he worked almost exclusively with these forms. The work of his maturity gave the public architecture of Melbourne the flavour of dignified decoration, classical forms with a modern twist.Four years after Christian’s death in 1954, he married Lorna Reyburn, the New Zealand born artist who had long been his assistant. Despite failing health he continued to work until shortly before his death at home in Ivanhoe 30 March 1972.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 19 June 1893
- Summary
- World War I veteran printmaker, painter, stained glass artist, mosaic artist and muralist. whose work epitomised Art Deco in Australia. Husband of Christian Waller.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 30-Mar-72
- Age at death
- 79
Details
Latitude-33.8894781 Longitude151.1274125 Start Date1888-01-01 End Date1972-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Ashfield, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- etcher, eg Dawe’s Point from McMahon’s Point 1925, Baillieu Library MU.
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1888
- Summary
- Walker is one of the many artists who recorded views of Sydney in the midst of her development as a metropolitan city.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1972
- Age at death
- 84
Details
Latitude-33.8354519 Longitude151.2083011 Start Date1885-01-01 End Date1972-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- North Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Popular political and sporting cartoonist who worked predominantly in Melbourne, Victoria. Samuel Garnet Smith Wells was born in North Sydney, New South Wales, on 2 February 1885. He was the son of Samuel Smith Wells, who was born in Middlebie, Dumfries, Scotland, and his mother was Emmeline Little who was born in Sydney. Wells’ mother passed away in December 1885 and his father then remarried Anne Collier. Wells and his two elder sisters were then raised at Kiama, New South Wales. He was educated at Kiama Grammar School and upon leaving school Wells started a career as a sailor. He married his first wife, Grace Maud Pike, in 1907 in the Sydney suburb of Manly. Her family were landowners in the Junee District of New South Wales. However, the financial crisis of 1907 in the USA created a protracted trade depression and Wells went to New Zealand looking for work. In 1909 Wells was at the Royal Artillery South Channel Fort at Portsea in Victoria working in the draftsman’s office and later was in charge of the guns at the fort after the draftsman’s office was disbanded. The fact that he was often away from home resulted in a rift with his wife and baby son, and the couple divorced in 1910. The earliest evidence of Wells’ capacity for artistic drawing was in 1911 when he was a Bombardier member of the Royal Australian Garrison Artillery at the Queenscliff Fort. While stationed there he would constantly amaze and astonish his friends with his ability with a pencil and eventually he gained enough confidence to send contributions to the weekly newspapers. As his popularity grew Wells found that there was more demand for his work. In 1911 Wells married Margaret Elizabeth Egan, daughter of farmers Kevin and Maria Egan of Warragul, Victoria. However after six children this union was to suffer the same fate as his first marriage. It is understood that Wells was still a member of the Permanent Garrison Army at Port Nepean in 1914 and was present when a shot was fired at the German Steamer Pfalz as it tried to escape from Port Phillip Bay; this was reputedly the first shot to be fired against the Germans by the British Empire of the First World War. The Commonwealth Government of Australia purchased Wells’ watercolour painting depicting this event. It is held in the National Library of Australia collection, Canberra, ACT. Wells decided in 1919 that the pencil was mightier than the sword and determined to stake everything on his bid for artistic success, disregarded his uniform and went to Melbourne. Within eighteen months he was holding his own in the art world; he joined the Melbourne Herald in January 1922. He also published a book of cartoons and caricatures the same year. During this time he was also instrumental in the Geelong Victorian Football League team receiving the nickname the “Cats” (Wells always eagerly awaited the opening of the Victorian football season). One week in June 1923 he suggested in one of his drawings that a black cat would give Geelong better fortune against the leading Carlton Blues. Geelong then went on to unexpectedly win against Carlton and won the premiership in 1925 and the “Geelong Cats” nickname very quickly took hold. Wells popularised his own character, John Citizen. It is believed that he jointly collaborated with renowned author C. J. Dennis and Alexander Gurney to pictorially create the first 'Gunns Gully’ characters for Ben Bowyang. Wells’ favourite character was the Prime Minister of the time, William (Billy) Morris Hughes, and in 1926 Hughes opened an exhibition of some four hundred of Wells’ original drawings at the New Gallery in Melbourne. Original works were very rarely seen in public. He married Vera Murray, an artist and daughter of a Melbourne accountant, on 9 February 1932 at Caulfield. In 1935 Wells went to the United Kingdom and worked with Allied Newspapers Ltd, returning to the Melbourne Herald in 1941. Family folklore has it that he was a war correspondent during the Second World War and went to Italy where he covered the story of Mussolini. In addition, it is believed that he was later asked to work for Walt Disney in the United States; however Wells again returned to Melbourne. According to former deputy editor of The Bulletin and former President of the Australian Cartoonist’s Association, Lindsay Foyle, Wells was forced to retire from the Herald in 1950 due to its compulsory retirement at sixty-five policy (Inkspot, pg10). Wells was then the contributing cartoonist with The Age through to 1967 and produced a cartoon on a Monday and Friday each week. Often there was a dig at his mates, if not within the actual cartoon, on the bottom right hand corner. Sometimes it was a message for someone who had helped him. Affectionately known as 'Sammy Wells’ by his peers at both The Age and The Herald, Wells was held in high regard in the Melbourne community. People from the man in the street, football and racing club presidents, through to Defence Force Generals and the Governor of the State of Victoria all liked and respected him. He was a member of the prestigious Kelvin Club of Melbourne and was also a member of the Victorian Division of the Australian Journalists Association. Sam Wells died on 12 March 1972 at his flat in Powlett Street, East Melbourne, having lived in Victoria for forty-eight years. His wife, Vera, placed a memorial notice in The Age every year after his death, and Richard Berry purchased the majority of Wells’ original works at a Melbourne estate auction in the mid 1980s.
Writers:
Dietrich, Roger
Note:
Date written:
2009
Last updated:
2011
Status:
peer-reviewed
- Born
- b. 2 February 1885
- Summary
- Popular political and sporting cartoonist who worked predominantly in Melbourne, Victoria. A number of his cartoons from the 1920s-50s are in the collection of the National Library of Australia.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 12-Mar-72
- Age at death
- 87
Details
Latitude-30.5144881 Longitude151.6656564 Start Date1882-01-01 End Date1972-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Armidale, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- photographer and school-teacher, grew up on her parents’ property, Craigie Lea, near Armidale (NSW).
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Note: Heritage biography.
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1882
- Summary
- Photographer and schoolteacher. Resident of Armidale, New South Wales, Lucy felt very much at home with an independent, outdoor way of life.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1972
- Age at death
- 90
Details
Latitude-38.1992753 Longitude144.3351609 Start Date1882-01-01 End Date1972-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Adelong, Victoria, Australia
- Biography
- illustrator, was born of Cornish parents in Adelong, Victoria, on 13 April 1882. Minnie spent much of her childhood in the Victorian Alps. With her siblings she spent her childhood recreation time prowling the hills and gullies in the valley of Wandiligong. From these childhood experiences she gained first-hand knowledge and keen powers of observation of the natural life of the hills. Minnie had no formal art training; she began her career as a schoolteacher.
Minnie’s work is strongly informed by the 'art nouveau’ illustrative style. While it is difficult to establish evidence of direct influence, her work shows similarities to the illustrative work of Arthur Rackham, falling within the 'fairy’ tradition of children’s writing and illustrating. Her books include colour plates and black-and-white (pen and ink) sketches.
Minnie Isabella Rowe (1882-1972), Gully Folk 1910, watercolour, pen and ink; original drawing for The Wand of Dawn , Melbourne 1916. Private collection, exhibited Dromkeen Collection of Australian Children’s Literature 1991.
Writers:
Gray, Pamela
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
1992
- Born
- b. 13 April 1882
- Summary
- Minnie Rowe's oeuvre is strongly influenced by the 'art nouveau' illustrative style. Her work demonstrates similarities to the illustrative work of Arthur Rackham and the 'fairy' tradition of children's writing and illustration.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1972
- Age at death
- 90
Details
Latitude-33.8349393 Longitude148.6925158 Start Date1880-01-01 End Date1972-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Cowra, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Leatherworker and metalworker, joined the Society of Arts & Crafts of NSW in 1917 and exhibited with it 1927-29.
This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1880
- Summary
- Young was a leatherworker and metalworker, who exhibited with the Society of Arts & Crafts of New South Wales during the early twentieth century.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1972
- Age at death
- 92
Details
Latitude49.4871968 Longitude31.2718321 Start Date1946-01-01 End Date1971-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Ukraine
- Biography
- Marie Briebauer, painter and etcher, was born in the Ukraine in 1946. Briebauer met George Gittoes in San Francisco in 1969 and corresponded with him throughout 1970-71. She came to the Yellow House on June 13 1971 and hung her work in Gittoes’ Puppet Theatre. Briebauer died at the Yellow House on 13 August 1971.
Writers:
Mendelssohn, Joanna
Date written:
1990
Last updated:
2010
- Born
- b. c.1946
- Summary
- The painter and printmaker Marie Briebauer was one of a number of artists who travelled to the Yellow House and worked there in the Spring of 1971.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 13-Aug-71
- Age at death
- 25
Details
Latitude-33.8342887 Longitude151.2182049 Start Date1916-01-01 End Date1971-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Neutral Bay, Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- painter, sketcher, craft-worker and art teacher, was born in 'Cooinda’, Wycombe Road, Neutral Bay, Sydney on 3 February 1916?, the elder of the two children of Florence E. Kent and John Dumeresq Cunningham ('Jock’) Lyall – called 'shipping clerk’ on Nan’s birth certificate but later a prosperous importer/ businessman – who had married in Sydney in 1915. The family moved to Adelaide when Nan was young. She attended the Adelaide Presbyterian Ladies College, learning music, dancing and sport; she also kept a horse. When Nan was about 14 her mother died, aged 38, and Jock married Florence’s sister Violet (Vi) Kent, then middle-aged. Soon afterwards the Depression started and Jock’s business failed. The family returned to Sydney where they mainly stayed with family until taking up residence in an old house after Jock was given the unofficial Engadine Post Office in the mid-1930s and Vi was postmistress. When Vi retired, Jock purchased a soldiers’ settlement block at Engadine. Nan’s sister Jean died of polio aged about 14 (c.1936).
In the early 1930s Nan got a job at David Jones. Because Engadine was too far to travel she lived in Sydney, where she studied art at East Sydney Technical College at night and with Rah Fizelle. She met Bill Hortin at art school, a commercial artist with a club foot who was an extrovert with a great sense of humour and lots of friends. They lived together for years until marrying in 1939, then separated six months later. With many others, they suffered near starvation during the Depression and became committed members of the Communist Youth League (later the Eureka Youth League). Bill became manager of the Communist Party of Australia studio, which employed a number of people to produce banners, etc. for the party and for unions. Since most cultural circles in Sydney were interconnected, Nan knew Rosaleen Norton , the Andersonian libertarians and several dance circles. A number of her sketches of dancers are probably of the Borovansky Ballet, perhaps their productions of 'Scherherazade’ or 'Terra Australis’ (costumes and decor by Eve Harris ) cf Marjorie Penglase 's Borovansky sketches, Pix 10 August 1946, 12-15, 'Is Australian Ballet dying?’
Nan’s main income during WWII came from teaching art at various NSW Dept of Education schools, including the Kindergarten Teachers College in Waverley and North Sydney, and at Technical Colleges. Before this she had a range of casual jobs. {Merewether claims she attended life drawing classes at the George Bell School, Melbourne, in the mid-1930s before travelling to England and India.} Nan and Bill parted in 1939 when Nan went off to China with a member of the Repin family, owners of the Repin chain of coffee shops in Sydney, who was going to Russia to reclaim some of his family’s property and possessions. Nan was refused entry at the Siberian-Sino border so travelled round China alone. She spent some months in Shanghai as governess in a British army family then accompanied them to India for a few months. On her return (with drawings of her travels) at the outbreak of WWII her drawing 'Bombay’ was reproduced in Art in Australia 4/2 (June-August 1941, 63) under the name of “Nan Lyall” but signed 'Nan’ (also represented in the Museum of Art, Bombay, according to 1946 Women Painters’ exhibition catalogue). Merewether claims she began to exhibit with the Contemporary Artists Society on her return, but this was the Melbourne not Sydney Contemporary Artists Society; she submitted 5 works to the 1942 Victorian Contemporary Artists Society exhibition. For the Sydney Contemporary Artists Society Holder has found her exhibiting only in 1950 and 1951, having checked cats of 1946, 1949-51 and 1953-54.
Her partner in 1945-46 was Douglas Campbell, an artist who chiefly made woodblock and linocut prints, often published in the Saturday Herald , and who later became a fervent Anglican. They lived in Forbes Street, Woolloomooloo, with Jean Kelly, Studio of Realist Art Secretary (later Jean Smail), until moving to a flat over Grubbs the Butcher’s in a lane off George Street, near Circular Quay. Smail describes Nan as 'a genius of a dressmaker… whatever she saw she could do… for example she took up shoemaking after she had observed the process in China’. In 1943 she made papier-mâché sculptured figures that were shown in 'Woman Represents Peace’ for the Australian Women’s Charter in 1943 (the organisation that published Australian Women’s Digest in 1944-48).
A foundation member of Studio of Realist Art in late 1944, Hortin was an active committee member. She also prepared Studio of Realist Art banners and other visual material for May Day marches and scenery and costumes for productions at the New Theatre. She exhibited in all Studio of Realist Art’s exhibitions (1946-49), showing oil paintings and crayon drawings in the first show (August 1946) at David Jones Art Gallery (see catalogue). One of her drawings of dancing couples became the cover of the March 1946 (no.9) Studio of Realist Art Bulletin (ill. Merewether, 79), for which she occasionally wrote as well as drew. She made gigantic papier-mâché figures for the Immigration part of the Australian section of the 1947 British Empire Exhibition at the Sydney Showground. (Was it part of that year’s Royal Easter Show?)
After the Studio of Realist Art studio was gutted by fire in 1947 the group was allowed to use the Waterside Workers’ Federation Hall, where they set up the Wharfies Art Group (active 1947-58) and where Nan taught art to wharfies’ children, with Vi Collings assisting from c.1952-55. She painted some wonderful murals on the history of the working class in the WWF canteen. Smail says that by 1945-46 she was very involved in painting murals, influenced by Diego de Riviera and José Orozco. She showed mural proposals in the 'Art in Public Life’ exhibition at the Education Department Gallery in October 1946. 'Arrival of Ordinary Settlers’ (convicts in chains), a drawing illustrated in the 1946 Women Painters’ catalogue, looks like a sketch for a mural.
In the late 1940s Hortin went to Brisbane, held a solo exhibition at Brisbane’s Moreton Galleries in 1950, then returned to Sydney. Her son, Michael George Adams, was born in Sydney in 1953. Nan had married the child’s father, George Adams, when she became pregnant, but they separated well before the birth. She purchased and did up a very small house in Euroca Street, North Sydney, and lived there for years with her son. In 1963, when Michael was 10 or 11, they moved with Tom Morrison to Yorkies {sp?} Knob in North Queensland, about 20 km outside Cairns, where they built their own 'ridiculously designed’ house. Ray Crooke was a close neighbour. Nan taught at the local TAFE.
Nan died in 1971. Then Michael, who had just started a course at Rockhampton TAFE, was killed in a motorcycle accident aged 19 or 20 and within the same eighteen-month period Tom Morrison died 'in the garden’. Nan’s estate went to George Adams, who sold most of it. Her collection of books, mostly socialist literature and philosophy, was donated to Townsville Library.
In Queensland her style changed completely to mainly pastel sketches and oils of tropical landscapes, seascapes and views. Almost all her work has disappeared, apart from a couple of oil paintings and some works on paper found in the Balmain markets one Saturday morning, acc. Merewether (late 1970s or c.1980?). They include Embracing Figures c.1947, pencil and pastel, Cafe Benefit c.1946, coloured crayon on paper, and Form c.1946, oil on masonite. All were still privately held when shown by Charles Merewether in 1984 (NB: NGA now has 15 drawings by Hortin). Hortin is not mentioned in Serle’s Artist in the Tropics .
Writers:
Holder, Jo
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 3 February 1916
- Summary
- A committed member of the Communist Youth League, Hortin was also a foundation member of the Studio of Realist Art, and while in Sydney was influenced by the Mexican muralist Diego Riviera. After she moved to North Queensland in the early 1960s however her style changed completely.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1971
- Age at death
- 55
Details
Latitude43 Longitude12 Start Date1909-01-01 End Date1971-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Italy
- Biography
- Painter, born Italy. Graduated in Arts from Sydney University. Taught at the Dattilo-Rubbo Art School in Sydney and at East Sydney Technical College. Won Sulman Prize 1945. The mural he painted for St Stephen’s Catholic Cathedral, Brisbane, behind the altar and on north-south walls of the crossing, commissioned by Archbishop Duhig during WWII, is now painted out. Duhig also commissioned a canvas of 'The Martyrdom of St Stephen’, measuring 25 feet by 12 feet six inches – 'the biggest of its kind ever undertaken in Australia’, according to the archibishop, who also said: 'The drapery and setting are really perfect and the figures seem to throb with life. I regard Mr Lo Schiavo as the most gifted artist in Australia, and I regret that his work is not much more before the public’ (Duhig letter, 17 June 1943 (Art File, Brisbane Archdiocescan Archives), cited Grice.
Lo Schiavo also painted an enormous mural for the Union Building, University of Sydney.
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1909
- Summary
- Painter, born Italy. Won Sulman Prize 1945 for the Shakespeare Mural at the University of Sydney Union. Had a work commissioned by Archbishop Duhig during WWII.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- Sep-71
- Age at death
- 62
Details
Latitude-31.9807252 Longitude115.7814486 Start Date1907-01-01 End Date1971-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Claremont, WA, Australia
- Biography
- Vigneron and painter was born in Claremont, Western Australia and educated at Thomas Street School followed by Fremantle Technical School around 1920-21 under Muriel Southern. Cook also took a commercial art diploma by correspondence and later had lessons from Margaret Saunders and in the 1950s-60s he had further classes – adult education – with the influential Henry Froudist. Cook exhibited with the West Australian Society of Arts and later with the Perth Society of Artists. George Benson, the painter and critic, described his work in 1931 as “Distinctly promising”. In 1933 he exhibited oil paintings in the landscape competition of the West Australian Society of Arts as well as charcoal drawings, tempera paintings and pencil drawings. Benson wrote of this work, “Two oils are shown by Allon Cook Herne Hill from the Darling Ranges and Autumn, each is a great improvement on the work he showed last year though 'Autumn’ is not altogether suggestive of 'season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’. Two landscapes in body colour or tempura, reveal his tendency to follow in the footsteps of his uncle, the late Delafield Cook.” In 1934 Cook exhibited an oil painting of “Whiteman’s Brickyard”, a watercolour of “Belvoir” and a drawing of Fremantle. He developed into a competent painter who won the Claude Hotchin Art Prize for oil painting on three occasions, 1950, 1951 and 1958. Cook was a friend of Cyril Lander and they held several exhibitions together.
Writers:
Dr Dorothy Erickson
Date written:
2010
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1907
- Summary
- Allon Cook was born in 1907. He was a painter who exhibited with the West Australian Society of Arts and with the Perth Society of Artists. Cook was a friend of Cyril Lander and they held several exhibitions together.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1971
- Age at death
- 64
Details
Latitude55.953333 Longitude-3.189167 Start Date1905-01-01 End Date1971-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 1905
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1971
- Age at death
- 66
Details
Latitude-33.283333 Longitude149.1 Start Date1901-01-01 End Date1971-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Orange, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- poet, journalist and sketcher, studied art and drawing at Stott and Hoare’s design school in Sydney c.1916. He was always good at drawing and often decorated his letters with sketches. He drew his own Christmas cards from c.1908/9 onwards.
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 27 March 1901
- Summary
- Influential 20th century poet, journalist and sketcher.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 30-Jun-71
- Age at death
- 70
Details
Latitude-39.6766915 Longitude175.7983062 Start Date1900-01-01 End Date1971-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Taihape, New Zealand
- Biography
- None listed
- Born
- b. 25 February 1900
- Summary
- None listed
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 6-Apr-71
- Age at death
- 71
Details
Latitude-34.5926463 Longitude146.7000438 Start Date1894-01-01 End Date1971-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Narrandera, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- painter, printmaker, bookplate designer, illustrator, commercial artist and gallery director, was born at Narrandera (NSW) on 26 June 1894.
Prints include woodcut Circe 1927 (edn 50) (Lebovic & Warner, Fifty Years , cat.16), The Offering-Bali n.d. (c.1932), edn 20/50 (Mitchell Library, SSV 99/INDO 1), and Ned Kelly. Pen drawings include a group of women in late Victorian costume under trees, exhibited Society of Artists 1922 (ill. in cat. plate 47).
Oil paintings include The Little Farm, Bengarby 1947 offered by Bridget McDonnell Gallery, Carlton, Early Australian Painters , catalogue of exhibition 25 May-15 June 2001 (cat 39 ill. from col. Dr Grant Lindeman) originally exhibited in Australian Red Cross Society exhibition, David Jones Gallery 1949, no.80 and on p.78 of Adrian Feint Flower Paintings , Ure Smith, 1948.
Illustrations in various styles were done for Home . Did story illustrations in Australia: National Journal and Australia Week end Book no.1 (1942), e.g. angel of resurrection in Prague for M.W. Peacock’s 'Requium’, p.86, historical illustrations 1788-1940 for Marjorie Barnard’s 'Parade of Women’, pp.113-122, and outback scenes for M.W. Peacock’s 'Wings’. Art Gallery of New South Wales has pen and ink drawing, 'The Old Bachelor [18th century man in bed with sleeping woman]’ 1924, purchased from Exhibition of Younger Group of Artists, Anthony Horderns 1924 (10 gns).
Feint was renowned for his bookplates.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1894
- Summary
- Feint was a painter, printmaker, bookplate designer and illustrator who provided illustrations for a range of books and journals and was well-known for his bookplates. He was associated with "The Home" magazine published by Sydney Ure Smith.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1971
- Age at death
- 77
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1892-01-01 End Date1971-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, VIC, Australia
- Biography
- Esther Paterson, painter and illustrator, was born on 5 February 1892 at Carlton, Melbourne, the second child of Scottish-born parents Hugh Paterson (the first chairman of the Commonwealth Art Advisory) and his wife Elizabeth Leslie, née Deans. Paterson’s father and uncle (John Ford) were both artists and through their example she was introduced to the Melbourne art scene from an early age. Her younger sister Betty also became an illustrator, cartoonist and journalist and as young girls, the Paterson sisters played games with the children of the prominent artist Frederick McCubbin, as the McCubbin family lived on the same street.
Paterson was educated at Oberwyl School, St Kilda, and studied painting at the National Gallery of Victoria School (1907-1912) under the tutelage of English artist Bernard Hall, where she attained a reputation in portraiture. In 1915, three years after her studies at the NGV School, an exhibition of her work was held at Besant Hall, Centreway, Collins St, Melbourne, receiving critical acclaim in The Argus newspaper. Her work as an illustrator can be seen in ‘Aussie Girls’ which was published towards the end of 1918, following the First World War. In her private life, on 2 June 1923, Paterson married George Hermon Gill (1895-1973), a London-born mariner and naval officer who had emigrated to Melbourne in 1922.
During her artistic career, Paterson formed many friendships with fellow artists including W.B. McInnes, who painted her portrait ‘Silk and Lace’ for which he was awarded the Archibald Prize in 1927. She admired the art of McInnes, as well as the work of other noted Australian artists such as George Lambert, John Longstaff and Max Meldrum. When her husband resigned from his post with the shore staff of the Commonwealth Government Line of Steamers in 1929, Paterson and her husband went on a trip to England and Scotland. While in England, they made a pilgrimage to Great Ayton in Yorkshire and Paterson took the time to create a large number of sketches and watercolours inspired by her trip.
In 1930, Esther Paterson supplied the cover illustration for the ‘Table Talk Annual’ and she continued to exhibit her work regularly in Melbourne. As an established artist, she also served as a dignitary at events, and, for example, opened an exhibition of paintings by artists including Phyle Waterhouse and Arthur Read at Velasquez Galleries, 100 Bourke St, Melbourne, on 5 October 1943.
In 1950, Paterson achieved the honour of being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, London, which was a society founded in the eighteenth century for the encouragement of the Arts. Her work had become known in England and several of her portraits, including one of Dr Thomas Wood, were in London. Her popular reputation in portraiture was further reflected by the praise she received from the Governor of Victoria Sir Dallas Brooks in 1955 with regard to her portrait of his wife Lady Brooks, which was exhibited on 2 May at the Victorian Artists’ Society in Albert St, East Melbourne.
During the later years of her artistic career, Paterson served as a council-member (1954-68) of the Victorian Artists Society, of which she became an honorary life member, and she was the President of the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors in 1966. She passed away on 8 August 1971 at her family home in Middle Park, Victoria.
The art of Esther Paterson is represented in several prominent public collections in Australia, including the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne and the Geelong Art Gallery, Geelong.
Writers:
Staff Writer
ecwubben
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 5 February 1892
- Summary
- Mid 20th century Melbourne cartoonist, painter and commercial artist. Sister of fellow artist Betty Paterson.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 8-Aug-71
- Age at death
- 79
Details
Latitude-41.441944 Longitude147.145 Start Date1889-01-01 End Date1971-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Launceston, Tasmania, Australia
- Biography
- John Cyril (Jack) Cato (1889-1971), photographer, was born on 4 April 1889 at Launceston, Tasmania, son of Albert Cox Cato, salesman, and his wife Caroline Louise, née Morgan.
Early LifeAt the age of 12 years he did an apprenticeship, and studied arts in night school. His father arranged for him to have lessons from a friend who was a metallurgist at Queenstown, Tasmania, where he learnt the properties of metals in photography. John Watt Beattie, a Scottish landscape photographer and also the son of a photographer, introduced young Jack to the medium in 1896. From 1901 Cato worked under Percy Whitelaw and John Andrew, both local portrait photographers. He was further trained by Lucien Dechaineux at Launceston Technical School.
CareerIn 1906, aged 17, Cato joined Beattie in his Hobart premises and set up his own studio. Later he applied to be official photographer to (Sir) Douglas Mawson’s 1911 Australasian Antarctic Expedition. However, Mawson passed up he and Frank Mallard in favour of Frank Hurley [Murphy, Shane & Hurley, Frank, 1885-1962 (2000). Shackleton’s photographer: the annotated diaries of Frank Hurley, expedition photographer, Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, 1914-17 : a book (2nd electronic ed). Shane Murphy, Scottsdale, AZ]. Cato travelled that year in Europe finding work with photographers in London, among them Claude Harris and H. Walter Barnett, the fashionable society and vice-regal portraitist. Having contracted tuberculosis and, seeking the relief of a warm climate, Cato left England in 1914 for six years working on expedition in South Africa. The anthropological photography earned him a fellowship (1917) of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain.
In 1920 Cato returned, ill, to Tasmania, where he operated his own portrait-studio in Hobart, and there married Mary Boote Pearce (d.1970) on 24 December 1921. In 1927 they moved to Melbourne. With the patronage of Dame Nellie Melba [DAME NELLIE MELBA OPENS SHOW. (1927, October 7). The Argus (Melbourne, Vic. : 1848 – 1957), p. 13.], whom he had met in London, and through her introductions to society and to theatrical circles, he set up as a social portraitist. He put his pictorial style, natural gregariousness, love of theatre and technical knowledge to effect in becoming a leader of the trade in Melbourne for two decades. [“He was also a singer, he loved the stage. I think that was more behind Jack Cato than anything: he was a performer, he loved performing, during the African years he was a member of a Pierrot troupe.”[Narkiewicz, Ewa (2000). Jack Cato’s Melbourne: an interview with John Cato. In La Trobe Journal. (65), 17-27.][“JACK CATO, photographer and raconteur, who, not long ago, produced a most readable book of reminiscences…” Clive Turnbull, in Portrait of A City. (1949, October 15). The Argus (Melbourne, Vic. : 1848 – 1957), p. 10.]
His photographs were frequently published in The Australian Womens Weekly, The Argus,, Table Talk, The Hobart Mercury, The Australasian, He maintained links with professional associations and amateur clubs through occasional exhibitions of his best work [Arthur Streeton reviews “an exhibition of photographs by Mr. Jack Cato opened at the Athenaeum Gallery bv the Prime Minister (Mr. Lyons)”; ART PHOTOGRAPHS. (1932, May 31). The Argus (Melbourne, Vic. : 1848 – 1957), p. 8.] , and was senior vice-president (1938) and a life member of the Professional Photographers’ Association.
Cato retired from his Melbourne studio in 1946 to begin a career as an author. In addition to a large number of articles in photographic, philatelic and other magazines, as well as serving as chronicler for the Savage Club, he published an autobiography, I Can Take It (1947), and a pictorial documentary, Melbourne (1949)[reviewed by Clive Turnbull, in Portrait of A City. (1949, October 15). The Argus (Melbourne, Vic. : 1848 – 1957), p. 10.].
Cato’s The Story of the Camera in Australia (1955) is acknowledged [“It is unlikely that new research will alter substantially the outlines of the story which Cato set down, although these might be filled in by pursuing more material outside the Sydney-Melbourne axis.” Humphrey McQueen in THE STORY BEHIND THE LENS. (1977, November 5). The Canberra Times (ACT : 1926 – 1995), p. 12.] as the first Australian national history of the medium, though it is more populist than academic. A keen stamp-collector from childhood (also 1935 president of the Royal Philatelic Society of Victoria) he was able to sell his stamps for about £10,000 in 1954 to finance six years of research for this book. He used the La Trobe Library picture and newspaper collections in Melbourne [Narkiewicz, Ewa (2000). Jack Cato’s Melbourne: an interview with John Cato. In La Trobe Journal. (65), 17-27.], making only one visit to Sydney and Canberra institutions. Cato also relied on written accounts such as the 100 or so letters from Harold Cazneaux, as well as corresponding with Keast Burke in Sydney, a photography historian and campaigner for the recognition of photography as a historical resource and was engaged in 1964 as consultant to the collections at the Australian National Library.
From 1960-63 Cato was photography columnist for the Age.
He died on 14 August 1971 at Sandringham, survived by his son, photographer John Cato and daughter.
A collection of his photographs is held by the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
References
Cato, Jack & Institute of Australian Photography (2009). Charles Nettleton (3rd ed). Institute of Australian Photography, [Melbourne]Cato, J. (1971) Philately from Australia, Sept 1971Cato, Jack (1963). Some early Australian Commonwealth postage stamp essays. Review Pubs, Dubbo, N.S.WCato, Jack (1955). The story of the camera in Australia. Georgian House, MelbourneCato, Jack (1949). Melbourne. Georgian House, MelbourneCato, Jack (1947). I can take it : the autobiography of a photographer. Georgian House, MelbourneDow, D. M. (1947) Melbourne Savages (Melb)Cosier, I. (1980) Jack Cato (M.A. prelim thesis, University of Melbourne). Ennis, Helen & National Library of Australia & National Portrait Gallery (Australia) (1996). The reflecting eye : portraits of Australian visual artists. National Library of Australia, [Canberra]Narkiewicz, Ewa (2000). Jack Cato’s Melbourne: an interview with John Cato. In La Trobe Journal. (65), 17-27.Newton, G. (1980) Silver and Grey (Syd,)Newton, G. (1993 ) ’Cato, John Cyril (Jack) (1889–1971)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 13, (MUP).Professional Photography in Australia, 23, no 5, Aug-Sept 1971Photofile, 4, no 1, Autumn 1986The Great Lindt; a compilation based on research by Jack Cato, R. J. Barcham and Keast Burke. (1955-10-01). In Image. 4 (7), 54(1).
Writers:
Staff Writer
James McArdle
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2014
- Born
- b. 4 April 1889
- Summary
- Professional photographer and photographic historian.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 14-Aug-71
- Age at death
- 82
Details
Latitude-30.7465571 Longitude150.7218323 Start Date1886-01-01 End Date1971-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Manilla, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- Catherine Maud Womersley was born at Manilla, New South Wales on 21 September 1886. Her father died when she was quite young and, as her mother remarried, she was raised by her paternal grandmother in Melbourne. She studied drawing and watercolours from early childhood. She married Jack O’Reilly in Sydney about 1920 and came to live in Brisbane where he was superintending engineer for the GPO. She became a student of L.J. Harvey at the Central Technical College and exhibited her pottery and was awarded several prizes at the Royal National Agricultural and Industrial Association 1923-5. She was included in the Central Technical College display of pottery at the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924 and it was the only year she exhibited with the Arts and Crafts Society of Brisbane where “. . . handsome pieces beautifully modelled in the 'Louis’ style” were noted.
In 1925 she and her husband travelled to England where she enrolled at the Royal College of Arts (April-July) and later studied ceramics at the London County Council School of Art Studies where she learned to throw. She was keenly interested in studying historic ceramics in London museums, especially Chinese ceramics of the Ming and Sung eras. The ceramics she produced there (she had 3 cwt of Queensland clay sent over to her) had simple profiles and sometimes vestigial dragon handles but principally relied on superb glazes for effect. In an article titled “Woman’s realm” in The West Australian on 23 April 1936 she remarked “I have always concentrated on form and proportion, the use of subtle colourings and high quality glazes particularly suited for each piece of work rather than the more modern style of decoration.”
At this time she made a plaque which incorporated the signatures of the Australian Test Cricket team for 1926. It was displayed at the Queensland Agent General, London, together with other items of her pottery.
She exhibited a collection of her pottery in the Women’s Artists Society, London in 1926 and later the same year she exhibited a model of a kookaburra at the Royal Academy (no. 1445). These items were also exhibited in Brisbane at the annual Queensland Art Society exhibition in November. She also exhibited a collection of pottery in the Queensland Art Society’s 1927 April exhibition. This appears to have been the end of her pottery career.
The couple returned to live in Melbourne and then in 1936 to Perth where a group of her pottery and painting was one of the main features of the first exhibition of the West Australian Women Painters and Applied Arts Society. She was also a member of the committee. The couple went to England as part of a round world trip in 1937. After the death of her husband three years later she returned to live in Brisbane where she died on 13 September 1971. She had made some items of poker work in earlier years but in her last years she restricted herself to watercolours.
Queensland Art Gallery: Research Curator, Queensland Heritage
Writers:
Cooke, Glenn R.
Note: Research Curator, Queensland Heritage, Queensland Art Gallery
Date written:
2003
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 21 September 1886
- Summary
- Maud O'Reilly was one of L.J. Harvey's students who furthered her skills by studying wheelthrowing and glazing when she visited London in 1925. She made her kookaburra statuette in Brisbane and in 1926 produced numerous casts, one of which was exhibited at the Royal Academy, London the same year. The auction of these casts has given her a considerable profile in recent years.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 13-Sep-71
- Age at death
- 85
Details
Latitude-33.713759 Longitude150.3121633 Start Date1886-01-01 End Date1971-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Katoomba, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- professional photographer, was born at Katoomba (New South Wales) on 30 June 1886, one of the five children of the headmaster of Katoomba College (where Blamire Young taught mathematics). Judith’s mother, Ann Marion Fletcher, was a gifted embroiderer, exhibiting an impressive needle-painting designed by Blamire Young in the 1907 Women’s Work Exhibition at Melbourne which won first prize in its class. Judith also made embroideries in her youth.
Later, the family moved to Greenwich, Sydney and Judith lived in the family home until she married late in life. Having exhibited through the photographic salons as an amateur for some years and adopted some of the principles of art photography, she may already have set up her own studio there by 1908, doing at-home portraits, especially of women and children.
One of the first women studio portrait photographers to establish a name in Sydney (along with May and Mina Moore ), Fletcher established a studio in the city in 1909. In 1916-18 she was advertising her 'art photography’ at George Street in Art in Australia with full-page portraits of celebrities, Sydney socialites and stylish young women. She also did fashion photography, and she took many photographs of Sydney artists, particularly women artists, several of which are included in the biographical section of this book. She owned a sketch by Grace Cossington Smith , a friend of both Judith and her sister Dorothy (McLaurin). Her portrait photographs of male artists include a fine informal portrait of Arthur Streeton (Art Gallery of New South Wales). A theosophist, Fletcher is said by the family to have been one of the participants involved in the Krishnamurti Star Movement amphitheatre at Balmoral Beach in the 1920s.
After 1920 Fletcher evidently worked solely from her Greenwich home. She continued to exhibit in photographic salons until the early 1930s. A close associate of the Manly photographer Frank Bell for many years, she is said to have helped him with the supply of equipment and in developing his technique. Later she married a Polish violin-maker, Gerard Paszek, probably just before World War II. They lived at Mount Kuringai, then at Glenorie. He was an extremely possessive man – Fletcher’s niece recalls that he 'wouldn’t let Judith out of his sight’ – and she had little to do with former colleagues after her marriage. She died in 1971.
Writers:
Newton, GaelNote: Primary biographer
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
1992
- Born
- b. 30 June 1886
- Summary
- One of the first female portrait photographers to establish a name in Sydney, Fletcher had her own studio on George Street in the city where she photographed Sydney socialites and fellow artists including Arthur Streeton. Fletcher was a close associate of photographer Frank Bell.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1971
- Age at death
- 85
Details
Latitude-42.880556 Longitude147.325 Start Date1885-01-01 End Date1971-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Hobart, Tas., Australia
- Biography
- embroiderer and watercolourist, was born in Hobart, eldest daughter of Charles Henry and Esther Ann Robey, members of a prominent Tasmanian Quaker family. Known as Linor, she was a very individual woman of marked uprightness of character and with a notable sense of humour. During much of her life she shared a home at Bellerive, Hobart, with her sister Margaret, her sense of history leading to the house becoming a notable archive of Tasmanian Quaker history.
While attending the Friends’ School at Hobart in 1892-1908, Robey developed an interest in art and craft. This took her to Hobart Technical College to study design and craft, where she was greatly influenced by the teaching of Lucien Dechaineux . In 1910 she went to Woodbrooke (Quaker) College in Birmingham, England, to further her studies. In 1913 she enrolled in the Educational Needlework course under Anne Macbeth at the Glasgow School of Art, Scotland. On her return, she taught needlework and drawing at the Friends’ School from 1914 until she retired c.1931 (acc. to Backhouse, TMAG cat.).
As a student Elinor Robey had exhibited with the Arts and Crafts Society of Tasmania in 1909, including examples of stencilling. She showed leatherwork in 1921 and 1922. She also painted native Tasmanian flora (TMAG). During World War II she was active in war work, especially connected with UNRAA. After the war she returned briefly to her old school as a house-mistress. Robey’s home was decorated with a fine embroidered panel of Glasgow School design, which must have been a continuing source of inspiration. Examples of her embroidery and leatherwork are in the National Gallery of Australia and in private collections.
Writers:
Miley, CarolineNote: Heritage biography.
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1885
- Summary
- Linor, as she was known, was a women of upright nature, and a passion for history. Born of a Quaker family, she studied both in Hobart and Glasgow before returning to her old school to teach needlework and drawing.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1971
- Age at death
- 86
Details
Latitude-34.0819102 Longitude137.6081151 Start Date1881-01-01 End Date1971-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Moonta Mines, South Australia, Australia
- Biography
- black and white artist, was born on 15 February 1881 at Moonta Mines, SA, second of the three surviving children of Cornish parents, James Pryor, a mine agent, and Caroline Jane, née Richards. He grew up in Moonta and began working for the Wallaroo and Moonta Mining and Smelting Company at the age of 13, under H.R. Hancock (Oswald Pryor wrote the Australian Dictionary of Biography entry on Hancock). After night classes at the Moonta School of Mines, Pryor became a mechanical draughtsman then from 1911 manager of Moonta Mines cementation works. In 1902-3 he attended the SA School of Design, Painting and Technical Art under H.P. Gill . On 8 January 1908 he married Mabel Dixon; they had one son. He was an accomplished organist at Moonta Methodist Church, later Kensington Park Methodist Church, Adelaide.
Having drawn caricatures signed 'Cipher’ for the Adelaide Critic , edited by C.J. Dennis from 1897 (attributed to Pryor by Joe Harris, ill. Harris, 142), Pryor moved to Adelaide in 1919 or 1920. He later wrote to William Moore:
It was while I was drawing for the Critic that C.J. Dennis, its then editor, made the suggestion that the Cousin Jack miner was a good subject for pictorial treatment. I did not adopt it for several years, as I thought Cornish humour would not be widely understood. I was surprised to find later that it had a very wide appeal, letters of appreciation coming from out-back prospectors and mining camps in all parts of Australia and New Zealand, and occasionally from overseas. (Moore ii, 120)
Also signed 'Cipher’ are caricatures of George Reid, Alfred Deakin et al in the Melbourne Clarion of 1904 (ill. Lindesay Way We Were [ WWW ], 53) and cartoons in the 1907 Adelaide satirical journal Gadfly (washerwomen joke, ill. Lindesay 1979, 134; 'advice for his own good’, i.e. two country bumpkins in the city, 12 February 1908, 8). 'Cipher’ also contributed to the 1907-09 Bulletin , eg Deakin to the 'Out of Work’ about 'Protection’ and 'New Protection’ policemen 1907, and caricature of SA Premier J. Verran 1909 (ill. Harris, 169, 216). 'Cypher’ also drew small illustrations of a mining town (Moonta?) in 1907.
'Oswald Pryor’ had cartoons published in Quiz 9 October 1901 (his first published cartoon according to the ADB ), in Lone Hand on 1 June 1909, 205, 1 December 1909, 161 and 1 March 1910, 495, as well as in various other magazines including the weekly Comic Australian (Sydney 1911-13) and SA Wireless Monthly . With J.A. Pearce , he was staff artist on the Adelaide News in the late 1920s-1930s, succeeding Hal Gye (Moore ii, 122) in drawing the weekly cartoon (see anthology Cornish Pasty , 1950, republished 1961). 'Oswald Pryor’ cartoons also appeared in Aussie , e.g. “What is your husband doing?”/ “'E’s done it; 'e came out yesterday.” n.d. (ill. Lindesay, WWW , 97). Later he ran the small SA distributing office for the Sydney Bulletin . But mostly Pryor drew for the Bulletin . Fifty years… notes that his Bulletin cartoons are '...mostly Cornish, or “Geordie”, subjects derived from Moonta (South Australia)’. The ML Bulletin collection has 163 original cartoons of 1906-22, 143 of 1930-36, 121 of 1937-41, 118 of 1941-60 and 36 caricatures of 1920-33 and n.d., mostly of South Australian topics and subjects.
Early Bulletin cartoons signed 'Oswald Pryor’ include Labour’s Real Identity ('Red Objective’) n.d. (courtesy Oswald Pryor) and The Enfant Terrible (Communism interrupting Labor wooing Miss Elector) n.d. (ditto), reproduced Harris p.289. Cartoons done in his later Bulletin years when he was freelancing from his home in Stanley Street, Leabrook, Adelaide, which are signed 'Pryor’ or 'Oswald Pryor’, include: Our Arbour Day (large Mitchell Library [ML] Bulletin original Px*D507/109) published 13 November 1924; Another Convert… , pen and ink political cartoon (ML SV*/CART/7) about Tom Walsh, Secretary of the Australian Seamen’s Union (ASU) during the 1925 Shipping Strike; 1926 driver joke (ill. Rolfe, 285); 1931 Another Little Misunderstanding (ill. Rolfe, 80): '“Parson do be tryin’ to strike good treble [female singer].”/ “What! And him so set and all against horse-racin’!”’
Pryor retired to Canberra and lived with his son Lindsay Dixon Pryor, Professor of Botany at Australian National University. His last cartoon was published when he was 85. He died at Queanbeyan on 13 June 1971. His grandson Geoff Pryor , political cartoonist on the Canberra Times , 'recalls many hours spent studying the works hung on his grandfather’s walls – works by Bulletin greats like Ted Scorfield, Norman Lindsay and David Low’ ( Pickering & Pryor 2002, p.7).
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 15 February 1881
- Summary
- Mid 20th century Moonta and Adelaide cartoonist. Pryor's last cartoon was published when he was 85.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 13-Jun-71
- Age at death
- 90
Details
Latitude-42.880556 Longitude147.325 Start Date1881-01-01 End Date1971-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
- Biography
- Rodway, apainter, pastellist and illustrator, was born on 11 November 1881 at Hobart, daughter of Leonard Rodway, a dentist and botanist, and Louisa Susan, née Phillips. She studied art at the Hobart Technical College (1897, 1899-1901) under Ethel Nicholls and the sculptor Benjamin Sheppard; fellow pupils included Mildred Lovett and Eileen Crow. After exhibiting with the Art Society of Tasmania from 1898 and teaching art at the College in 1902, she travelled to London to study at the Royal Academy Schools under Sargent, Bacon, Leslie, Storey and other visiting masters, for which she won a four-year scholarship. She gained a credit in the Academy examinations with work in which Bertram Stevens saw 'breadth of treatment, fecundity of imagination and persistent earnestness’.
After returning to Australia in 1906, Rodway set up a studio in Sydney and continued to study under Sydney Long at Julian Ashton’s Sydney Art School. Her dramatic depictions of draped figures entered with several other works in the 1907 First Exhibition of Women’s Work at Melbourne were referred to as 'titanic’ by D.H. Souter. In the first issue of Art in Australia (1916) her portraits were described as having 'considerable power … certainty and grace’. As well as oil studies, she drew black-and-white illustrations for journals such as the Lone Hand , e.g. illustration to Arthur H. Adams’s poem 'Loneliness’ in June 1907 (p.177), a very odd drawing titled The Sisters showing a naked (dead?) woman in a cave accompanied by a skeleton (September 1907, 494) and illustrations to Furnley Maurice’s poem 'Exile’ in May 1907, 105. 'The Australian Girl as seen by Florence Rodway’, one of a series, was published on 1 January 1910, 282(?). Sleep , a pastel of a sleeping girl awarded an Honorable Mention at the 1909 Society of Artists’ exhibition, was reproduced in the magazine on 1 April 1910, accompanying a review of the show which stated:
Miss Rodway has come with pastels into her kingdom, to which her familiar charcoal studies seem to-day but a highway. Unlike her charcoals, she does not over-work her pastels; and the several children and fair girls that she shows are handled with a most refreshing directness.
Rodway was an active member of the Society of Artists from 1908 to 1930 and a committee member in 1912. She was also a foundation committee member of the Society of Women Painters in 1910 and a member of the exhibition committee in 1910-12. By then she was receiving regular portrait commissions, especially for children and mostly in pastel or pencil. Three of her pastels, Toffee (a little girl), a portrait, and The Interview , were purchased for the Art Gallery of NSW in 1910, 1916 and 1920 respectively. By 1916 she was producing about twenty portraits a year but really preferred to do more complex compositions with several figures, like The Interview , in which a prospective young woman employer is interviewing a servant (evidently a cook) accompanied by her daughter. She received commissions to paint famous figures like Sir Adrian Knox (1920, ML), Sir William Cullen, Dame Nellie Melba, Julian Ashton, W.C. Wentworth and Henry Lawson (1913, ML). In 1919 the Art Gallery of NSW commissioned portraits of J.F. Archibald (1921) and Major General Sir William Bridges, the University of Sydney commissioned a portrait of Sir Alex McCormick. The Australian War Memorial commissioned portraits of Major General Sir William Bridges (1920), Brigadier General Henry MacLaurin (1922) and Captain Walter Gilchrist (1925).
Rodway exhibited throughout her life, most frequently before her marriage in 1920 to Walter Moore, a civil engineer, the birth of a daughter and the family’s return to Hobart. Even so, her work was included in the 1923 Exhibition of Australian Art at Burlington House, London, and in the following year’s British Empire Exhibition at Wembley. With Thea Proctor, Margaret Preston and thirteen male artists—including Sir John Longstaff, Arthur Streeton and Hans Heysen—she was again chosen to represent Australia (with The Interview ) in the second (1928) London exhibition of contemporary art of the Empire at the Imperial Institute, South Kensington. She had paintings in the 1934 Women Artists of Australia exhibition at Sydney and in the 1950-51 exhibitions of the Melbourne Society of Women Painters and Sculptors (when living in Melbourne). She died in Hobart on 23 January 1971.
Writers:
Bell, Pamela
AntheaGunn
Michael Bogle
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2022
- Born
- b. 11 November 1881
- Summary
- Florence Aline Rodway had a splendid career as a portraitist but preferred to do more complex compositions with figures. Together with artists such as Thea Proctor, Margaret Preston, Sir John Longstaff, Arthur Streeton and Hans Heysen she represented Australia in the second London exhibition of contemporary art of the Empire at the Imperial Institute in South Kensington in 1928.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 23-Jan-71
- Age at death
- 90
Details
Latitude-37.8246698 Longitude140.7820068 Start Date1870-01-01 End Date1971-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Mount Gambier, South Australia, Australia
- Biography
- foundation member of SA Society of Arts in 1892. Continued to exhibit until she was 90.
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Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1870
- Summary
- Ethel Annie Bloxam was a founding member of the South Australian Society of Arts in 1892 and a frequent exhibitor, showing her work regularly until the age of 90.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1971
- Age at death
- 101
Details
Latitude-32.9483779 Longitude151.7566681 Start Date1923-01-01 End Date1970-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Mereweather, Newcastle, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- (Helge John) Jon Molvig was born at Mereweather, Newcastle, NSW on 27 May 1923 to Helge Molvig, a Norwegian sailor and Bernadine Ward, whose family settled in northern New South Wales in 1852. After his mother’s early death in 1925, he was cared for by his grandmother, Isobel Ward, and after her death in 1932, by his aunt Eleanor Malley. On completing his primary schooling he worked in a garage and the Newcastle Steelworks.
Molvig enlisted in the Australian Citizen Military Forces 5 December 1941, was called up in the 4th Field Regiment R.A.A. at Greta 12 February 1942 and finally discharged 27 January 1944 after service in New Guinea. His early interest in art was rekindled when he saw the sketches by fellow soldier Stanislaw Payne and enrolled at the Strathfield branch of the East Sydney Technical College under the terms of the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme in 1947. His skill as a draftsman was acknowledged by fellow student (and his long time friend) John Rigby. He exhibited with the Strath Art Group during its active years 1949-1954 but being an intensely private man and a committed individualist, it was also the only organised group in which he ever participated.
His visit to Europe from late 1949-1952 with other students introduced him to the modernist paintings he had known only in reproductions. The work of the German and Norwegian expressionist painters he viewed at the Nasjonalgallerier, Oslo were later to prove very influential. He visited Brisbane in 1953 when his own expressionist leanings were reinforced with the underlying looseness of local art attributable to the senior Brisbane artist W.G. Grant (1876-1951) and established his individual style in paintings such as Crucifixion (private collection). He settled permanently in Brisbane two years later and produced a series of expressive figurative paintings in the years 1956-1957 whose aggressiveness and intensity (eg. Bride and groom 1956, Art Gallery of New South Wales and A twilight of women 1957, Queensland Art Gallery) is almost without parallel in the history of Australian art. In a 15-year survey at the Rudy Komon Gallery in August 1966, James Gleeson admired the strength of Molvig’s work but was dazzled by his output in the years 1955-61. Writing in the Sun Herald Glesson noted:
'No one in Australian art has painted so nakedly as Molvig did at that time. There was no covering his emotions. He had torn away the last skin of reserve, and painted the world he knew in his blood, his nerves and his heart. In a sense it was orgiastic – a great Dionysian acceptance of those ecstatic storms that sometimes blow up from the subconscious with such violence that the government of reason is overwhelmed. Even the paint looks as if it has been blown on the canvas by tremendous gusts of passion.’
The art scene in Brisbane was remarkably conservative so when he took over John Rigby’s classes at the studio beneath St. Mary’s Anglican Church, Kangaroo Point in November 1955 it became a focus for a closely knit group of students and fellow artists and the centre of innovatory art practice. Molvig quickly became the exemplar of the committed artist. He did not impose his own style on a student but created an environment in which they could establish their own voice. Naturally, some were profoundly influenced. The most significant students include John Aland, Maryke Degeus, Gil Jamieson, Mervyn Moriarty, Joy Roggenkamp, Andrew Sibley and Gordon Shepherdson. He was appreciated as a consummate draftsman promoting, in the words of Andrew Sibley 'the malleability of line and mass to create the pulse of the line.’ This was probably his greatest influence locally as he conducted life drawing classes until 1966 as opposed to the two years he taught painting.
Other important associates included his first dealers, Brian and Marjorie Johnstone (with whom he exhibited 1956-59), and the art critic Dr Gertrude Langer. Langer was to be a staunch supporter throughout Molvig’s career though she acknowledged, because of the nature of expressionist art, the unevenness of his production. Another was the director of the Queensland Art Gallery 1961-67, Laurie Thomas. Thomas’s support is evident in awarding Molvig the exhibitions he was invited to judge: the 1963 Perth Prize for Painting ( The family ), the 1964 Finney’s (David Jones) Art Prize ( Under arm still life No. 2 ), the 1966 Corio Five Star Whisky Prize ( The publican ), and the 1969 Gold Coast City Art Prize ( Tree of Man ).
Molvig’s career manifested further radical shifts of style. He exhibited at the Johnstone Gallery (the last at the city venue) in December 1957 before departing on a tour of Central Australia, with fellow painter Maryke Degeus, which became the inspiration of his 'Centralian’ series at the Johnstone Gallery in 1959. Although some of his paintings depicted the dispossession and alienation of the Aboriginal people, the series was more colourful than the preceding work – it was even designated by Dr Langer as 'lyrical’. Shortly afterwards Molvig was the first artist the Sydney dealer Rudy Komon contracted to his gallery with a monthly retainer. This provided Molvig with a stable income but he did not participate in the marked commercial and critical success of the Johnstone Gallery during the 1960s. Rudy Komon held exhibitions of his work in 1960, 1962, 1964, 1966, 1968, 1978 and 1984 and organised exhibitions in other venues; Argus Gallery, Melbourne 1962 and Grand Central Galleries 1966, Kennigo Street Gallery 1966, Johnstone Gallery 1972 and New Central Gallery 1977, all in Brisbane.
The 'Eden industrial’ series 1961-62 marked another shift into the remembered images of his childhood in the industrial city of Newcastle. His need to create a means of expression appropriate to his subject lead to his blow-torching the oil paint to create suitably eroded surfaces for some paintings. Predictably, this was sensationalised in the press. His first major award, the first Transfield Art Prize, 1961, at that time the nation’s richest award, was for one work from the series 'City industrial’. (He had received the Lismore Prizes in 1955 and 1956, the Rowney Drawing Prize in 1960.) Other major paintings include Eden industrial: The garden 1961 (Queensland Art Gallery).
The generative impulse for his work is largely conjectural as he was notoriously reticent in discussing his art and, as frequently, confrontational but his integrity and commitment to his art was unquestioned. His emphasis on figuration included his 'Pale nude’ series (the rendering, however, is more attenuated), dating to 1964 although his work did veer towards abstraction in his last major series, that of 'Tree of Man’ series, in the years 1967-69. These paintings, comprised of target shapes and skeletal forms, were described by Dr. Langer as 'expressive symbolism’ and may have a connection with Patrick White’s book of the same name (published 1955).
The divergence of his techniques becomes even more obvious in his justly famous portraits which include the hewn, massiveness of his Self portrait 1956 (Queensland Art Gallery) the spidery elegance of Janet Mathews 1957 (private collection), the grim monumentality of Russell Cuppaidge 1959 (Queensland Art Gallery) and the voluptuous brushwork depicting a close friend Joy Roggenkamp 1963 (private collection). He entered the Archibald Portrait Prizes at the Art Gallery of New South Wales from 1952 but it was not until 1955 that he was actually hung. Although reviewers considered he merited the prize on several occasions it was not until 1966 that he received the award with his portrait of Charles Blackman (now in the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia) and ceased exhibiting there.
The Transfield Prize enabled Molvig to purchase land in the outer Brisbane suburb of Mt. Cotton and after his marriage to Otte van Gilst on 26 August 1963 he devoted a major part of his time to the construction of a house into which they moved in 1967. His output decreased even further during these years as Molvig was now seriously ill. His childhood nephritis, together with the malaria he suffered during the war years and his alcohol intake, finally resulted in kidney failure. Molvig received the first kidney transplant to be performed in Queensland on 17 February, 1970 but died three months later on 15 May.
Although Molvig’s work is highly regarded, especially by artists, it still has not achieved the prominence it merits despite exhibitions toured nationally by the Newcastle Region Art Gallery (curated by Bronwyn Thomas in 1978 and Katrina Rumley in 2002) and the book on his career by Betty Churcher Molvig – the lost antipodean , 1984.
Writers:
Cooke, Glenn R.
Date written:
2000
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1923
- Summary
- Apart from being one of Australia's major figurative expressionist painters, Jon Molvig became a significant inspiration for the art scene in Brisbane when he settled there in 1955.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 15-May-70
- Age at death
- 47
Details
Latitude51.2 Longitude0.7 Start Date1920-01-01 End Date1970-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Kent, England, UK
- Biography
- Painter, was born on 1 April 1920 in Kent, England. Molly Pascall studied at the Medway School of Art, Rochester (1932-36) and at the Royal College of Art (1940-43) then taught at the Chesterfield School of Art. In 1945-46 she taught at the Girls’ School, Alexandria in Egypt where she married Douglas Stephens in December 1945. In 1951 the family came to Smithton, Tasmania. Molly moved to Hobart in 1954. She accompanied Max Angus and Patricia Giles on regular painting excursions, and she worked on portrait commissions, particularly of children. Her matter-of-fact classic surrealism is evident in Saturday Noon , oil on canvas 122 × 81 cm, n.d. (Nevin Hurst 2002, cat 82, $4,750): three women boiling the billy for a picnic on rocks near the sea – one naked brunette, another brunette in her underclothes and a dressed, barefooted, blonde pigtailed child who is opening the picnic basket.
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Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1999
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1 April 1920
- Summary
- Molly Stephens (née Pascall), born in Kent, England studied at both the Medway School of Art and the Royal College of Art, before going on to be a teacher. After moving to Egypt she came to reside in Hobart Tasmania, in 1951, painting mainly portrait commissions.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1970
- Age at death
- 50
Details
Latitude51.0690613 Longitude-1.7954134 Start Date1919-01-01 End Date1970-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Salisbury, Wiltshire, England, UK
- Biography
- David Edgar Strachan was born on 25 June 1919, at Salisbury in England. His mother was Eleanor Margery Isobel Strachan née Tapp of Bath, his father, Dr James Charles Power Strachan, had been a major in the Royal Australian Medical Corps. In 1920 he travelled to Australia, first to his father’s home in Adelaide and then to the old gold mining town of Creswick in Victoria where Dr Strachan became the town doctor. Dr Strachan’s patients included the elderly widowed Jane Elizabeth Lindsay, her daughters and her son Robert. Norman, Lionel and Percy Lindsay were the town’s most famous sons, and their many activities were the stuff of local legend. The youngest Lindsay boy, Daryl was a frequent visitor with his wife the novelist Joan Lindsay. Mrs Strachan in particular befriended Mary Lindsay, so young David was early embedded into a culture where art was a suitable career path.After attending Geelong Grammar school, the 16 year old David travelled to England with his mother, where he enrolled in the Slade School of Fine Art for two years. Here he met and befriended Godfrey Miller. In 1937 he travelled to France where he attended summer classes at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris and travelled south to paint at Cassis on the Riviera. On his return to Australia in 1938 he enrolled in classes at the George Bell School. In 1941 Strachan moved to Sydney, where there were other artists who shared his interest in classical form and mythologies. He lived at first on the top floor of the home of the artist Jean Bellette and her husband the influential art critic Paul Haefliger. Along with many other artists in their circle they travelled to the picturesque abandoned gold mining town of Hill End. The lively and supportive artistic community of what became known as the bq). Charm Schoolbq). was contrasted with his war work of painting camouflage against possible Japanese bomb attacks.At the end of the War he left Australia for Paris, where he joined with former Sydney friends, Hélène Kirsova and Peter Bellew, who was working for UNESCO. Bellew had included Strachan in an exhibition at the Musée National d’Art Moderne two years earlier, and his work was well received. In 1950 Strachan began to experiment with printmaking, both making individual prints and publishing artists’ books. Along with Alister Kershaw and Jacques Murray he founded Stramur-Presse which printed etchings and lithographs by other artists as well as their own work in exquisite artists’ books. He maintained close friendships with others in the Australian expatriate community including the Haefligers at their Majorca home and undertook extensive painting trips with Moya DyringBy the late 1950s Strachan was increasingly interested in Jungian psychology and spend most of 1957 and 1958 at the C. G. Jung-Institut in Zürich. He returned to Australia in 1960 and in 1963 bought a house in Paddington. The food he made at his Paddington home formed aspects of his carefully considered subject matter. He also became an inspirational teacher of printmaking to young students at East Sydney Technical College, and helped foster a new Australian generation of artists in print.His starkly elegant landscapes and symbolist inspired still-lives were not fashionable with the avant-garde, but remained highly regarded by the Trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales,who twice awarded him the Wynne Prize. He did not forget his Creswick past, but when he painted landscapes of abandoned gold mines, his paintings were based on Hill End in NSW, not Creswick in Victoria. His last major painting, Lewers Freehold Mine, an historical re-imagining of what the mine may have looked like in 1874, was given by him to the Creswick Historical Society to honour his late father.David Strachan was returning to Sydney from presenting this work when he died after a motor accident on the Hume Highway on 23 November 1970.
Writers:
Staff Writer
staffcontributor
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2012
- Born
- b. 25 June 1919
- Summary
- David Strachan, the son of the Lindsay family's doctor, studied in London and Paris before attending the George Bell School in Melbourne. He is most identified the Sydney Charm School of the 1950s, and with the revival of etching in Australia. He was awarded the Wynne Prize in 1961 and 1964.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 23-Nov-70
- Age at death
- 51
Details
Latitude-34.9275 Longitude138.6 Start Date1912-01-01 End Date1970-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Adelaide, SA, Australia
- Biography
- illustrator and writer, was born in Adelaide. Studied South Australian School of Art, Adelaide with Wilkie. Began working as an illustrator in Adelaide in the 1930s (see Peaceful Army ). Apart from a visit to Sydney in 1937, she lived in England from 1935. A coloured poster she designed for London’s Southern Railway is in the James Hardie Childhood collection (now Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW), which also holds a Chinese scene. Her children’s books were published in England from 1952.
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Writers:
Staff Writer
staffcontributor
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1912
- Summary
- Elizabeth Skottowe, illustrator and writer, was born in Adelaide. She studied at the South Australian School of Art, Adelaide and worked as an illustrator in the 1930s. She designed a coloured poster for London's Southern Railway and also wrote children's books.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1970
- Age at death
- 58
Details
Latitude-37.87731945 Longitude145.042234 Start Date1912-01-01 End Date1970-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Caulfield, Melbourne, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- cartoonist, painter and illustrator, novelist and journalist, was born in Caulfield, Victoria. While studying in Melbourne with Sam Atyeo (and possibly at the National Gallery of Victoria) he drew cartoons for several publications including the Bulletin and Smith’s Weekly . He also did illustrations for the Australian Weekend Book and other publications. Original cartoons in Mitchell Library include one of 1933 (Mitchell Library PXD 764). Then he turned to journalism and travelled the world for many years as a foreign and war correspondent, living and working in 46 countries, including Tibet, China, and Burma. After the war he settled in London as editor of the European bureau of Australian Associated Newspapers but resigned in 1954 in order 'to gamble on life as a free-lance novelist’. He lived on the island of Hydra in Greece with his Australian-born wife, Charmian Clift, and their three children. Best-known as an author of war books, travel books, novels, and thrillers, including My Brother Jack and a slightly autobiographical detective story Death Takes Small Bites .
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Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 20 July 1912
- Summary
- Noted mid 20th century novelist and journalist, Johnston also worked as a cartoonist, painter and illustrator. He travelled the world for many years as a foreign and war correspondent, living and working in 46 countries, including Tibet, China, and Burma.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 22-Jul-70
- Age at death
- 58
Details
Latitude-32.05423 Longitude115.74763 Start Date1910-01-01 End Date1970-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Fremantle, WA, Australia
- Biography
- Painter, illustrator, designer and art teacher born in Fremantle, Western Australia. His father was a teacher in the Education Department and the family moved about. He studied at Northam High School, graduating in 1926 and then at Fremantle Technical School under Muriel Southern, obtaining credit passes in both Light & Shade I & II in 1927. A 1927 cutting in the Art Gallery of Western Australia files confirms his skill stating that, “Mr. R. Thompson showed remarkable ability for the delineation of character in four pencil sketches.” He had exhibited the four studies with the West Australian Society of Arts. Thompson went on to study at Swinburne Art School in Melbourne in 1928 and later at Julian Ashton’s in Sydney each weekend from 1936 to 1938. He worked as a poster designer and lino-cut reproducer for Renwick, Pride and Nuttall in Melbourne, then the Woodward Advertising Agency from 1929-1930 until the Depression forced him to return to work on the family property at Serpentine. He then became a poster designer for the Imperial Printing Company, before working freelance in Sydney in 1935. He designed covers for the Women’s Weekly and later for the Western Mail. In 1933 he exhibited a number of entries with the West Australian Society of Arts, six watercolours in the landscape competition, five oils in the portrait section as well as pencil drawings and other watercolours. “Renee”, the critic, wrote of his 1935 exhibits, “The most successful exhibitor was R. M. Thompson, who carried off the prize for the best watercolour, with his On the Hillside, and also the portrait prize for an unfinished self-portrait in oils. Also commendable were his River Scene, Fremantle and Sand Dunes, Cottesloe.” Thompson returned to Perth in 1941 where he worked for Art Photo Engravers as an advertising illustrator before enrolling in the Royal Australian Engineers in 1942. He was sent to a course in camouflage design in Sydney and served on the front in New Guinea before lecturing in camouflage at Kapooka. He married Beatrice (Biddy) Cullingworth during the war. After the war he became an advertising artist with West Australian Newspapers where he met Ivor Hunt and in 1948 began teaching at Perth Technical College where he became a Senior Lecturer and on occasion Acting Head of Department. He also exhibited with the Perth Society of Artists. His 1950 exhibtion piece was a watercolour, Canning River, Kelmscott and 1953 his entries were oil paintings Man Reading and The Little Gardener. Thompson illustrated many books and also designed The Sower a sculpture for Bible House in Perth. Thompson, who had a very sensitive skill with the pencil, went on to lecture at Western Australian Institute of Technology until he retired with ill health about 1969 and died soon after. He was a very gentle man remembered with affection by past students.
Writers:
Dr Dorothy Erickson
Date written:
2010
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1910
- Summary
- Painter, illustrator, designer and art teacher. He was a very gentle man remembered with affection by past students.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1970
- Age at death
- 60
Details
Latitude-27.467778 Longitude153.028056 Start Date1907-01-01 End Date1970-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Brisbane, Qld., Australia
- Biography
- cartoonist and illustrator, was born in Brisbane on 24 July 1907, daughter of an Englishman. Confined to bed with TB of the spine as a child, she lost two fingers of her right hand in her teens and learnt to write and draw with her left. In some accounts Botterill left for England in the 1920s when she attended the Royal Academy Schools in 1928-30 and studied art under Stephen Spurrier for a year before becoming a freelance commercial artist. In other accounts the family settled in England in 1915 when Antonia was three and she had no further connection with Australia.
As 'Botterill’, Antonia freelanced as a fashion and commercial artist in 1932-37, producing numerous advertising posters and showcards. In 1937 she formed a cartooning partnership with her brother, Harold Underwood Thompson (b. Cheshire 1911 & apparently still alive in 1994), who had begun cartooning as 'H. Botterill’ in 1935. They called themselves 'Anton’. During the war, when Harold was on active service in the Navy, Antonia drew all the Anton cartoons. They teamed up again after the war and produced many cartoons for Punch , Lilliput , Men Only and others, until 1949 when Harold’s work as director of an advertising agency left him less time for drawing and Antonia again took over the name entirely.
Anton’s drawings of spivs, forgers, dukes and duchesses were very popular and appeared in the Tatler , Evening Standard (where the weekly cartoons were entirely by Harold) and Private Eye , as well as in Punch etc. Antonia was the only female member of Punch 's Toby Club and the first woman elected to the Chelsea Arts Club. She also illustrated 17 books, drew a series of popular advertisements for Moss Bros and, with Harold, published two cartoon anthologies: Anton’s Amusement Arcade (1947) and Low Life and High Life (1952). She died in England on 30 June 1970.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 24 July 1907
- Summary
- Mid 20th century cartoonist and illustrator, born in Brisbane. She moved to England as a young woman where she studied art under Stephen Spurrier at the Royal Academy Schools. She later formed a cartooning patnership with her brother under the pen name 'Anton'. Botterill also worked as a commercial and fashion artist and was the only female member of Punch magazine's Toby Club and the first woman
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 30-Jun-70
- Age at death
- 63
Details
Latitude-34.9275 Longitude138.6 Start Date1903-01-01 End Date1970-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
- Biography
- Cartoonist, caricaturist, songwriter and radio broadcaster, was born in Adelaide. After a brilliant university career in Adelaide, his father became a Far Eastern correspondent on various newspapers but returned to Adelaide after some caustic, witty remarks were reprinted in Tokyo dailies. There he founded University College, of which he was headmaster, then unexpectedly threw up everything and moved to Coff’s Harbour with his wife and five children to manage the British-Australian Timber Mill and its 'couple of hundred’ employers that dominated the settlement. Kerwin spent his childhood there. His eldest brother, Hugh, tally clerk of the B.A.T. Timber Mill at Coff’s Harbour Jetty from the age of 15 (when Kerwin was 'about seven’), served as a lieutenant in France with the AIF, was severely wounded at Bullecourt and awarded the Military Cross in WWI; he also served in WWII.
Kerwin, who was left-handed, did drawings, cartoons and (kind, flattering) caricatures that were widely published from the 1920s to the 1960s. He was especially interested in cricket and in 1934, while in England, drew sporting caricatures of the Australian XI touring cricket team for London newspapers and magazines. For this, Florence Taylor claimed, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (he was also proud that 'Three British Kings’ – Edward VIII (the Duke of Windsor), George V and George VI – had 'stood for Kerwin Maegraith to draw them’. His page of caricatures 'Some Sydney Artists’, published in the Sydney Mail on 11 August 1937 (p.32), included Joan Morrison and 25 men connected with that year’s Artists’ Ball identified as: A. Aria , Will Ashton (Director of the NAG NSW), Jim Bancks , Maurice Bramley, Stan Cross (President of the Ball Committee), George Finey , John Frith , Tom Glover , Raynor Hoff ('brilliant sculptor’), Arthur Horner , Lahm , Norman Lindsay , Peter Lindsay, George Little , Brodie Mack ('cartoons sporting celebrities’), Will Mahoney , Arthur Mailey (cricketer and cricket cartoonist), Emile Mercier , Syd Miller , Syd Nicholls , Virgil Reilly , Dan Russell , Jim Russell (Secretary of the Ball Committee), Ted Scorfield ('the man who so happily satirises life’s foibles’) and Frank Whitmore . In old age Maegraith drew murals for the Illawarra Master Builders’ Club at Wollongong, similarly consisting of dozens of black and white caricatures of local members drawn from life.
Maegraith wrote the words and lyrics of It Ain’t Cricket , a musical revue performed in Melbourne in 1935 starring Don Bradman. He was also interested in surf lifesaving and flying. He wrote a memoir (an undated recording of him reading from it is at ML OH 37/1-8), a biography of Florence Taylor (a recording of him reading from it, ML OH 37/9-21, c.1969), a short appreciation of George Taylor , the fellow cartoonist who had founded Construction in which Maegraith published most of his cartoons, and a memoir of his family’s early years in Coff’s Harbour entitled 'Timber … We Were The Pioneers’, included in his book of cartoons (pp.51-53). In 1988 the SLNSW acquired his papers (ML MSS 4944) and pictorial material (Pic.Acc.6514) from Peter Maegraith, evidently his son.
The ML’s Bulletin collection holds 109 original caricatures by Maegraith of men from South Australia (mainly), WA and Victoria (1924-33 and undated). He also contributed to Beckett’s Budget , e.g. 'MADGE: “Why did you quarrel with Ethel last night?”/ MABEL: “She called me an old scandalmonger.”/ MADGE: “But, my dear, you’re not old!”’ (25 November 1927, 18). He wrote reports of visits to country towns, which he illustrated with caricatures, e.g. Kerwin Maegraith visits Griffith 14 June 1927, 6. ML also has a Sam Hood photocopy of a 1945 caricature of Sammy Lee by 'newspaper artist Kerwin Meagraith’. He drew instant caricatures on TV.
His book (p.27), made up of cartoons from Construction , Australasian Engineer and Building , edited by Florence Taylor, includes If Joern Utzon Is Not Long, We Will Wait For The Opera House! – 10 amiable caricature heads of Sydney businessmen in the building industry dominated by a full-length and very, very 'long’ Utzon taking up the length of the page ('Up in the Clouds Joern Utzon hopes they will be getting going pretty quickly on The Opera House’).
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1903
- Summary
- Mid 20th century Adelaide born, well travelled Sydney based cartoonist, caricaturist, songwriter and radio broadcaster. Maegraith drew instant caricatures on TV.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1970
- Age at death
- 67
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1903-01-01 End Date1970-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, VIC, Australia
- Biography
- This record is a stub. You can help out by adding more detail.
Writers:
staffcontributor
Date written:
2011
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1903
- Summary
- Stewart's paintings were discovered by the artist Clifton Pugh in a junk shop in Echuca, Victoria in 1970 and he was subsequently recognised as a 'primitive painter' of great talent.
- Gender
- Unspecified
- Died
- 1970
- Age at death
- 67
Details
Latitude58.7523778 Longitude25.3319078 Start Date1901-01-01 End Date1970-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Estonia
- Biography
- graphic artist and industrial designer, born Estonia; arrived Australia in the 1930s from Germany. Won Sulman Prize in 1939. One of the first poster artists to work in a semi abstract style in Melbourne. Later adapted Aboriginal Art to advertising. Stamp design featuring Aboriginal rock carving of crocodile 1948, pen, ink gouache on card, National Philatelic Museum, Melbourne (ill Baddeley).Did the colour lithographic posters Sunshine and Surf, Australia 1932 (National Archives), Surf Club Australia 1935 (National Archives) and Australia [Boomerang] 1957 (National Gallery of Australia) for the Australian National Travel Association; The Grampians, Victoria, Australia c.1939 (NLA) for the Victorian Railways (poster no.117).
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1901
- Summary
- Sellheim was a graphic artist and industrial designer. He won the Sulman Prize in 1939 and was one of the first poster artists to work in a semi abstract style in Melbourne. He also undertook work as a muralist for the Victorian Tourist Bureau, the NZ Centennial Exhibition 1939 as well as domestic clients.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1970
- Age at death
- 69
Details
Latitude-32.9316667 Longitude151.7677778 Start Date1899-01-01 End Date1970-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Cooks Hill, Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia
- Biography
- painter and graphic artist. Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, holds William Dobell was born on 24 September 1899 at Cooks Hill in Newcastle, the sixth and youngest child of Robert Dobell, a bricklayer,and his wife Margaret Emma Wrightson. At Cooks Hill Commercial Public School his teacher, John Walker, noticed his talent for drawing and encouraged him. By 1916 he was working as a technical draughtsman for a local architect, Wallace Lintott Porter. In 1924 he moved to Sydney where he worked for the pressed metal manufacturers’ Wunderlich, while undertaking evening classes at the Sydney Art School under Henry Gibbons. His precocious talent for drawing soon attracted attention. When he was awarded the NSW Travelling Art Scholarship in 1929, both Wunderlich and the Committee for the Artists’ Ball supplemented the funds as they knew this student did not have a wealthy family to subsidise his international travel.He travelled to London and enrolled in the Slade School in late 1929. In 1930 he was awarded first prize for a painted nude study by a student. Financially, the London years were hard for Dobell as the Travelling Art Scholarship only had funds for two years, and he moved from a series of basement and attic rooms in a series of boarding houses. In order to survive the bleak years of the Great Depression Dobell drew illustrations for magazines and advertising agencies. Mary Eagle records that Dobell told his biographer James Gleeson 'that the editors of illustrated magazines only wanted corny jokes about sailors and pretty women’. She notes a drawing in cartoon style in one of his sketchbooks (c.1933, National Gallery of Australia [NGA]) showing a Salvation Army officer peering through a bathroom keyhole and saying to a fellow officer, 'Quick Joey! Play the National Anthem!’ He also designed posters, e.g. Orient Line to Australia (NGA).A fellow student, Nancy Kilgour (married to Jack Noel Kilgour) noted in her diary how awkwardly Dobell behaved in the presence of women. He had an acutely cynical observant eye, and his small swift paintings of these years effectively captured the follies and the pretentions of London life with paintings such as Mrs South Kensington (1937 AGNSW) and The Dead Landlord (1936) a painting which inspired Patrick White to write The Ham Funeral. He could also paint gently romantic studies such as The Boy at the Basin (1932 AGNSW) and his sensuous study The Sleeping Greek (1936 AGNSW). In cosmopolitan London, in the company of openly gay friends like Donald Friend, Dobell could relax somewhat about his sexuality, and his drawings of the late 1930s are more frank in their admiration of the male body than previous work. At the beginning of 1939, on hearing that his father was ill, he began the long journey home, but decided to travel home via Paris. Robert Dobell died in February 1939, before his son could return.As his paintings had been hung bq). On the Linebq). at the Royal Academy, and as he had easily mastered the ironic yet technically adept academic style of the Slade tradition, Dobell was received with some enthusiasm in Sydney. He was honoured with a survey exhibition at the National Art Gallery of NSW and when war broke out was able to become one of the group of artists painting camouflage. Homosexuality was illegal for all of Dobell’s lifetime and in Sydney he was careful to remain both in the closet, and in the background at any social meeting. This attempt at personal camouflage was destroyed in 1944 when he was awarded the Archibald Prize for the portrait of fellow artist, Joshua Smith. Smith had been one of three other men sharing a tent with Dobell in Army service, but this detail did not stop the Daily Mirror from publishing a headline that was designed to imply a greater intimacy. The painting was under attack partly because in awarding the prize to Dobell, who was associated with the Society of Artists, the Trustees had broken a time-honoured unwritten agreement that it was the turn of a Royal Art Society painter to win. The fact that this was a modernist portrait by an artist only recently returned from London compounded the insult. The Trustees awarded the prize to Dobell because there were at this time fewer votes aligned with the Royal Art Society. Their president, William Lister Lister, had died suddenly on 6 November 1943 and the Minister for Education, Clive Evatt, had not replaced him. The Minister had two unaligned nominees on the board. One of these was the former State Librarian and deputy-director of the Department of War Organisation of Industry in New South Wales, W.H. Ifould. The other, appointed in March 1943, was his sister-in-law Mary Alice Evatt, the first woman to join the board. She was a vocal advocate of modern art and not inclined to support conservative artists with a sense of entitlement.Two unsuccessful artists who were also members of the Royal Art Society, Mary Edwards and Joseph Wolinski, sued the Trustees of the National Art Gallery of NSW, claiming that Dobell’s portrait of Smith was bq). not a portrait but a caricature bq)..It was hard for the Trustees to openly defend the case, as those associated with the Royal Art Society were happily providing information to Howard Ashton who was the art critic of the Sydney Sun, as well as the plaintiffs. Tensions on the Trustees were compounded when in April 1944, some eight months before the case was heard, Clive Evatt appointed Dobell to the Board as a replacement for the Royal Art Society’s Lister Lister.Despite the attacks and innuendo in the media, support came from surprising sources. Lionel Lindsay, a fierce anti-modernist who nevertheless saw merit in Dobell’s work, secretly provided detailed briefing notes to the defence barristers. His briefing notes included the information that the principal witness for the plaintiffs, J.S. MacDonald, had written his attack on the portrait of Joshua Smith without seeing it. This formed the basis of the rigorous cross examination of MacDonald, and damaged the credibility of the plaintiffs. Dobell, who was called as a witness, spoke well to defend his practice as an artist and as a painter of portraits. As colourful as the Dobell Archibald case was (and it certainly provided a useful distraction from World War II), the plaintiffs attack on modern art was doomed. Justice Roper ruled that the only question that could lawfully decided by the court was the competence of the Trustees to make a decision to award the prize, and therefore the case was dismissed. Even though he had not been on trial, Dobell was traumatised by both the courtroom experience, and the media attention. He retreated to his sister’s house at Wangi Wangi on Lake Macquarie. Oddly enough the ordeal by media had made Dobell a popular figure. His paintings never fully recovered the satirical edge of his earlier studies, but their sweetness made them greatly admired as subjects for reproduction in Womens’ Weekly and other magazines. He was awarded the 1948 Archibald Prize for his portrait of fellow artist Margaret Olley, and the Wynne for Storm approaching Wangi.He visited New Guinea as the guest of Sir Edward Hallstrom and made many delightful small oil sketches of a more exotic life, as well as painting society portraits. He painted the aged poet Dame Mary Gilmore, and eight portraits of the beautician Helena Rubenstein. His most famous commission was of the Prime Minister, Robert Gordon Menzies, a commission for Time magazine. Neither the subject nor the artist had much sympathy for each other, and both placed this on the public record. He was knighted in 1966, a year after Menzies’ retirement.Dobell died at Wangi Wangi of congestive heart failure, on 13 May 1970 and directed that his estate be used to establish the Sir William Dobell Art Foundation.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Joanna Mendelssohn
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 24 September 1899
- Summary
- William Dobell came from a working class family in Newcastle to become one of Australia's most loved artist and the creator of fashionable portraits. He was awarded the 1943 Archibald Prize for his portrait of fellow artist Joshua Smith and in 1960 his portrait of the Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, was on the cover of 'Time' magazine.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 13-May-70
- Age at death
- 71
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1895-01-01 End Date1970-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, VIC, Australia
- Biography
- painter, cartoonist, violinist and singer, was born in Melbourne on 18 March 1895, daughter of the artist Hugh Paterson and Elizabeth Leslie, née Deans, and younger sister of Esther Paterson .
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
1992
- Born
- b. 18 March 1895
- Summary
- Mid 20th century Melbourne painter, cartoonist, violinist and singer. Sister of Esther Paterson.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 5-Jul-70
- Age at death
- 75
Details
Latitude-37.7667 Longitude144.9628 Start Date1894-01-01 End Date1970-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Brunswick, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
- Biography
- China painter was born in Brunswick, Victoria and moved to Western Australia where she lived in Midland Junction and became a student at Midland Junction Technical School under Flora Landells in 1912-13. Mechenstok married and became Mrs Lange and moved to Pingelly where she continued to paint. In 1933 she signed her work “B. Lange”.This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Dr Dorothy Erickson
Date written:
2010
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1894
- Summary
- Bertha Marianne Helene Mechenstok was born in 1894. She was a student at Midland Junction Technical School under Flora Landells in 1912-13.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1970
- Age at death
- 76
Details
Latitude-37.814167 Longitude144.963056 Start Date1890-01-01 End Date1970-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Melbourne, VIC, Australia
- Biography
- painter, printmaker and commercial artist, was born in Melbourne and received her artistic training at the National Gallery School in 1907-10.
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. c.1890
- Summary
- Although born in Melbourne, Molly O'Shea came to favour Sydney's bays and beaches. Landscapes and floral arrangements were her forte, but she was also awarded the Francis Zabel Prize in 1932 for a bookplate design at the International Exhibition of Bookplates in Sydney. She was a member of several artist societies and was hung in the Wynne Prize at the Art Gallery of NSW.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- c.1970
- Age at death
- 80
Details
Latitude-37.7867587 Longitude144.9193668 Start Date1889-01-01 End Date1970-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Flemington, Melbourne, Vic., Australia
- Biography
- was born on 18 November 1889 at Flemington Melbourne, second daughter of George Hendry Hardess and Ann Emma, née Taylor.
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Note: Primary
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 18 November 1889
- Summary
- Fabric designer, she worked in collaboration with Mollie Grove. Together they established a business and from 1940 until the early 1960s, they worked as artist-craftswomen producing Australian woven textiles. Work by Hardess is shown in "Design in Everyday Things" ABC, 1941 where she is described as an interior designer and fashion designer.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1970
- Age at death
- 81
Details
Latitude-27.3181585 Longitude153.063315 Start Date1888-01-01 End Date1970-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sandgate, Qld, Australia
- Biography
- Frank Waldo (Wal) Potts was born at Sandgate, 1888, the youngest child of the three daughters and three sons born to William Potts and Selma née Hartenstein. His father was a tailor with premises in Queen Street whose clients included the Queensland’s Governors. He attended the Normal School, Anne Street and later became a student of Richard Godfrey Rivers at the Brisbane Technical College. Potts exhibited original oils and copies at the Queensland National Agricultural and Industrial Association from 1906 to 1907 and worked for a time in a hardware store. Potts served in the AIF during World War I (1916-19) where he met David McHaffie at the Enoggera Army Barracks in Brisbane who became a lifelong friend. When the war ended they settled on a fruit farm at Flaxton on the Blackall Range. Potts, like Kenneth Macqueen , painted after his work on the farm had been completed and during the years from 1926 to 1966 exhibited more than 170 landscape and still lifes (mainly watercolours) at the Royal Queensland Art Society annual exhibitions.
When he retired to Woody Point, subjects on the Redcliffe Peninsular became dominant and he exhibited extensively in the Redcliffe Art Contest from 1957 to 1966. He was also a member of the Brisbane Art Group from 1948 to 1953 and was included in the 1951 'Exhibition of Queensland Art’ at the then Queensland National Art Gallery. Potts held solo exhibitions at Finney’s Art Gallery, c.1953-54, Don McInnes Gallery, Brisbane, September 1968 and two (one of which was in 1957) at Allan & Stark’s Gallery, Queen Street.
He produced attractive oil paintings but was largely noted for the quality of his watercolours. Indeed, Dr Duhig, a noted art patron in Brisbane during the first half of the 20th century, commented about Pott’s watercolour, Valley of the Maroochy , when he presented it to the Queensland National Art Gallery Collection, '... I believe that this is a particularly fine piece of work and I doubt whether a better water-colour painting of a landscape has even been done in Queensland.’ (1) This is no doubt a fine work but the claim may be a little excessive as Kenneth Macqueen was producing his stylish watercolours of the Darling Downs by then. Watercolour was a particular strength in Queensland art practice at this time and Potts contributed significantly both in his floral still lifes and landscapes. His landscapes of the hilly countryside where he lived (such as The Obi from Mapleton Range also on the QAG Collection) can have a peculiar vertiginous quality about then. He died at Chermside, Brisbane on 27 July 1970.
1. Letter from Dr. J. V. Duhig, 30 Oct. 1939.
Writers:
Cooke, Glenn R.
Date written:
2006
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1888
- Summary
- Wal Potts was a proficient exponent of the watercolour medium which was, during the 1930s to the 1950s, favoured by Queensland artists. Potts excelled in both landscape and still life studies and their decorative patterning were typical of modern styles in Queensland.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 27-Jul-70
- Age at death
- 82
Details
Latitude-33.867778 Longitude151.21 Start Date1888-01-01 End Date1970-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sydney, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- painter and printmaker, was born in Sydney, daughter of Rachel M. and Harry E. Farmer, owner of Bullivant’s Australia Company.
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1888
- Summary
- Painter and etcher who studied under Sydney Long and was taught the intaglio printmaking technique by Sir Will Ashton. Regarded as one of the principal women etcher-painters during Australia's Golden Age of Etching (1920/1930).
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 3-Apr-70
- Age at death
- 82
Details
Latitude-34.5672546 Longitude150.3212358 Start Date1887-01-01 End Date1970-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Sutton Forest, NSW, Australia
- Biography
- cartoonist, was born Sutton Forest NSW but left Australia aged 18 months. He became a well-known English cartoonist with work in Tatler, Sketch, London Opinion, Passing Show etc., especially Punch where he became known for his 'The Man Who…’ series of cartoons. The Art Gallery of Western Australia (958/0D65) has The Making of a Reformer n.d., acquired from the proprietors of Punch . Bateman revisited Australia in 1939, touring Fremantle, Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney (March-April 1939) with an exhibition of his work sent out from England.
Cousin of sculptor Daphne Mayo .
This entry is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 1887
- Summary
- Popular early 20th Australian-born English Punch cartoonist. Bateman was the creator of the well-known "The Man who.." series.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1970
- Age at death
- 83
Details
Latitude-22.1646782 Longitude144.5844903 Start Date1878-01-01 End Date1970-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Queensland
- Biography
- craftworker, came from Queensland. After studying tailoring, she supported her family by designing and making fashionable dresses and theatrical costumes. Her designs featured decorative beadwork and hand embroidery. In the 1920s she opened a small dress shop in Bondi Junction, Sydney. A talented artist, she was able to learn and adapt new craft techniques quickly and the business apparently did quite well. In 1928 she and her daughter Olive visited London where they attended classes in pyrography (pokerwork). They returned to Australia at the onset of the Great Depression and used their new skill to provide a living for them both.
This entry is a stub. You can help DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Toy, Ann
Note: Heritage biography.
stokel
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1878
- Summary
- Craftworker, working with fashion and costume designs featuring decorative beadwork and hand embroidery.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1970
- Age at death
- 92
Details
Latitude-42.880556 Longitude147.325 Start Date1918-01-01 End Date1969-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
- Biography
- Artist and stage designer
This artist’s biography is a stub. You can help the DAAO by submitting a biography.
Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007
- Born
- b. 9 January 1918
- Summary
- Sainthill was involved in a number of mural projects while in Melbourne. He became a leading mid 20th century painter and theatre designer who lived in Merioola, Sydney, before moving to London.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 10-Jun-69
- Age at death
- 51
Details
Latitude51.3104474 Longitude0.302977975 Start Date1911-01-01 End Date1969-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Wrotham, Kent, England, UK
- Biography
- cartoonist, was born in Wrotham, Kent, England (with a Danish grandmother). The family moved to Tasmania when she was three. She had juvenilia published in local newspapers, notably the Tasmanian Mail , to which she is said to have contributed an annual decorative panel for years after leaving Tasmania. The Triad published a piece by her in its Children’s Page before she moved to Sydney to study art under Rayner Hoff at East Sydney Technical College [ESTC], specialising in sculpture. 'The Revival of Sculpture’ in Art in Australia (March 1927) mentioned that Morrison’s scultpures – along with works by Vic Cowdroy , Mavis Mallison, Mollie Rohr and Coral White – 'had a fresh and original outlook which invested it with considerable interest’, although Eileen McGrath was the star.
At ESTC the 15-year old Morrison met Norman Lindsay , who encouraged her to illustrate her first book. Her illustrations to Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales were published in the Triad in April 1927 (then being edited by Norman’s great friend, Hugh McCrae). A serial, 'Little Bo’ by Madeleine Honey illustrated by Morrison, began in Australian Childhood on 20 June 1930. By 1930 she was also doing humorous drawings for the Sporting and Dramatic Magazine and illustrations for the Sydney Mail . She also contributed to Smith’s Weekly . Her (first?) cartoon, published on 5 January 1929, 12, was typical of the direction her work was to take: She: “Your face seems familiar. Haven’t we met before?”/ He: “Rather! I was the second co-respondent in your first divorce case” . With Mollie Horseman , she was appointed to the permanent staff of Smith’s later that year.
Morrison drew a few joint 'Smith’s Sisters’ strips with Horseman, e.g. showing them together (i) shopping and (ii) refusing to do a strip for the editor. Her own cartoons for the paper came in two different styles, comic dolls (like Mollie’s English style) and more US-inspired glamour girls. Sometimes the two are mixed, as in an early example with a stereotypical caricature of a hen-pecked husband on the beach clutching a giant fish toy beside a glamorous young wife (published 3 February 1934). The glamour style that became her trademark was evident a couple of months later in a rear view drawing of a glamorous beach couple, with him saying, “What would you do if you had a face like Mabel’s?” and her replying, “I’d start saving up for my old age” (14 April 1934).
Other Smith’s Weekly cartoons by Morrison include: TEACHER: Why has Australia a wonderful future before her?/ JOHNNY: Because Bradman’s still young” published 20 May 1934; (rear of woman in backless dress looking into mirror beside husband dressing) WIFE: “I have to have decent clothes.”/ HUSBAND: “What, are the police complaining?” 26 May 1934; SHE: “How do you account for your success as a futurist painter?”/ HE: “I always use a model with St. Vitus’s dance” 2 June 1934, 2; (three women in boudoir) BETTY: “There was something about the party I don’t understand.” / MOLLY: “What was that?”/ BETTY: “How I got home from it “ 16 June 1934; (two cheerful fat, working class women on husband being cremated in order to ensure that at least his ashes will do some work – in an hour glass) 30 June 1934; (glamour girl in charge of exercising four fat females) She Knew a Fat Lot 7 July 1934; (very Virgil-like glamour girl on couch) Some Body 11 August 1934; (comic English) AUNT: “What sort of sports do you go in for?”/ FLAPPER: “The ones who give you a good time” 25 August 1934; YOUNG WIFE: “I used to cook for an hotel before you married me.”/ HUSBAND: “I suppose the bar trade pulled them through” 15 September 1934; (beach) Girls of the wide, open spaces 29 September 1934; LODGER: “Ah, Mrs. Mangle, half the world is ignorant of how the other half lives.”/ LANDLADY: “Not in this boarding 'ouse, miss!” 15 December 1934; one-page spread 16 April 1938, 3; (old comic woman and glamour gal) “She doesn’t seem to take marriage seriously.”/ “Well, it’s only her second wedding” 18 August 1934; (two showgirls) “I can’t decide to accept this year’s contract or get married.”/ “Well, which do you think would last the longest?” 25 August 1934; [strip cartoon of woman doing exercises] 6 January 1940; [ Chorus Girl 1 ] “I had chapped lips all last winter.”/ [ Chorus Girl 2 ]: “Who was the chap?” 1941. Her original cartoon “All men are the same to me.”/ “It’s a wonder your husband stands it” was donated to ML (PXD 840) in 1999 by the wife of a former Smith’s Weekly reporter along with 20+ works by other artists and a copy of the final issue (28 October 1950) signed by all the cartoonists.
In the 1930s Morrison briefly drew theatrical caricatures in Smith’s , e.g. Highspots from the Shows , published 3 March 1934, 16. Along with other Smith’s artists, she illustrated Ken Slessor’s later verses after Virgil ceased drawing his girls to accompany them. A selection collected by Julian Croft containing a couple of Morrison girls was belatedly published in book form as Backless Betty from Bondi (Sydney, A&R, 1983). Morrison trod a fine line between pandering to her audience’s prejudices and sending them up. The results are certainly of their time, yet her best cartoons survive despite radical changes of attitude towards her subject matter over the years.
Her work was rarely treated seriously, either at the time or retrospectively, mostly because she drew cartoons, but also because she was a woman whose glamour-girl subjects were identified with her. Pretty, 'with a rounded figure and fluffy dark hair, readers were convinced she was her own model and she received a large fan mail’, Blaikie remarks. When Morrison, a member of the Black and White Artists’ Club, was reported at the 1937 Black and White Artists’ Ball, it was as wearing 'a frock of baby blue georgette… among her guests were Miss Olive Cleveson wearing gold lame, Miss Sybil Winter in violet taffeta, and Pixie O’Harris [q.v.] wore black velvet and a shoulder spray of clover-pink carnations’. Quoted by Vane Lindesay in his 1994 history of the Club (p.21), this is his sole mention of Morrison apart from a brief biography in the footnote appended to the quote. In fact, Morrison was an active member of the Black and White Artists’ Association and was (gently) caricatured by Kirwin Maegraith in the Sydney Mail (11 August 1937, p.32) among Some Sydney Artists responsible for organising the 1937 Artists’ Ball – the only woman among 25 men.
The 1940 Smith’s Weekly Christmas holiday number featuring Morrison cartoons (28 December 1940), was reportedly censored. On page 1, the artist was reported to be in the West Indies:
The gifted young artist – herself as pretty as a picture – took her sketch book with her. She will draw and air-mail to “Smith’s” her studies of American and West Indian feminine types. These alluring girls will appear in “Smith’s” at an early date.
Shortly before she left on her flying holiday Miss Morrison received Mr. Neville Cardus in her studio at “Smith’s”, and gave him tea. In the opinion of Mr. Cardus, who is a connoisseur in art, Miss Morrison ranks high with the black-and-white artists of the world. “She has depicted the Australian girl in all her grace as no other artist has succeeded in doing,” he said.
Blaikie comments that she continued to draw her 'dainty damosels’ at Smith’s until Virgil Reilly tired of drawing 'The Virgil Girl’ and 'The Morrison Girl’ was born. During World War II 'Morrison Girls’ were favourite pin-ups with the troops. Their primary appeal was certainly as objects of male desire, but Morrison Girls were nevertheless independent beings: powerful, funny, amoral, greedy and in control of most situations.
Morrison married a sea-going captain, Paddy Wilkinson. From the early 1940s, she drew cartoons for Man , e.g. undated wartime Man Annual (evidently 1944) with two full-page cartoons in crude colour. A red and yellow “What the heck are you looking at, stupid?” shows a brunette displaying a lot of leg at a bus stop with a man looking at her hat. The other depicts a fisherman saying to a glamorous brunette coming up from the water at the end of his boat, “I must be mad, but go away, you’re scaring the fish”.
Other Man cartoons include (old gent in tropical paradise surrounded by gorgeous women) “They won’t let me go. At nights I lie awake… it fills my thoughts… it’s becoming an obsession… supposing they change their minds?” February 1949, 24-25; night-club scene with female photographer snapping glamour girl and hidden sugar daddy, cover of issue for June 1951 (used in Heritage ); full-page colour cartoon of smooching blonde and indiscreet parrot, September 1952 (still ed. Greenop and same art staff). Man Annual 1952 contains five full page colour cartoons: (1)”...watch it fetch”; (2-3) “Why, I’ve practised self-control for years. Mind you, I’ve never been any good at it…” (repeated about 20 pages further on); (4) [old man with blonde on knee in solicitor’s office] “...and being in full possession of my faculties hereby bequeath”; (5) [male reporter to beauty contest winner] “To what do you attribute your success?”
Morrison also painted murals, including several at Gordon East Public School on topics like Enid Blyton’s Magic Far-a-way Tree . All are now painted over, although her mural of Christ with the children of the world reputedly survives in the old hall of St John’s Church of England, Gordon. She married and had at least one son, David Wilkinson, a professor of Environmental Engineering at UNSW later in New Zealand (Christchurch?). She continued to work as a freelance illustrator throughout the 1950s but was then was forced to retire through illness. Her last known work was to illustrate Ronald McCuaig and Isla Stuart’s You Can Draw a Kangaroo/The Poems Tell You What to Do , published by the Australian News and Information Bureau in the early 1960s and reprinted as a supplement to the Australian Woman’s Weekly on 30 December 1964. This charming booklet for children was recently reprinted and has sold well at the Museum of Sydney Booksho
A self-portrait simply captioned 'Morrison, Joan’, shows her holding a drawing of a man with a gun, Smith’s Weekly 15 April 1933, 3, plus joke biography evidently by Kenneth Slessor, which includes: 'Is dangerous when roused; killed her first editor, 1927’. Another caricature is included in a line-up by Frank Dunne , 'Seeing’s Believing – “Smith’s” Artists On Parade’ (30 July 1932, 7) with the description:
First there’s JOAN MORRISON. She wears three-quarter skirts without any visible reason. Apart from that, she has a proper sense of man’s ugliness (she’s only seventeen) and of woman’s dependence upon foundation garments. Above all, she’s a First Impressionist, though she’s open to argument.
Writers:
Kerr, Joan
Date written:
1995
Last updated:
1992
- Born
- b. 1911
- Summary
- Morrison was an accomplished mid-20th century cartoonist and book illustrator. Her cartoons, published in Man and Smith's Weekly, were populated by sassy glamour girls that came to be known as 'The Morrison Girl' and during WW2 they were a popular pin-up among the troops. In 1929 she and Mollie Horseman were the first female cartoonists to be appointed to the permanent staff of Smith's.
- Gender
- Female
- Died
- 1969
- Age at death
- 58
Details
Latitude-30.748889 Longitude121.465833 Start Date1908-01-01 End Date1969-01-01
Description
Extended Data
- Birth Place
- Kalgoorlie, West Australia , Australia
- Biography
- Arthur Baldwinson,1908-1969
Arthur Baldwinson is one of Australia’s first generation of prominent modernist architects who experienced the European modernist movement first hand. His modernist contemporaries include Roy Grounds and Frederick Romberg in Victoria and Sydney Ancher and Walter Bunning in New South Wales; their respective Australian architectural careers in modernism began in the late 1930s. Baldwinson’s active professional career as an independent practising architect was relatively short (1938-1960).
Baldwinson was born in Kalgoorlie, West Australia in 1908. He trained in architecture (1925-1929) under George R. King, the head of the architecture programme at the Gordon Institute of Technology, Geelong, Victoria. Baldwinson’s work, especially in the areas of drawing and rendering, was exemplary and this led King to ask him to stay on as “Architectural Instructor”. Baldwinson held a teaching position from 1930 until 1932 when he left for London.
In London, Baldwinson was first employed in the office of Raymond McGrath, an architecture graduate from the University of Sydney. Whilst there, Baldwinson worked with such major talents like Serge Chermayeff and Wells Coates. McGrath’s practise at the time included designing the interiors for the BBC’s studios at Portland Place, London. Concurrently with work, McGrath was compiling one of the first international surveys of residential modernism for publication, Twentieth Century Houses (1934); some of the plans that accompany the photographs appear to be drawn by Baldwinson.
In mid-1934, Baldwinson worked for the firm Adams Thompson and Fry during the period when principal partner and co-founder of MARS (Modern Architectural Research group), Maxwell Fry, in collaboration with social reformer Elizabeth Denby, was designing the progressive, modernist housing scheme for the Gas Light and Coke Company, Kensal House in Ladbroke Grove, London.
In October 1934, Maxwell Fry formed a partnership with Walter Gropius with whom Baldwinson worked directly until early 1937. Gropius departed for the United States in March 1937. Baldwinson was actively involved in the design and drawings of Gropius’s commissions including: Isokon 3 medium density project, Windsor; the E. W. Levy House, Chelsea; the Donaldson House, Sevenoaks; the Impington Village College, Cambridgeshire and the Christ’s College project for Cambridge University.
In January 1937, Baldwinson began his return trip to Australia with a determination to plant the flag of “the new architecture”; he took up a position with Stephenson & Meldrum, first in their Melbourne office, then later in Sydney as Stephenson & Turner.
In early 1938 Baldwinson entered the annual Victorian Timber Development Association (TDA) prize for residential timber buildings and won in three categories. Soon after this success, he established his own practice in Pitt Street, Sydney. In 1938-1939, he formed a brief design partnership with fellow-West Australian, John Oldham (Oldham & Baldwinson) to design a housing project near Coomaditchy Lagoon, Port Kembla, New South Wales.
In 1938, Baldwinson had his first solo commission, Collins House at Palm Beach; the site was difficult, on a steep north-facing sandstone and clay slope with extensive views of Barrenjoey Head and Broken Bay. Baldwinson designed a red-stained weatherboard house on a sandstone plinth comprising an external stair ramp, two bedrooms, upper level verandah and “playroom” on the lower level. The house received considerable media attention when it was completed.
Before the second World War disrupted his career, Baldwinson was on the organising committee for the formation of the Australian Modern Architecture Research Society (MARS) and Australia’s first industrial design organization, the “Design and Industries Association of Australia” (DIAA), while focusing on designing modernist houses, drawing on his British experiences with McGrath, Gropius and Fry.
During the Second World War, Baldwinson worked for the Commonwealth Aircraft Factory designing and constructing buildings engaged in the manufacture of Beaufort Bombers. By 1943, he had been promoted Chief Architect of the Beaufort Division, Department of Aircraft Production (DAP). Baldwinson later developed an all-steel pre-fabricated “Beaufort” house for DAP post-war sale to the Victorian Housing Commission in 1946. This was Australia’s first factory-manufactured prefabricated that did not require traditional trade skills to assemble and erect.
In 1946 Baldwinson returned to Sydney and formed a partnership with Melbourne engineer, Eric Gibson. As Gibson and Baldwinson, Gibson managed the office in Melbourne and Baldwinson the Sydney office. In this partnership Baldwinson produced his best residential designs for a number of Sydney’s Contemporary Artists Society (CAS) members. These avant-garde clients included Alistair Morrison, William Dobell, Harold Clay, Geoff and Dahl Collings, James Andriesse, Max Dupain and Elaine Haxton. These works form an outstanding cohesive group best described as the “Artists Houses”. In 1950 he concluded his partnership with Gibson and in early 1951 applied for a lectureship at Sydney University. By 1952, he was a Senior Lecturer in the architecture faculty, a position he occupied until his death.
In 1953, Baldwinson formed a partnership with Charles Vernon Sylvester-Booth; in 1956 Charles Peters joined the firm to form Baldwinson, Booth and Peters. The partnership lasted until 1958 with Baldwinson concentrating on residential designs, which he favoured, while Booth and Peters pursued commercial work. One of their designs, Hotel Belmont, in Belmont, Newcastle won the NSW RAIA Sulman Award in 1956.
During this partnership, Baldwinson also designed the Mandl House, Wahroonga (1953) and the Simpson-Lee House, Wahroonga (1957). He also designed and built his own residence at 79 Carlotta Street, Greenwich (1954) funded by his teacher’s salary. The Carlotta Street house is a white-bagged brick building with tallow-wood tongue and groove siding and is the most precise essay on Baldwinson’s restrained modernist philosophy.
Baldwinson’s palette of materials was consistent throughout his practice: bagged brick, weatherboard or vertical tongue-and-groove cladding and concrete contrasted against the irregularities of regional sandstone. Although his practice was occasionally involved in commercial commissions, his greatest accomplishments lie in the adaptation of the principles and materials of European modernism for site-specific suburban Australian houses. He helped to pioneer free-plan concepts, site-adjusted residential design, the “scientific kitchen”, flat roof treatments and the functional placement of windows and doors to create a distinctly regional variation of European modernism. In his development of a Sydney basin form of regionalism, he is a precursor to the much-debated “Sydney School” of residential architecture of the later 20th century.
Internal disputes forced the dissolution of the Baldwinson, Booth and Peters partnership whereupon Baldwinson immediately formed a new partnership with recent Sydney University graduate Geoffrey Twibill. The partnership lasted until late 1959 during which Twibill played a major role in the design of the Commonwealth Film Studios, Roseville, and the prefabricated design of the Overseas Telecommunications Commission’s (OTC) modular housing in the Cocos Islands.
In 1960, Baldwinson closed his formal practice but continued to accept private commissions in the Sydney suburbs, designing the Hauslaib House, Point Piper (1960), the Pennington House, Whale Beach (1960), the Robinson House, Castle Cove (1963) and his last completed house for the artist Desiderius Orban, in Northwood (1968).
The last years of Baldwinson’s life were devoted to teaching and travelling. In 1969 he died in Sydney from congestive heart failure as a complication of influenza.
References
Arthur Baldwinson. www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/A130117b.htm
Michael Bogle. PhD thesis “ARTHUR BALDWINSON. REGIONAL MODERNISM IN SYDNEY 1937-1969.” RMIT, 2009.
Greg Holman, “Arthur Baldwinson, His Houses and Works”, B.Arch. Thesis, University of NSW, 1980.
Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW. PXD 356 (includes Architectural & technical drawings, 2,686 architectural plans and private papers.)
Writers:
Staff Writer
Michael Bogle
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2011
- Born
- b. 1908
- Summary
- Baldwinson was a regional modernist architect. He was a founder member of Modern Architecture Research Society (MARS), Sydney, Australia’s first industrial design organization, the “Design and Industries Association of Australia” (DIAA) and Sydney’s Contemporary Artists Society (CAS). He was also a printmaker, painter and sketcher and an officer of the Sydney CAS.
- Gender
- Male
- Died
- 1969
- Age at death
- 61