ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Clarice Beckett 1887 – 1935 All truths wait in all things, Clarice Beckett is now recognised as one of Australia’s finest artists. Her evocative images capture the essence of Melbourne city and its bayside suburbs during the 1920’s and 30’s, making a significant contribution to our understanding of what constitutes the Australian identity. As a professional painter she never compromised her ideas, persisting in expressing the commonplace as something beautiful. The motifs in her work included wet roads, telegraph poles, cars, trams, petrol bowsers, railway stations and tracks, subjects that were deemed unworthy of serious art by the critics of her era. Holding large yearly exhibitions at the Athenaeum Gallery in Melbourne between 1923-1933 she was regarded as a distinguished and remarkable artist by many of her peer group. She was called “an artist’s artist” and also greatly admired for her dedication to her work. Her untimely and tragic death at the age of forty eight, was the result of a chill caught while painting in a storm which resulted in pneumonia. Her father burnt many of the works from her final two years of painting, and her sister then removed the rest of her lifetime’s work. Now stacked in an open sided, country cow shed and exposed to the elements, rats and possums, hundreds of them were destroyed over the next thirty five years. In 1971 these works were re-discovered. Those that remained intact, were rescued and exhibited. Public enthusiasm was unanimous. Many young artists responded to the emotional depth of feeling that her images aroused. They also admired her subtle aesthetic simplicity, soft edge technique, her modernity and uniqueness of vision. As a tonalist painter, her ability to capture a haunting sense of place and the ethereal and transient qualities of nature, ensure that her lyrical work, like that of all great artists, will remain forever relevant to future generations. This eternal quality was confirmed by contemporary critics, and the unprecedented numbers of visitors viewing the Ian Potter Museum’s, Retrospective Exhibition, “Politically Incorrect” which toured State and Regional Galleries in 1999 and 2000. She is now represented in State and most Regional Art Galleries throughout Australia, and in many private collections. |
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| John Borrack 1933 - John Borrack is a significant Australian watercolourist who has been painting professionally since the 1950’s. John does not produce a literal replica of what he sees, but filters his chosen landscape through his imagination. His sensitive interpretations of the Australian landscape capture the structural qualities, the spirit and poetry of the place he is portraying in a way that is not only unique in style but makes us look and register a new way of looking at the landscape, the key to what innovative artists do. Deeply moved and influenced by the famous English watercolourist, J.M. Turner, and with a Cézanne like understanding of form, John developed his own style and strengths. With the eye of a poet and the soul of a musician, he illuminates the feeling of the vastness and distances of a landscape with the application of melting opalescent colours to achieve a living organic quality dancing within endless layers of abstract space. With a seeming, effortless application of watercolour, he not only evokes the structural ruggedness of the mighty mountains and gorges of the Australian terrain, but also the intimate beauty of Queensland rainforests, and the Victorian landscape. The Plenty Valley and Mernda, where he has lived since a young artist has been an old haunt, loved by painters since Arthur Streeton in the 1890’s. Its delicate environment and magnificent rare and ancient red gums and mountain vistas, is now being destroyed by urban development. There is no artist in Australia’s history who has so intensely and continually, painted and loved this once beautiful area, as John Borrack has. |
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