Geoff Dyer - Australian Landscape

 

 Geoff Dyer (1947 – 2020) "Geoff was a true innovator within the contemporary art scene, helping draw national attention towards the rugged beauty and rich natural assets of Tasmania through his commanding interpretations.   Geoff lived and breathed paint, constantly driven to make his mark and share his love of the landscape, in all its many forms and ambience.Geoff had a highly celebrated professional career spanning over fifty years, with countless solo exhibition nationally, as well as exhibitions in Singapore, Guangdong and New York.  His work is held in numerous important collections including the National Portrait Gallery, Artbank, the University of Tasmania, the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery and the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA). He has been hung in the New South Wales Art Gallery over twenty times as a finalist in the Archibald Prize, the Wynne Prize and Sulman Prize.  Most notably, Geoff won the Archibald Prize in 2003, with a portrait of author, conservationist and friend, Richard Flanagan. Geoff remains only the second Tasmanian to ever win the Archibald prize.
His love of Tasmania, its people and landscape will continue to resonate through the legacy of what can only be described as a momentous and critical body of work.Geoff’s significant creative achievements reflect his determination and passion as great artist. His paintings continued to increase in visual strength over the decades, ensuring that his iconic large scale works will remain an important part of Tasmania’s cultural history for years to come."(despard-gallery.com.au)

 

John Perceval - Australian Art

 

 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. (Design & Art Australia Online )

 

Hugh Sawrey

Hugh Sawrey was born at Forest Glen, near Buderim, Queensland, in 1919, the second son of timber-getter George Sawrey and his wife, Jane. His mother was widowed by a falling branch so the young Hugh followed his mother through various station properties in outback Queensland where she worked as a cook. He left school at age fourteen and found his first job as a jackeroo at Jessievale Station in the Gulf Country and for thirty years went droving and, apart from the time he served in New Guinea during World War II, working on cattle stations in regional Queensland, the Northern Territory and the Kimberleys in Western Australia. He was largely self taught as an artist, initially experimenting with drawing with charcoal from campfires on any paper he was able to scrounge but during the 1960s when he decided on a career as an artist, took lessons from Caroline Barker and attended Jon Molvig’s drawing classes which, at that time were quite informal. Molvig ceased giving these classes in 1966.(daao.org.au)

 Hugh Sawrey's love of the Australian bush stems from his childhood. His father died when Hugh was only three years old and Hugh moved from Forest Glen with his mother and brother to live in Brisbane. After one year of secondary schooling, Sawrey took to the bush when he was 14 and began working, sending money back to assist his mother during the bleak days after the Great Depression.
Hugh Sawrey was no stranger to the hardship of the Australian outback. He became an expert horseman and all-round bushman when working as a head drover, rabbiter, axeman and shearer. Sawrey travelled extensively throughout the interior of Queensland and the Northern Territory, often befriending Aborigines and occasionally being rewarded with access to remote tribal sacred places. Many of his paintings of aboriginal stock boys and cattle mustering were inspired by his travels from Alexandria Downs in the Northern Territory to Tiberoo Station, out from Eulo. His droving experiences took him mustering out past the Cooper and Diamantina, and as far west as Western Australia.

He enlisted during World War II and experienced active service in Papua New Guinea. When the war was over, Sawrey used his service pay to buy a small mob of cattle which he ran on his mother's small and harsh property on the Darling Downs.
Unfortunately his cattle were wiped out in a drought in 1947 and Sawrey moved back to work in the interior. During this time he scribbled sketches and painted on anything he could find. In the earlier days he would take a piece of charcoal from the campfire and draw on the camp shovel. In this arid environment he began to develop his talent for painting bush scenes and his subject matter was drawn directly from his own personal experiences and observations of the outback. His work is evocative and foremost it presents an honest representation of the way the bush is, as Hugh simply said: "I paint what I see."

 In his impressionable years as a stockman and developing artist, Sawrey mustered cattle on many of the runs known to Kidman and his men. Everywhere he went, he carried scraps of paper in his saddle bag to sketch the life around him and he began to paint all the facets of life he knew as a stockman. Ever present was his desire was to show town's people what went on beyond the city lights. Sawrey said: "In my paintings and drawings I have tried to be honest and factual above all things because Australia is an honest land." A lifetime of outback stories are related by Sawrey in his works which are a valuable narrative about life on the land in Australia.

In 1965 Sawrey decided to become a full-time artist and he set up his first studio in the Royal Hotel in Queen Street, Brisbane. Since then he prospered and became a renowned Australian painter with his paintings being actively sought by collectors and investors. In his latter years, Sawrey lived with his wife Gill in Victoria where they established a renowned quarter horse stud. Along with breeding and training quarter horses, Hugh painted from his studio on the property.(.etchinghouse.com)

Australia Arthur James Murch

Arthur James Murch (1902-1989), painter, sculptor and teacher, was born on 8 July 1902 at Croydon, Sydney, second of three children of English-born parents James Murch, journeyman carpenter, and his wife Caroline Elizabeth, née Holman. Murch’s life reflected many influences from his Methodist upbringing: teetotalism; devotion to family; frugality; a lack of interest in materialism; a love of learning; a strong work ethic; and the ability to build anything from nothing, even his own false teeth. Arthur left Sydney Technical High School, Ultimo, at 15 and became an apprentice at John Heine & Son Ltd, Leichhardt, manufacturers of sheet-metal-working machinery. He was struck in the eye by a steel chip, which later affected his ability to paint outdoors. His drawing skills were noticed and from 1920 he studied part time at the Royal Art Society of New South Wales. In ‘The Foundry’ (exhibited in 1945) he re-created a fiery scene from his engineering years.

Murch was introduced to the impressionistic artists by Antonio Dattilo-Rubbo and in 1924 he joined sculpture classes at East Sydney Technical College under Rayner Hoff. He built a studio in his parents’ backyard and devoted himself full time to art. In 1925 he won the New South Wales Society of Artists’ travelling scholarship; he studied art briefly in Paris at the Académie Julian and in London at the Chelsea Polytechnic, and in depth in Italy, where he fell in love with the Renaissance masters and their classical sources.

On his return to Sydney in 1927 Murch became assistant to George Lambert. Harold Cazneaux’s photograph of them working on a sculpture of an unknown soldier for St Mary’s Cathedral captured their close working relationship. ‘Pocket Hercules’ was Lambert’s apt description of Murch, a diminutive man with a powerful physique. After Lambert’s death in 1930 Murch threw himself into Depression Sydney’s Bohemian art world. But it was from a cottage at coastal Thirroul that the first paintings emerged in the Murch style, in which he fused classical and Renaissance subjects, themes and techniques with Australian people, light and landscape.

In 1933 Professor H. Whitridge Davies invited Murch to accompany a scientific expedition to Central Australia as a freelance artist. His six-week stay at Hermannsburg mission and a camel trek to Mount Liebig resulted in forty-five works exhibited at Macquarie Galleries. Next year he returned to Hermannsburg.

Back in England in 1936, Murch finished painting the shimmering nude ‘Leda’ (1935-39) by candlelight, because his poverty was such that his electricity had been cut off. He created decorations for the Australian wool pavilion at the 1938 Empire Exhibition in Glasgow, Scotland, with the help of (Sir) William Dobell, Donald Friend, Jean Appleton and other Australians. In Sydney again—a return that ‘required considerable adjustment’—he married Gloria (Ria) Mavis Counsell, a copywriter, on 12 September 1940 at Rose Bay Methodist Church. Ria was often the breadwinner; they moved to Sydney’s northern beaches, where living was cheaper and Murch could paint his glorious ‘summery nudes’ and angophoras. He often used his wife and son as models. After Japan entered World War II he was ‘manpowered’ and in July 1942 he was appointed an official war artist; his appointment ended in May 1943 due to illness.

Murch won the 1949 Archibald prize with his portrait of Bonar Dunlop. Murch’s training in engineering and sculpture were particularly evident in his portraits, and his skin tones were unequalled in Australian art. His versatility was evident from his large equestrian sculptures, from murals such as the commissioned ‘The Arts of Peace’ (1951), depicting a Molonga corroboree, and from drawings of his daughter. He inspired the children and adults whom he taught at Avalon, East Sydney Technical College and Hermannsburg. As his palette muddied, so did his fine mind. Survived by his wife and their son and daughter, he died on 23 September 1989 at Terrey Hills and was cremated. His work is held by the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, and by most State galleries.(Australian Dictionary of Biography)