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Thomas Walkley is an enigmatic type who appears to have wandered across Australia earning his keep through his artwork. His presence is mainly recorded through his images of Adelaide, Melbourne and Perth.

Arriving in Western Australia around 1890 as with many others he found his way to the goldfields in pursuit of his fortune but he took work as the scenic artist at the Trivoli Theatre in Kalgoorlie. His work was highly acclaimed in newspaper reviews though none of those pieces are known to remain.

In 1897 The Kalgoorlie Miner announced Mr Thomas Walkley, the scenic artist, has just finished a beautiful scene, representing the Lake of Killarney, and is now busily engaged on another work to represent a view of the famous Gippsland country, showing its picturesque mountains, etc. and again

… there will be shown for the first time, a new scene by the Tivoli artist Mr Thomas Walkley on which he has been engaged for some time. it is a valuable addition to the stock already laid in by the management and depicts an evening view of the Gippsland Mountains with the Baw Baw Ranges in the distance. The dimensions of the work were 25 feet wide by 14 feet in depth.

Walkley led a colourful life on the goldfields and appeared in the courts on a few occasions as both victim and offender. On one occasion he was robbed of £2 while asleep in a laneway behind the York Hotel, on another he was placed on the prohibited list from entering licensed premises for 6 months, and again in Leonora he had the choice of a £1 fine or seven days in the lockup for disorderly conduct. His punishment was not disclosed in the newspaper report of the time.

This a panting of the jetty near the Mount Eliza quarry is a faithful record of the time and is one of the few images of the part of the workings of the quarry on record. The jetty is stacked with broken stone that is awaiting transport for use in road repairs in the city. An unattended barge used to transport the stone is empty and waiting its next load. Horses finish their toil and are led away by their handler and rather than two abreast they are single file due to the width of the jetty.

Walkley chose to record the scene at the end of the day as work winds down and night approaches. It is a tranquil scene and has been romanticised with the sun shrinking in the western sky and a lad waiting for his father to finish work and begin their trek home.

The Mount Eliza quarry ceased production by 1892 though the exact date is not recorded in a letter to the editor of the Western Mail in the same year an anonymous resident of 26 years referred to the Mount Eliza quarry closure in the following manner – It is only known to a few that the good hard bed of stone was discontinued being quarried under Mount Eliza because of the large quantities of useless debris on top of the stone. The correspondent then went on to suggest that Mounts Bay be reclaimed using the debris from the Mount Eliza quarry and a water playground be built with canals, ponds, lakes and ornamental bridges. The public works department never acted upon the recommendation but it is confirmation that ideas for improvements to the river front have been around since early days of settlement.

The subject of this work Camaret was once a thriving fishing village in Brittany with the harbour as bustling and energetic as this work illustrates – today it is a lot more serene. Friend was visiting the region in 1971 following a successful exhibition at Drouant Gallery in Paris and was charmed by the area. He decided to stay awhile to sketch the village and its surroundings in preparation for his next French show that was scheduled for 1973.

The paintings for that exhibition were finished at his studio in Bali where he was living in palatial splendour on prime waterfront property Sanur. He had built a grand house and created a splendid garden and the local Balinese referred to him as Tuan Rakshasa or Lord Devil – a title that pleased him.

Donald Friend was an exceptional talent and had flair with both pen and paint though it is through his paintings that he is better known. His drawing skills were exceptional and every mark on the paper is correct. What he intends to depict is what he achieves. The viewer in left in little doubt that this is the scene of a thriving fishing village full of activity and the painting is the work of a master who is endowed with an abundance of natural talent.

Failing health caused Friend’s return to Australia. He had lived in Bali for fourteen years after what was only intended to be a stopover. He was accorded a retrospective exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1990 but died a few months before it opened.

Camaret was exhibited in his 1973 exhibition that was once again held at the Drouant Gallery in Paris.

In 1954 The Western Mail sent their staff artist and often journalist Norman Aisbett up to Exmouth Gulf to report on the oil drilling and exploration in the region. The Rough Range No 1 Well had been sunk in 1953 and had been producing good quality oil in commercial quantities since. This development and the discovery of oil was being greeted with great excitement locally as it promised to herald a new era in Western Australia.

It was predicted that the state was set for an unprecedented boom, and the economic ill balance between the two seaboards would disappear. The tag Cinderella state that applied to the west, would finally be removed – no longer the poor relation to the more robust economies of the east.

When he arrived in Exmouth Aisbett had no experience of what awaited him. In addition to being one of the earliest journalists to visit the site, he was an arts pioneer as well, being one of the first contemporary painters to record the landscape and the surroundings of the Rough Range and the rugged country of the North West. He begun his newspaper article with a comment on the painting conditions,

Australia’s wild north is a paradise for painters – but you’ve got to be a pretty tough sort of painter to appreciate it.

I can’t imagine any of the more highly strung members of our fraternity emerging from it unscathed. A week in the Spinifex would turn Salvador Dali into a gibbering idiot.

He then went on to write, When you’re sitting under the boiling sun with a brush between your teeth you are ill equipped to defend yourself from unprovoked attacks by ants, mosquitoes and Kamakazi flies.

Aisbett had issues with the insects of the north – particularly the voracious ants. He presumed that Dali wouldn’t have been able to manage in a real setting that was suggestive of his imagined landscape.

This work Rough Range No. 1 Well was painted on that 1954 trip and is an important record in the development of Australia’s North West.

In his essay The Rough Range Oil Discovery – 50 Years On, published in the December 2003 – January 2004 Petroleum Exploration Society of Australia (PESA) newsletter Philip Playford wrote:

It was the Rough Range discovery that first pointed towards the rich potential of this area. That find was clearly an incredible fluke that has had a major impact on Western Australia and the nation as a whole. The enthusiasm generated by the discovery focussed national and international attention on the petroleum and mineral potential of this country, resulting in much exploration investment for a wide range of resources. It can truly be said that Rough Range was the forerunner to the petroleum and mineral developments that now form the backbone of Australia’s economy.

Rough Range No. 1 Well is a pioneering work of a pioneering era and as such is an important piece of contemporary history.

Even though he was the president of the Perth Society of Artists from 1951 to 1954 and associated with many local artists, Ernest Philpot considered himself to be a loner.

Loner or otherwise, he is an important figure in Western Australian art history and one of this state’s first exponents of pure abstraction. Crucifixion was painted in the mid 1950’s at the time when he was evolving from traditional landscape to pure abstraction. After becoming interested in the abstract image he found he was unable to make the complete leap to the non representational and dwelt for a while in a surreal/cubist phase. The works he produced during this brief period form and important part of his oeuvre.

In his book Ernest Philpot I am the artist he said on his transition from traditional to abstract, “Before plunging into the tide, I stuck in a tentative tow … I floated and swam until I reached the further solid shore of pure abstract imagery, and cannot leave it without scarring my artistic conscience.”

Crucifixion may have been painted for inclusion in the Blake Prize though there is no record of him sending it. Another of his works titled Crucifixion was a finalist in the 1956 Blake Prize.

Guy Grey-Smith returned from England in late 1947 having survived the shooting down of the aircraft of which he was the pilot, the associated injuries, four years as a prisoner of war and tuberculosis complicating it all. Yet he came back determined to advance modernism within Western Australian art. His first solo exhibition was held in 1949 and his third, in 1951, was held in Melbourne. Unequivocally, his aimwas to be seen – and judged – by a national audience.

Grey-Smith was good friends with Leslie and Bill Anderson who ran the Rottnest Island Hostel (subsequently known as the Lodge) from 1953 to 1960. Undoubtedly, then, he was a regular visitor to the island making sketched during his visits that he later used as the basis for a series of oil paintings. One of the Rottnest series – Longreach Bay (1954) – is held by the Art Gallery of Western Australia; another – Rottnest (1954-57) – sits in the collection of The University of Western Australia.

Of particular interest is that Grey-Smith and his family returned to England in September 1953 and did not head back to Perth until February 1955. Like the ground-breaking Longreach Bay, the work on offer is also dated 1954 and was almost certainly executed in England using sketches and notes taken from home. This perhaps explains some of the slightly unexpected features of the painting.

With trees as a typical reference in the foreground, Grey-Smith accurately depicts Rottnest’s low shrubbery using characteristic and spontaneously produced blocks of colour. The salt lake further identifies the location while the bright pink and crimson mid-ground probably reflects the influence on his art at the time of Matisse and Fauvism more generally.

Yet the horizon presents a deep blue, mountainous sky quite unlike Rottnest. For Grey-Smith, however, any perceived dissonance would have been little note as he was primarily concerned with self-expression through painting and note with literal reproduction of scenery. From the moment, while still a prisoner of war, that he saw an image of a Henry Moore sculpture and absorbed its modernist message – that art could and should reflect his own response to his environment – his paintings sought to describe that response rather than portray precisely what he had seen.

This striking painting is a rare and early example of Grey-Smiths oeuvre, heavily influenced as he was at that time by the works and philosophy of Cezanne but already confidently portraying his own unique artistic language.

Grey-Smith was a pivotal modernist influence in Western Australian art. He achieved early and sustained national recognition for his distinctive style. Without doubt, his works are amongst Western Australia’s most critically acclaimed and sought after. In March 2014, he will be the subject of a major and long overdue retrospective exhibition at the Art Gallery of Western Australia.

Along with Elise Blumann and Howard Taylor and, later, with other members of the so-called Perth Group (Robert Juniper, Brian McKay and Tom Gibbons) Guy Grey-Smith led the advancement of Western Australian art into its post-war future. He was awarded numerous prizes during his lifetime and his works are held in every major Australian Gallery and by every major Australian corporate collection. He is arguably Western Australia’s most influential artist. The current work is at once distinctive and evocative, beautiful and scarce.

The term “Action Painting” was coined by New York art critic Harold Rosenberg in 1952 to describe certain works of art by key members of the New York school of abstract expressionism. Foremost amongst these artists was Jackson Pollock whose self-described “drip” paintings had been breaking new ground since about 1947.

What made these works so unique was their emphasis upon the act of process of painting rather than upon the actual work itself. They were not meant to portray objects or even emotions but by virtue of their seemingly unpremeditated creation, came to be regarded as representations of the artist’s subconscious.

Against both the critical and commercial grain of Australian art in the mid 1950’s, Earnest Philpot broke away from his established and strictly figurative style to introduce distinctly abstract imagery into his works. This rapidly transformed into his own particular style of abstract expressionism, which, in a bold move, he exhibited in London in 1960. Most of the works from this exhibition were described as “action paintings”[1]

In Painting in Action (1960) Philpot exhibits a lyrical and free-flowing style that brings to mind dance-like imagery of Pollock’s Summertime Number 9A (1948) and his monumental Number 1, 1952 (1952).[2] Like the abstract expressionists, Philpot was also looking for a sublime, unpremeditated outcome. Unlike Pollock and the New York school as a whole, however, Philpot sought not to express subconscious human thought but to somehow create a more universal image, an evocation of the very meaning and purpose of life. The cloud-like form bordered by the swirling, dancing lines in Painting in Action reflects his ineffable, almost spiritual objective.

Painting in Action is a dynamic, rhythmic work art. It’s evident technical precision does not detract art. He believed deeply in the emancipating power of abstract art – for him, it brought him closer to what he saw as a universal truth. The images he produced transcended their individual component materials and their aesthetic impact in their endeavour to explore and express something truly profound, not merely to record people, places or events. Philpot did not seek to mirror society but to actually guide it, most especially through contemplation of the abstract image, towards a deeper understanding of self and life.

As Philpot has so powerfully written, “Such in the raison d’etre of art, not to be a depicter of mini-truths but an imagiser of the Great Truth.”[1] In this context, especially, Painting in Action represents a singular step in Philpot’s almost career-long pursuit of truth and meaning, expressed through the medium of the painted image.

-ML

[1] Valerie, F. (2008). Earnest Philpot: I am the artist.

[2] Emmering, L. (2003). Pollock. Taschen.

A Welsh portrait painter George Frederick Harris with his family arrived in Western Australia in 1920. He soon realised that Perth would not provide enough commissions to provide for his children, so in 1922 he moved most of the family to Sydney.

George Harris  was the father of Pixie O’Harris and the grandfather of Rolf Harris and at one time served as the chairman of the Royal Art Society Cardiff.

Statham’s Quarry Gooseberry Hill, the subject of this painting, was established in 1894 by Thomas Statham and William Burton. The quarry provided the materials for much of Perth’s roads and following Statham’s death in 1920 the quarry was owned and operated by the Perth City Council. The quarry ceased operation in 1949 and is now used for recreational purposes.

This social realist work by Harris depicting men at work beneath the intense summer sun is unusual for its time. The tendency for artists of the period was to paint idyllic images of the landscape and ignore the reality of everyday toil.

Through this picture Harris has shown his ability to quickly come to terms with the Australian light and landscape. He has also provided a small vignette of the quarrymen’s day and the tasks they had to perform with the facilities available to them.

“The traces of time are all around us and they have little effect on our senses that is, until it becomes time to paint the house.”

When he saw the work of the European artists Antonio Tapies and Emil Schumaker in 1958 Lynn’s eyes were opened to the visual excitement that time and the elements can induce. He was touring Europe and had seen their paintings at the Venice Biennale and was astounded that the weathering effect on ordinary everyday items could be the subject for sublime works of art.

He became an immediate enthusiast for textural paintings and was eager to explore the possibilities of this new form of expression and how it could relate to Australia with all its variables.

Texture painting fitted perfectly into the Australian artistic oeuvre, but intellectually in the 50’s it was astray. Australia was isolated and not ready for abstraction – it was viewed as an international conspiracy. The influence of the traditional and modern figurative painters was in power and difficult to dislodge. Lynn viewed this disinterest as a challenge and in addition to creating visually uplifting works he applied an intellectual component and titled his works accordingly.

He trusted that the viewer, after digesting the visual and tactile elements, would search for the meaning of the title and understand how the piece fitted the name – unfortunately his trust was vain. Very few rose to the challenge and visually his work failed to interest those outside of the major collecting institutions. From the intellectual viewpoint very few bothered to accept the test.

Lynn provided for his family through teaching, writing and critiquing, and every spare moment saw him at work in his studio persisting and finding satisfaction on his output. He never lost confidence in his direction and persevered until the end. He knew that his position in Australian Art History could not be undone and the time for wider appeal of his work would arrive.

Through technology the world has taken on village proportions and abstraction has emerged in Australia. The worldlier and younger brigade of collectors and enthusiasts are comfortable with Lynn’s images and are often surprised that Australian works of this type are nearly 60 years old.

The public has finally caught up with him. Today the visual and tactile elements are stimulating the viewers and the challenge of the title is at last being accepted. There is a new appreciation for his pictures.