QAGOMA pays tribute to Brisbane painter Gordon Shepherdson (1934–2019) who passed away in July – an enduring presence in the local art community over many decades, Shepherdson was known for his unique approach to expressionist figuration. People, flowers, animals, the night sky and his favourite fishing spots – he painted them from memory with both brush and fingertips. Shepherdson’s process was tactile, meditative and direct, and engaged his deep sensitivity for his subjects.
Born in Brisbane, Shepherdson attended Gatton Agricultural College for two years from the age of 14. He left his studies for an office job in 1950, followed by a stint of itinerant farm work. At 18, Shepherdson returned to Brisbane, where he worked in the shipyards during the day and attended art classes at night, first with Caroline Barker at the Royal Queensland Art Society in 1951, and ten years later with Jon Molvig and Andrew Sibley. For 23 years, he worked in an abattoir to support his wife and children; his workplace providing subject matter for his paintings on occasion.
Shepherdson often cast his subjects against dark blue, deep red and pitch black backgrounds, giving definition to his searching forms and heightening the rich colours of his enamel paints. The dark spaces of his paintings also emphasise the serious introspection that informs their making – Shepherdson infused his work with a strong sense of the profundity of existence, the luck that we are here at all amid the darkness of the universe. As bleak as this outlook may seem, it also embodies a sense of the miraculous.
The artist painted regularly until recent years, limited only by his failing health, and his works are held in public and private collections around Australia. Gordon Shepherdson is remembered by family and friends for his immense kindness, good humour and generous spirit, attributes he preserved to the end of his life.
Watch our time-lapse as Ben Quilty draws portraits of Margaret Olley on the wall of the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA). These large-scale chalk drawings are based on preparatory sketches he made for his Archibald Prize winning portrait of Olley. Quilty has cast in chalk some of the objects she gave him over the years; teapots, jugs, and vases, and used these to draw with.
Ben Quilty first met Margaret Olley after she awarded him the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship in 2002. Of course, when Quilty first heard that Olley was going to be guest judge of the Scholarship he was convinced there was no way he could win — his practice was just too gritty and abstract to appeal to Olley’s interests.
Surprised, Quilty struck a friendship with Olley that would endure to her last days. Olley’s mentorship and advocacy certainly bolstered Quilty’s career — and undoubtedly Quilty’s youthful appreciation of Olley’s spirit, tenacity and lifetime achievement was gratifying given her lifelong devotion to her practice.
In 2011, he convinced Olley to sit for a portrait that would win the Archibald Prize that same year. His sketchbook from that sitting has now become the source for a delicate yet soaring wall-drawing that connects these two exhibitions in a tribute to Margaret Olley.
Using pastels cast in the shapes of teapots, jugs and vases from Olley’s home studio, Quilty has captured her unmistakable presence one more time. Quilty has cast in chalk some of the objects Olley gave him over the years: teapots, jugs and other vessels, and has used these to draw as series of portraits.
Wall-drawing
Ben Quilty has created a series of site-specific, hand-drawn portraits of Margaret Olley.These large-scale chalk drawings of Margaret Olley are based on preparatory sketches he made for his award winning Archibald Portrait.The various objects cast in chalk and used as drawing tools are on display below the wall-drawings.Ben Quilty soaks the various vessels in water that he had cast in chalk before drawing.
Ben Quilty has created a series of site-specific, hand-drawn portraits of Margaret Olley, using a range of objects cast in chalk such as teapots, jugs and other vessels.
‘A Generous Life’ at the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) 15 June – 13 October 2019 examined the legacy and influence of much-loved Australian artist Margaret Olley, who spent a formative part of her career in Brisbane. A charismatic character, whose life was immersed in art, she exerted a lasting impact on many artists as a mentor, friend and muse.
Feature image: Ben Quilty sketching his large-scale drawings for Margaret remembered #BenQuilty #MargaretOlley #QAGOMA
Dick Roughsey is well known to many Australians for his vividly illustrated children’s books The Rainbow Serpent and The Giant Devil Dingo – Jennifer Isaacs explores his life and work and offers her personal recollections of the artist, from his upbringing on Mornington Island to his pivotal role in the early years of the Australia Council.
Dick Roughsey showing his bark paintings at Karumba Lodge, 1963 / Image courtesy: Valerie Lhuede
Dick Roughsey, also known as Goobalathaldin, was a Lardil artist from Mornington Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria. While his artistic practice had its origins in traditional bark painting, he later transitioned into modern paintings in oil and acrylic and became well known for his illustrated children’s books, winning the Children’s Book of the Year award twice during the late 1970s. His writing and art made him a pioneer cultural educator, and his book Moon and Rainbow (1971) was the first autobiography by an Indigenous Australian. He was appointed OBE in 1978.
Goobalathaldin Dick Roughsey ‘Trezise. Roughsey at the caves’
I first met Dick in 1970, stepping out of a lift with his friend and fellow painter, Percy Trezise. Percy was an airline pilot, historian and documenter of Aboriginal rock art, and together he and Dick spent many years locating cave painting sites near Laura in Cape York, which Percy mapped with meticulous scale drawings. On this occasion they were arriving to present plans for the preservation of these cave paintings at a meeting of the Aboriginal Advisory Committee of the Australia Council for the Arts, chaired by Dr HC ‘Nugget’ Coombs. Following the successful 1967 Referendum, the Australian Government was looking to encourage and stimulate the arts of Aboriginal Australians through a range of policy initiatives designed to support all areas of cultural practice; this committee included the most outstanding Indigenous leaders in the arts, as well as academic advisers from disciplines ranging from music, dance, art and anthropology. Throughout this period, his peers included many Indigenous leaders who would come to be celebrated over the following decades as fighters for justice and champions of land rights.1 Dick had every reason to be confident of his stature among them and, in 1974, he would become the first Chair of the fully Indigenous Aboriginal Arts Board (under Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s new larger Australia Council).
Percy Trezise and Dick Roughsey discuss a painting of the Rainbow Serpent with Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, 19 March 1975 / Collection: National Library of Australia / Photograph: Don Edwards/Australian Information ServiceXavier Herbert, Thancoupie, Percy Trezise and Dick Roughsey (with unknown, far left), c.1980s / Image courtesy: Jennifer Isaacs
In 1970s Sydney, Dick was a charming, warm, urbane presence. He was a frequent visitor to our menagerie of a household in Glebe, where a rolling number of itinerants stayed for both short and long periods, including many artists. Sometimes lonely, Dick came for the company, the food and a few beers — around the kitchen table, his jocular, raconteuring manner produced numerous larger-than-life tales of his exploits. He was particularly close with Dr Thancoupie Gloria Fletcher (Thanakupi), an artist from Weipa, who was also kin and became one of the country’s most respected ceramicists. Dick was older by 15 years, but they talked incessantly of their families. Thancoupie — whom Dick always called Gloria, or ‘my gel’ — listened eagerly to his updates on his wife Elsie and their six children on Mornington Island.
Dick was in his mid-forties at the time I met him, but these years in Sydney were a world away from where he grew up. After a fully self-sufficient hunting life on Mornington Island in his youth — surviving on turtle, shellfish, fishing and spearing game — Dick also worked on cattle stations at Tallawanta, Gregory Downs and Lorraine Station (where the food was so bad he took off on foot to Burketown and was police-escorted back to Mornington Island). He was a stockman and ringer, mustering, dipping, branding and droving long distances with pack horses. He was also an experienced deckhand on the Cora — which travelled across the Gulf to the east coast of the Northern Territory, Mornington Island, Aurukun and Weipa — and he enjoyed the open air and the smell of the sea.
However, this was still the era Aboriginal people call the ‘Dog Act’ times; in order to leave Mornington Island to work on cattle stations, Dick needed a permit to leave — a ‘dog tag’.2 He mostly avoided this through misdeeds and purposely stealing cattle, hoping to be sent to Palm Island, from which he imagined he could run away. From the adventures he regaled us with, and from his autobiography, it is clear that his larrikin nature and determined personality repeatedly led him to try to escape island life — dominated by the mission — to a life offering greater and more exciting opportunities. But World War Two intervened, and his theft was forgiven by default when the cattle stations called for men in wartime and he was suddenly sent out to work them. During the war years, he also assisted in the location and recovery of wreckage and human remains from American planes that crashed in the Gulf. He married Elsie at the Presbyterian Church on Mornington Island in September 1944.
Throughout the 1950s, Dick worked on the mainland and also lived at the mission during the wet season. By 1960, he and his elder brother Lindsay (Burrud) began painting barks as well as carving utensils, spears and artefacts. Unlike Arnhem Land bark paintings, Lardil works were quite figurative, and primarily done in sequenced vignettes — like comic books — that told a cautionary tale or Creation story. These stories were well known to people of Dick’s age, but it concerned him that the younger generation ignored them. He frequently attached his own handwritten explanations on the back of the bark paintings.
Goobalathaldin Dick Roughsey ‘Strange procession passing by’
Dick’s bark works featured ceremonial scenes relating to aspects of love magic (Djarada), flood, birth, initiation, burial practices and punishment for transgression of the laws. Realistic figures appear frozen in action but bear the full repertoire of Lardil body paint designs, wearing ceremonial hats, cockatoofeather head bands and woven arm bands. They are shown in silhouette or in profile, often in shake-a-leg dance position or poised ready to hurl weapons. The figures are arranged in tiers, sometimes with an inventory of Lardil artefacts and weapons.
In 1962, Dick was a yardman at the lodge in Karumba, the only town in Gulf Country that sits right on the coast — extensive tidal flats and shifting sands make other coastal settlement impossible in the region. As a pilot for Ansett, Percy Trezise often stopped overnight in Karumba on his route across the Gulf. The two men struck up a friendship through painting when the manager of the lodge commissioned Percy to paint a mermaid on the floor of the swimming pool. Percy would later become one of the strongest influences on Dick’s practice and career, and a catalyst for his journey into the mainstream art world. Percy particularly encouraged Dick to paint his own cultural knowledge and stories, rather than to try to emulate the work of Albert Namatjira, whose art was hugely popular and who was Dick’s personal hero.
Goobalathaldin Dick Roughsey ‘The Birth of Goobalathaldin’
Dick and Percy began going on frequent camping trips on the Cape York Peninsula to paint and to map cave paintings in the sandstone escarpment. Dick’s consultations with traditional owners — particularly Willy Long, who lived in a corrugated tin-shack settlement a few miles from Laura — enabled him to record the mythological meanings of many of the cave images and to discuss the consistencies with his own Lardil stories. The Rainbow Serpent often featured in his paintings, along with the giant dog or dingo. When, on Percy’s advice, Dick turned to other media, he began exploring hunting images, with lyrical and romantic depictions of gathering firewood, hunting turtles, or swimming among the water lilies in blue lagoons.
Renowned artist Ray Crooke was another important mentor in Dick’s life, and Dick, Percy and Ray developed a tight camaraderie on their bush painting adventures. Crooke strongly influenced Dick with his advanced knowledge of oil painting technique, which is evident in Dick’s depictions of life vignettes using strong bodily form, rounded dark figures and sensuous tropical colour. Whereas Dick’s bark paintings were two-dimensional, his shift to working with oils and acrylics on Masonite or artists’ board introduced perspective both in the figures and in the landscape. The new medium enabled Dick to make thematic series portraying historical events, including the ill-fated 1848 expedition to the tip of Cape York by Edmund Kennedy and his Aboriginal guide, Jackey Jackey. As Percy’s son, Steve Trezise, observed while watching the men paint together: ‘Ray introduced the word chiaroscuro and kept saying, “More white, more white, mix it”, to assist Dick to achieve a middle ground in his landscape perspectives’.
Goobalathaldin Dick Roughsey & Percy Trezise ‘The next resting place was at Fairview where he decided to make another lily lagoon called Minalinka…’
Dick moved to Cairns in 1964 and continued to produce enough work for his paintings to be exhibited in shows around the country.3 In the early 1970s, he began working in the genre he became best known for, the stories and vivid illustrations for his children’s books, including The Giant Devil Dingo (1973) and The Rainbow Serpent (1975). These were followed by a series relating to the Quinkan (spirit) figures in the cave art he was so familiar with, and other fearsome characters in the legends. Percy was integral to this work and he co-authored the later books in the series, which enraptured Australian school children for two decades and were among the first books to introduce Aboriginal culture to children.
Late in his life, Dick was badly afflicted by trachoma. This eye condition frustrated and worried him, and he painted less. As tastes in art, and specifically Indigenous art, swerved towards the new, modern, colourful acrylics of the desert, opportunities faded for sell-out shows of his work. To unaware new collectors, his paintings seemed folksy, naive or didactic. He returned to Mornington Island where he passed away from cancer in 1985.
Dick Roughsey’s pioneering life is an extraordinary and unique Australian story. He was one of ‘the first heroes’, an adventurer, a traveller between so many worlds — black and white, yet also mission and city, urban and village, and through the spiritual worlds of other ‘tribes’. He was brave and determined, yet also a very gifted artist who set high standards for others.
Jennifer Isaacs AM is a writer, art consultant and independent curator. She was made a Member of the Order of Australia in 2003 in recognition of her work promoting Aboriginal culture and assisting Aboriginal artists.
Endnotes 1 These included painter Wandjuk Marika, the protagonist in the first land rights case; poet, playwright and musician George Winungwidj; writer, poet and activist Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Noonucal); community leader and first Aboriginal subject of a published autobiography, Phillip Roberts; union leader Chicka Dixon; land rights campaigner Eddie Mabo; and writer Jack Davis. 2 The Aboriginals Preservation and Protection Act 1939 became known as the ‘Dog Act’ for its restrictions on human rights and freedoms. It prevented free movement, made possession or use of alcohol illegal, excluded ATSI people from voting rights and curtailed rights to own land and access justice. Under this law, people were settled away from their land by force, children were removed, certain marriages were forbidden and other injustices were perpetrated. On missions, the manager or superintendent determined suitable work and set the wage (usually low) and could seize property. 3 Exhibitions of Dick Roughsey’s work were held at various spaces during his career, including the Upstairs Gallery, Cairns; Artarmon Gallery, Wagner Art Gallery and Holdsworth Galleries, Sydney; Macquarie Galleries, Canberra; Australian Galleries, Melbourne; Bonython Gallery, Adelaide; and Anvil Gallery, Albury.
‘Goobalathaldin Dick Roughsey: Stories of this Land’ / Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane / 30 March until 18 August 2019 / The first major retrospective celebrating the work and life of Roughsey (1920-1985).
‘Goobalathaldin Dick Roughsey: Stories of this Land’ is a collaboration between Cairns Art Gallery and QAGOMA.
Acknowledgment of Country The Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) acknowledges the traditional custodians of the land upon which the Gallery stands in Brisbane. We pay respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander elders past and present and, in the spirit of reconciliation, acknowledge the immense creative contribution Indigenous people make to the art and culture of this country.
It is customary in many Indigenous communities not to mention the name of the deceased. All such mentions and photographs on the QAGOMA Blog are with permission, however, care and discretion should be exercised.
Feature image detail: Dick Roughsey Strange procession passing by (from ‘Jackey Jackey and Kennedy’ series) 1983
#QAGOMA
‘Geometrics’ showcases works by both Australian and international contemporary artists who play with colour and form to create often mesmerising optical effects. The exhibition at the Queensland Art Gallery (QAG) features works from the 1950s to the present day that stir the senses, engage the viewer in both mind and body and address the eyes with dazzling demonstrations of colour and form, write Peter McKay and Ellie Buttrose.
What’s on in Brisbane: Visit ‘Geometrics’ at the Queensland Art Gallery until 2 February
Using deceptively simple strategies — structuring relationships between the most elementary components of shape, scale and relative sequencing, for the most part described in pure, flat and vibrant colours — the artists behind these arrangements excel in creating mesmerising optical effects. Contemporary in their lively spirit, and sometimes surprisingly classical in their sense of order and proportion, these works are certain to stir the senses.
Perennial favourite Big Blue 1981–82 by British artist Bridget Riley is the centrepiece of ‘Geometries’. Often associated with the Op (optical) art movement of the 1960s, Riley is a master of perception. She has dedicated her career to exploring the interaction between colour and form, and her works are highly attuned to the dynamic effect of this relationship. Although Riley’s work is resolutely abstract, Big Blue was inspired by her experience travelling to Egypt, basking in the Mediterranean light and visiting the ancient tombs in Luxor. Here she was ‘astounded at the consolidated effect of the “fabric of colour” in the well-preserved frieze paintings. A restricted palette, although 4000 years old, was fresh and perfectly harmonised, a marvellous condensation of light itself’.1
While the colour scheme of Max Gimblett’s Light Green/Red – To Dora 1978 exhibits some similarities to Big Blue (in that they both use red to create strong contrasts, for example), Gimblett’s is a significantly more reductive exercise in pairing only two tones in two shapes. The New Zealand artist painted these works in response to new directions in colour-field and geometric abstraction emerging in the United States during the late 1940s and early 50s, particularly the work of Robert Motherwell, Ad Reinhardt and Barnett Newman. Spanning just over two square metres, Light Green/Red – to Dora (Gimblett’s mother) provides a visceral optical experience that, with great economy, engages both mind and body. The impressive turquoise field immerses the viewer in pure colour, punctuated, or perhaps punctured, by a vertical red rectangle that compels the viewer to stand in the centre of the work.
Australian painters Wilma Tabacco and Lesley Dumbrell are both known for their pursuit of especially lively abstract styles. Unlike many Op painters of the era, Tabacco paints with a rich, almost glowing, traditional oil medium instead of fast-drying flat-finish synthetic paints. This makes the tightly spaced thin vertical stripes of Hellza poppin 2004 intensely luminous, heightening and enlivening the complex and rhythmic moiré effect that she constructs. Hellzapoppin was a popular Broadway revue that ran from 1938 to 1941. The show was a comedy hodgepodge of music and topical slapstick — the opening scene featured Hitler speaking in a Yiddish accent — and its irrepressibly energetic circus atmosphere included dwarfs, clowns, trained pigeons and audience participation. Various sequels followed, including a 1941 movie that featured some of the best-known Lindy hop dance scenes of the swing era. Tabacco’s Hellza poppin clearly makes reference to this high-energy music and improvisational dance, here translated into bright fluctuations of pink, yellow and blue.2
Lesley Dumbrell, a recognised pioneer of the Australian women’s art movement of the 1970s and a leading exponent of abstraction in Australia, also refers to sound in her work Stridor 1972: ‘stridor’ meaning a harsh, grating noise or the wheezing of an obstructed windpipe. Here, Dumbrell works with a muted palette — unusual given the predilection for bright tones and high contrast employed by many Op painters — and this creates a strange shifting (perhaps rattling) push-pull effect with her subtly angled crossing verticals, which seem to perpetually cross from the foreground to the background. Although Dumbrell is better known for her jazzy system paintings of the late 1970s, as well as the more playful linear and shape paintings of the 1980s that share an aesthetic with the ubiquitous Memphis design group, Stridor is an accomplished early work.
While most of the works in ‘Geometries’ create a sense of movement, Lincoln Austin’s light box Out of Sight 2013 take this further. By incorporating a system similar to that of a lenticular print, the Queensland-based artist has created a geometric composition of intersecting circles and ellipses that shift in relation to the viewer’s position. By offering no more than a glimpse of the work from any given angle, Austin encourages his audience to dart around the cool metallic form of Out of Sight in a sort of sight-responsive dance.
Peter McKay is Curatorial Manager, Australian Art, QAGOMA.
Ellie Buttrose is Associate Curator, International Contemporary Art, QAGOMA
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John Honeywill, offers his personal reflections on Margaret Olley’s work and how her spirit has shaped his practice.
I met Margaret Olley once. In 2009 she came to her old school — Somerville House, where I taught art for many years — to be honoured for her contribution to Australian culture. Like most Australians, I knew Olley through her paintings, the portraits, her biography and the photographs of her home. She had been woven into my consciousness for many decades, though I did not know her personally.
I finished teaching in December 2017 to focus on my painting, and four days later I began a residency at the Tweed Regional Gallery. I was invited to respond to the objects in the Margaret Olley Art Centre and made six paintings for the group exhibition ‘A Painter’s House’, held in conjunction with three other artists (Monica Rohan, Lewis Miller and Guy Maestri) who had done similar, earlier residencies. The initial impression of clutter in the re-creation of Olley’s Duxford St home quickly changed into an appreciation of a richly lived-in space as I spent time in the rooms, selecting and handling objects, becoming increasingly aware of the personal nature of these bowls, jugs and bottles and the stories they held. Her paintings included so many of these objects.
I felt a sense of responsibility as I used Olley’s objects in my own work, reinterpreting them and their conversations with each other. I have been very fortunate to have had this access, as it has enabled a positive shift in my paintings. My deepest gratitude is for being able to spend time there, because each visit back into Margaret Olley’s rooms became more emotionally touching — a combination of happiness and gentle intimacy that gave me a sense of the private world of this uncompromising, wonderful artist.
John Honeywill, Artist and Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation member
‘A Generous Life’ at the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) 15 June – 13 October 2019 examined the legacy and influence of much-loved Australian artist Margaret Olley, who spent a formative part of her career in Brisbane. A charismatic character, whose life was immersed in art, she exerted a lasting impact on many artists as a mentor, friend and muse.
Feature image detail: Margaret Olley Hawkesbury wildflowers and pears c.1973
#MargaretOlley #JohnHoneywill #QAGOMA
The Indigenous voice of Australia is over 65 000 years old. During NAIDOC Week 2019, with the theme of ‘voice, treaty and truth’, we invited award-winning author and Mununjali woman Ellen Van Neerven to develop a series of written responses entitled ‘Collecting Australia‘, which draw inspiration from works featured in our Australian Art Collection.
This is one of a three blogs by van Neerven, and features Judy Watson, combining her artwork with van Neerven’s poetry. You can also read poems inspired by Dale Harding and Destiny Deacon.
Judy Watson
The poem, ‘sacred ground beating heart’ takes its title from Judy Watson’s painting. I have always loved this work so I appreciated the chance to write to it. Plus the title just lends itself well to poetry!
I wrote this series of poems, ‘Collecting Australia’ in two places: in the Gallery sitting before the works, and abroad in Germany, where I had a travel engagement. I missed my Country a lot while I was away. I think this work really captures what that connection is like, how deeply it is felt through your whole body.
sacred ground beating heart 1989 is pinned to the gallery wall, and remains unstretched as exhibited, rebuffing the classical traditions of European paintings.
sacred ground beating heart ancient sound feeding art we’re all sleeping on a sensation bigger than us, bigger than the body if you roll me I’ll be thunder if you squeeze me I’ll be dance move, jahjam, move put your feet in the earth recover yourself don’t stop dreaming softly spin all the way around sacred ground beating heart ancient sound feeding art
Ellen van Neerven (Meanjin, July 2019)
Judy Watson
Through paint and pigment Judy Watson, a descendant of the Waanyi people of north-west Queensland, offers evidence of intimate encounters with the heat, air and moisture and pulse of the earth — the geographical emblems of her heartland. These emblems are linked with Australian Aboriginal totemic beings or culture heroes who metamorphosed into landscape features such as hills and rocks, and who continue to manifest their presence as meteorological or astral phenomena. The unstretched canvas has been stained by layers of wet and dry pigment, creating a velvety, sensuous surface which is then marked by distinct touches of colour. The imagery suggests an aerial perspective of parched land, a depiction of distant homelands or a material translation of an emotional state.
This project is part of ‘Drawing from the Collection’, a series of programs which invite you to take inspiration and draw ideas from the QAGOMA Collection through ongoing experiences from special events, to daily drop-in drawing.
Acknowledgment of Country
The Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the land on which the Gallery stands in Brisbane. We pay respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders past and present and, in the spirit of reconciliation, acknowledge the immense creative contribution First Australians make to the art and culture of this country. It is customary in many Indigenous communities not to mention the name or reproduce photographs of the deceased. All such mentions and photographs are with permission, however, care and discretion should be exercised.
#QAGOMA
We acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land on which the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art stands and recognise the creative contribution First Australians make to the art and culture of this country.
