Once you’re famous there’s just no way to keep your letters out of the hands of the curious! Letters give us a humanising insight into the private world of an artist. They can provide a glimpse into their daily life, travel, friendships, moments of joy and despair as well as their creative process – that’s…
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the fierce wildness and ‘savage beauty’ of Belle-Île, the small island off the coast of Quiberon in Brittany, France, exerted a powerful attraction to creative artists of a late-romantic temperament. Delve into why Belle-Île’s temperate climate, magnificent coastline, and 60 beaches became a magnet for Australian impressionist…
Continue reading » “The allure of the savage beauty of Belle-Île”
The QAGOMA Research Library holds a collection of letters, photographs and other memorabilia relating to the famously reclusive artist Ian Fairweather, who spent the last two decades of his life in a hut on Bribie Island. A new book Ian Fairweather: A Life in Letters from Text Publishing compiles several hundred of Fairweather’s letters, which…
Margarey Olley was deeply grateful when in 1962 poet and art critic Pam Bell invited her to visit Aroo station at Boonah, west of Ipswich, Brisbane as it provided her with new subject matter for a number of regional landscapes and homestead portraits. Boonah landscape 1962 was inspired by the view of Roadvale and the…
A conventional portrait — a seated half-figure painted from life — which is disrupted by the subject’s race. In mid-twentieth-century Australia, Indigenous people had rarely figured in a genre that confirmed the status of ‘elder statesman’ upon its (mainly male) subjects. William Dargie’s Portrait of Albert Namatjira 1956 has subsequently become the most identifiable image…
In October 2011, Ben Quilty toured with Australian troops as an official war artist for the Australian War Memorial, part of its scheme to document the experiences of Australians deployed to the frontline in Afghanistan. Quilty’s Sergeant P, after Afghanistan 2012 is a brave attempt to capture the intensity of experience felt by soldiers involved…