This was Drysdale’s first excursion into Australia’s inland and it was to make a profound impact upon his artistic direction and aesthetic aims. These words reveal that Drysdale’s aesthetic aim is to create a pictorial analogy of timeless ecological harmonies. Isa, Tennant Creek, Alice Springs, the Musgrave Ranges, Ayers Rock, the Olgas and then headed north to Darwin.
These amply display visual attributes that make his contributions all the more obvious. As such, his paintings uncover aspects of a largely hidden Australia. The effect of visual unification is made all the more obvious with the splashes of red and ochre pigments on the figure’s lower body that mimic the colours of the earth around it, shining with the fierce unpolarised glow of an Outback sunset. Viewed in such a context, there is little doubt that Drysdale had a very sympathetic understanding of Aborigines’ relationship to the Australian landscape and their adaptation to local climatic conditions and forbidding environments. On 18 May 1956, Drysdale and his wife Bon and their sixteen year-old son Tim set out on a six-month journey in a specially fitted-out Dodge station wagon. Drysdale stood at neither of these two disparate poles and one can sense how empathetic he was in his paintings of the pivotal period between mid-1956 and late-1958. The trip eventually passed through Townsville, Cairns, the Barkly Tablelands, Mt. The most observable thing to note in this impressive painting is how closely the foreground male figure is linked to his surroundings. However, they are re-doubled when viewing Drysdale’s actual paintings. Certainly, he had been into North Queensland to attend monthly business meetings for Pioneer Sugar Mills, the family company of which he was a director, but he had never crossed west into Australia’s heartland. Significantly, it was the first Drysdale retrospective exhibition ever seen in Melbourne. It is clear that Drysdale’s paintings are based upon the associations contained in his mental compendium and do not derive from any simple recording of a particular scene. Formal Valuations Located on Darling Street between Toorak Road and Alexandra Avenue The bleak apocalyptic landscape painting, Crucifixion (1946), encapsulates the horrors of World War II, including the Holocaust and the bombing of Hiroshima.
As is so often the case in history, it is the visionary artist He admired their resourcefulness and their stately manner. Russell is a Quaternary scientist who studies Earth's past climate using geochemical proxies from cave deposits (speleothems). In November 1944 the Sydney Morning Herald commissioned Drysdale to record the effects of the drought in western New South Wales, considered to be the worst in Australia’s recorded history. Likewise, the low horizon line and its outcrop of mountainous rocks of indeterminate size suggest receding distance. He is one of a group of Physical Geographers specialising in Quaternary climate and environmental change. The Aborigine, with a dead wallaby on his right shoulder, on the far right of the canvas is rendered in such a way that merges the painting’s individual elements so that his figure and the earth seem to co-mingle.
Lord Kenneth Clark, the youngest ever Director (at thirty years of age) of London’s National Gallery, former Surveyor of the King’s Pictures and the Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University had the following pertinent words to say about Drysdale’s artistic merits: The previous opportunity was a Drysdale retrospective at Sydney’s Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1960. All these social elements and aesthetic associations converge in the present painting, Drysdale’s important canvas, Red Landscape, of 1958. It is safe to say that Drysdale revived an interest in the depiction of Aborigines and changed the way they were perceived in art. Those who love Australia and the Australians as I do will find their feelings reflected in the bold, sincere and deeply human records he has made of the landscape and its inhabitants, black and white. But no one except Drysdale gives the same authentic feeling of the resolute humanity that has managed to exist in that terrible continent. So, when I discovered recently, via Lisa of ANZLitLovers , that the Tarra Warra Museum of Art in Victoria was having a Russell Drysdale exhibition on the theme Defining the Modern Australian Landscape , I knew I wanted to see it. As is so often the case in history, it is the visionary artist who, untrammelled by aesthetic convention and artistic precedence, instigates cultural change and enlarges perceptual horizons. Russell DRYSDALE. LOU KLEPAC'S weighty monograph on Russell Drysdale was first issued in 1983, less than two years after the artist's death in June 1981. In the Eighteenth Century they were depicted as unfettered ‘Noble Savages’–a then common phrase that originated with the English poet and dramatist John Dryden in his book, The Conquest of Granada, of 1672 and was later popularised as an anthropological concept by the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his famous publication, The Social Contract, of 1762. Russell Drysdale, in fact, disappeared a little from view – at least, I stopped hearing him mentioned.
The exhibition presented the first opportunity that the Australian public had in thirty-seven years to evaluate the full scale of Drysdale’s paintings. Feelings of awe and wonder flood the painting. Here, this is overcome by suggesting pictorial depth through the slant of the mid-ground mound immediately behind the figure. As a result, the painting presents itself as a horizontal vignette which displays only a small part of the vast visual expanse. Buying & Selling Art Drysdale took many notes and photographs, kept a diary and completed many sketches. There are still men of stone-age culture living a forgotten pattern of life. As Professor Bernard Smith, Australia’s most respected art historian, has remarked on many occasions, the sad historical passage ran ‘from the Noble Savage to the ignoble savage’. During the mid-1940s Russell Drysdale began to blend symbolism with Australian outback imagery. The dizzying vastness and desolate solitude of the environment is heightened by the complete lack of internal framing devices (trees, branches, grass and the like) that might draw the viewer’s eyes inwards. To anyone who cannot visit Australia I would say look at the paintings of Drysdale and you will understand why so many unexpected people admire Australia.