News location:

Canberra Today 15°/17° | Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Waters eyes ‘Elegance’ in artworks

IF actor John Waters felt a little mystified at having been invited to Canberra to open the National Portrait Gallery’s newest exhibition, he wasn’t showing it. On the contrary.

“Elegance in exile: Portrait drawings from colonial Australia”  throws the spotlight on four  painters who, after being transported to  Australia as convicts, created many of the most important  portraits of the colonial period, and he’s become quite an expert on that.

Waters said he first studied colonial art while preparing for his role in the 1970s TV series “Rush”, especially the works of ST Gill, who documented the Ballarat Goldfields.

But his acquaintance with colonial Australia since coming here as a migrant in the 1960s had also been extended in films like “Breaker Morant” and  “The Getting of Wisdom”.

[portfolio_slideshow]

Just recently, he said he had finished making an ABC telemovie “Mystery of a Hansom Cab”, set in 1890s Australia.

“I always use art as a visual stimulus, even in my contemporary work,” he said. And he hadn’t needed the  great Russian acting teacher Stanislavsky to tell them that, because he’d never read him.

Waters said he found that the exhibited portraits  of Indigenous leaders, governors, explorers, gentry and administrators and  ordinary people by Richard Read Snr, Thomas Bock, Thomas Griffiths Wainewright and Charles Rodius, demonstrated just how far the Australian colonies had moved in establishing cities within only about 40 years.

In the paintings, he sensed a certain informality and “the beginning of the lack of pretentiousness that came to be characterised as Australian”.

The exhibition of 80 rarely-seen drawings, watercolours and miniatures highlights the portraits’ richness as historical documents which, in addition to their art historical value, represent a record of colonial life, society and identity.

Curator Joanna Gilmour said the exhibition, with that  mixture of art and social history, very well reflected the aims of the Gallery itself.

She pointed out that one of the major lenders, Mitchell Library in the  State Library of New South Wales, collected such pictures for  history rather than artistic quality.

When it came to the quality of the paintings, however, it was hard to go past the early depictions of Indigenous Australians by Rodius and Bock.

“I love the simplicity of the drawings – just charcoal and paper,” she said of works by Rodius, whose truthfulness and accuracy, she added, defied the caricature and derogatory attitudes of the time.

In the case of Bock, whom she described as “an exquisite and exquisite draughtsman, but more for ethnographic purposes”, his works formed a kind of documentation before Tasmanian Aboriginals were moved to an island mission inBass Strait.

The exhibition takes a side look  at the conditions under which these artists practised in colonial Sydney and Hobart, and the pre-eminence of drawing and printmaking in the early years of the visual arts in this country.

Works in the exhibition have been  loaned from collections including the Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery; Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales; the Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts, State Library of Tasmania; the National Gallery of Australia; the National Library of Australia; and the Art Gallery of South Australia.

“Elegance in exile”, at the National Portrait Gallery until August 26.

 

 

 

 

 

Who can be trusted?

In a world of spin and confusion, there’s never been a more important time to support independent journalism in Canberra.

If you trust our work online and want to enforce the power of independent voices, I invite you to make a small contribution.

Every dollar of support is invested back into our journalism to help keep citynews.com.au strong and free.

Become a supporter

Thank you,

Ian Meikle, editor

Helen Musa

Helen Musa

Share this

Leave a Reply

Related Posts

Follow us on Instagram @canberracitynews