drawings
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Kimberley Field Drawings
1947 - 1950I was lucky … having known the people … it was easy to mingle in with their life. We’d walk together and go on long journeys, sometimes two or three weeks at a time … When I’d be out in the bush the actual conditions were fairly rigorous — there was no chance of acting like the French artists who’d fix themselves up in a spot, put up an umbrella and paint right there on the spot.
It was necessary to reduce things to a very practical easy-to-carry formula — it was a case of working with sketchbooks and soft pencils. In this way I’d draw ... -
Face Value
1940s and 1960s...
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Kimberley & Goldfields
1940s — 1960sThe Kimberley and Goldfields drawings are selections from six scrolls † that were prepared in 1964 for the former Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. The scrolls were re-drafted for the AIAS from a wealth of graphic material in the artist’s sketch-books dating from the 1930s.
Like much of Elizabeth Durack’s graphic, out of sight, work this series is of historic as well as artistic interest.
Overall, the works reveal the chasm between traditional and western beliefs and practices — a conflict ... -
Bougainville Is
1969The Bougainville Island drawings selected here are from a large series of works prepared for ConZinc RioTinto Australia, Melbourne, in 1969.
They have since become part of the RioTinto collection in Perth, Western ...
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The Living Rock
1950s and 60sExamples from drawings of the Pentacost and Grant Ranges, Kimberley, Western ...
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Battle Cries
1978Battle Cries, a series of almost 30 works is passionate and sardonic response to another war ... to the turmoil and distortion, the agony and courage, the construction and destruction, the reconstruction and deconstruction associated with war wherever it occurs in the world.
For such timeless subject matter, Durack found within abstraction a freedom to convey insights into modern warfare — insights that are highlighted by terse, ambiguous titles, a number of them famous lines from ... -
'. . . black swan of trespass on alien waters'
1979… black swan of trespass on alien waters is a suite of 15 paintings named for some well-known explorers and discoverers of Western Australia.
The title is a line from an Ern Malley poem:
Durer: Innsbruck, 1495
… I had read in books that art is not easy
But no one warned that the mind repeats
In its ignorance the vision of others. I am still -
Background to Hamersley Iron
1969 and 1991...
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'the beautiful country with an iron heart ...'
1976The title of this series The beautiful country with an iron heart ... is from a line in a letter to the artist's son. It refers to the vast iron-ore rich Pilbara region of Western Australia.
These particular harvest of the eye works were exhibited at the Fine Arts Gallery, Perth in ... -
Dreaming up the Victoria
1994Dreaming up the Victoria (1994) consists of some 18 large aerial impressions of the Northern Territory’s longest and most majestic river. The pastel drawings depict, and loosely follow, the course taken by Captain John Clement Wickham and Commander John Lort Stokes who in the Beagle had explored and named the river in 1839.
Elizabeth Durack was familiar with the river since the 1930s and on several occasions had sailed along it from The Depot (present-day Timber Creek) and up the coast to Darwin. In 1994 when reading Stokes’ Discoveries in Australia, Journal of a Voyage of Discovery during the Voyage of HMS Beagle, 1837-1843 opportunity arose for ... -
Kimberley Calls
1981Kimberley Calls is the general title for a set of work honouring the Royal Flying Doctor Service of Australia. In April and May 1981 when the RFDS was based in Wyndham, Western Australia, Elizabeth Durack flew with doctors to many remote northern outposts. Revealing an innate sense of design these bold bright works capture the essence and variety of Kimberley landscape from the air. They also acknowledge the dedication of those associated with the RFDS. The examples selected here are from a series of some 40 works first exhibited, in association with the RFDS, in Georges Gallery, Melbourne in November 1981.
Collage was one of many media that appealed to Elizabeth Durack. She ... -
'Bett-Bett's wonderful lonely palace ...'
1970s — 1990s, a continuumBett-Bett's wonderful lonely palace ... is a large sequence of out of sight works that was produced over a period of some 20 years.
The title Bett-Bett's wonderful lonely palace ... is from the caption of a photograph in Mrs Aeneas Gunn's Little Black Princess of the Never-Never (1905) a story with which 7 year old Betty Durack had identified when it was read aloud by Loreto nuns during sewing classes in 1922. Some fifty years later when travelling through East Kimberley near the Northern Territory border ...