Education - Drysdale

		Russell Drysdale was one of Australia's most important and popular artists. He enjoyed a national and international reputation. A study of Drysdale's work can reveal a treasure-trove of artistic influences, technical invention and important links between many subjects in the school curriculum.
		The influence of the land From an early age Drysdale developed a direct knowledge of and strong attachment to the Australian landscape and it's people. Born in Sussex, England, in 1912, he traveled twice to Australia as a child, including a two year stay in northern Queensland before his family settled in Melbourne. His parents were wealthy landowners. His grandfather and great grandparents had been early pastoralists in Tasmania and the western district of Victoria. As a student Drysdale boarded at the prestigious Geelong Grammar School in Victoria, where many fellow students came from rural areas and shared a common interest in life on the land. Upon leaving school he worked at his family's Pioneer Sugar Mills estate in Queensland then later at the family property Boxwood Park near Albury in New South Wales.
		Artistic Influences At the age of seventeen Drysdale developed a detached retina in his left eye, a condition which left him virtually blind in that eye for the rest of his life. While recovering from eye treatment in a Melbourne hospital in 1932 he amused himself by drawing in pen and ink. His doctor showed the drawings to his friend Daryl Lindsay, a noted artist and later director of the National Gallery of Victoria. Lindsay in turn introduced Drysdale to the art teacher George Bell. At the age of twenty, Drysdale attended art classes at the newly opened George Bell and Arnold Shore Art School where he was shown reproductions of modern art by Cezanne, van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, Modigliani, Roualt and Dufy. The school was modernist in it's approach. Bell was and influential teacher but did not impose any particular style upon his students, although there was strong emphasis on form, compositional structure and drawing from life. Later in 1932 Drysdale left for Europe to further his knowledge of modern art. In particular he studied the Impressionists and the artists of the School of Paris. Early in 1933 he returned to Australia. Two years later he married Elizabeth (Bon) Stephen and resumed his classes with Bell. The largest and most important of Drysdale's early paintings is The Rabbiter and his family which he painted while a student of Bell. This theme would have been familiar to Drysdale from his farming experiences. It is the first of many paintings to explore the relationship between the figure and the land, which was to become characteristic of his work. The oval shaped heads, bright colours and rhythmic patterned forms reveal the influence of early twentieth century French art and of Modigliani, in particular. The formal pyramidal arrangement of figures evokes a solid structure and there are humorous elements of everyday life - the carpet slippers with pom poms and the laconic scratching dog. Such elements of humour were to become a strong aspect in many of Drysdale's paintings.
		Drysdale attempted to join the army in 1940 but was rejected due to his defective eyesight. In the same year the family moved to Albury then later to Sydney, where he began to focus his artistic concerns on images of Australian life. Both realistic and expressive, his paintings now signaled a complete break from the naturalistic landscape tradition that had dominated art in Australia in the last decades of the nineteenth century - such as the Heidelberg School - and the post impressionist style of the 1920's and 1930's. Paintings such as Sunday evening and Man reading a paper also display strong surrealist elements which echo the influence of his friend, the artist Peter Purves Smith, who experimented with painting elongated figures, pole like trees and low perspectives. Other influences included the Australian artist Eric Thake and the French surrealist Yves Tanguy. From 1941 the effects of the war on Australia increasingly occupied Drysdale's attention. Works such as Home leave and Local V.D.C. parade formed part of his personal war effort. An unofficial war artist, Drysdale recorded the war effort from a rural perspective, which offered a quiet, often humorous but equally valid alternative to the harsher urban images of war time painted by artists such as Albert Tucker and John Perceval. As the crisis of war sharpened, the humorous elements of Drysdale's art began to decline. Paintings, such as The station yard, became darker with echoes of a brooding sinister element. This was due, in part, to the influence of the British artists Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland and Paul Nash whose wartime images of England toured Australia in 1943. Like their work, Drysdale's paintings from this period evoke an air of mystery and a sense of silent menace.
		In 1944 The Sydney Morning Herald commissioned Drysdale to record the effects of a drought in western New South Wales, considered to be the worst in Australia's recorded history. This was an important event in Drysdale's career. It provided him with powerful visual experiences, which he drew and photographed. It also brought him national acclaim when his drawings of dead trees, animals and eroded landscapes appeared in newspapers across the country. From these drawings and photographs Drysdale produced a series of paintings which reflect the extreme hardships and tragedies in the outback at that time. Deserted out-station was one of the first of these. Like several of the paintings in this series it uses the device of metamorphosis and a deep theatrical space, characteristic of late Surrealism, to emphasise a sense of vast emptiness. In this series there is little difference between the organic and the inorganic or between life and death. Rarely populated by people, they are among the most abstract of all his paintings. From around 1945 the strong dramatic element in Drysdale's work began to give way to a quieter and more classical mood. His elongated figures were now modified to achieve monumentality and there was an increased emphasis on the modeling of forms. Such characteristics are evident in Drysdale's powerful image of strength and survival - Drover's wife. In 1947 Drysdale and the Australian artist Donald Friend explored the half deserted gold towns of Hill End and Sofala in New South Wales. Following these visits Drysdale produced a series of quiet and often haunting images such as Sofala, the silent mood of which as been compared to the work of the Surrealist precursor Georgio de Chirico. In the same year Drysdale also painted The rabbiters in which he combined his earlier elements of dramatic shadows and biomorphic forms with a classical style similar to Claude Lorrain.
		Drysdale was the first Australian artist of his generation to receive international attention and acclaim. His solo exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in London in 1950, which he attended, launched his overseas reputation and marked the beginning of Australian art abroad. Part of the fascination of Australian art was it's distinctive landscape imagery. In Great Britain in particular there arose a new interest in the Australian outback due to the wave of British migrants who arrived in Australia during the 1940's and 1950's. Returning to Australia in 1951 Drysdale took a decisive new direction in his painting. A visit to Cape York Peninsula in that year generated and intense interest in Aboriginal people, both for their sake and as subject matter for painting. Drysdale became the first modern Australian artist to depict the plight of indigenous Australians in rural areas and towns. Paintings like Shopping day display a highly realistic treatment of pose and expression and a new found freedom of paint application. In addition backgrounds were often more abstract. Shopping day is an incisive comment on the sense of displacement experienced by aboriginal people during the 1950's as they were forced to integrate into white society. The aboriginal women with their hats, long sleeves and white collars seem trapped between two cultures. From 1956 onwards Drysdale undertook several lengthy journeys with members of his family to the remote areas of Australia, including Alice Springs, Uluru (Ayres Rock), Mt Olga, Darwin, Halls Creek, Broome and Melville Island. Paintings such as Native dogger at Mt Olga and Basketball at Broome resulted from the artist's first journey , while a second expedition in 1958 became the catalyst for the more painterly and abstract qualities evident in Snake bay at night and Mangula. In these works colours are heightened, forms simplified and backgrounds reduced to flat decorative areas. In the process figures are almost embedded into the landscape rather than standing out from it as in earlier works. During the 1960's Drysdale continued to paint, draw and photograph. In the last decade of his life he produced few paintings, although he continued to draw. In 1980 he suffered a stroke which prevented him from working again. He died in Sydney in 1981.

1. Lynne Clarke, quoted by Geoffrey Smith, Russell Drysdale 1912-81 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1997, p.26.		Drysdale found painting a long and sometimes agonising process. His daughter Lynne has recalled: He was a very careful, slow painter, building up many layers of underpainting�.he found it terribly hard to start working and would do anything to prolong the moment. ¹ Painting exclusively in the studio Drysdale did not live in the places he painted, nor paint the places he lived in. he spent lengthy periods travelling to remote and desolate parts of Australia, using photography and drawing extensively to record his outback experiences.
2. Russell Drysdale 1912-81 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1997, p.30.		Drysdale described his technique as follows: I am not what is known as a direct painter, in the sense that one puts down paint and does not touch it. I am what is known as an indirect painter, I prefer to be able to build up an underpainting and glaze and paint into the glazes and so forth. The old technique of painting, fat on lean, or lean on fat, cold on warm, or warm on cod, to me this gives paint a quality which I think is beautiful, I love it. ²
		Christipher Allen, Art in Australia: From Colonization to Postmodernism, Thames & Hudson, London, 1997 Jennie Boddington, Drysdale: Photographer, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1987 Lou Klepac, The Life and Work of Russell Drysdale, Bay Books, Sydney, 1983 Geoffrey Smith, Russell Drysdale 1912-81, National Gallery Victoria, Melbourne, 1997 ... See the literature section of this site for additional reading.

		Follow this link to access a printable version of these Questions and Issues for Discussion Art • Compare Drysdale's images of Aborigines to the work of early Australian artists, eg. John Glover, Thomas Bock or von Guérard, Consider content and prupose. For related information see the Identity Timeline. • Look at the work of Claude Lorrain, Modigliani, Tanguy, Roualt, Dufy, and Purves Smith. What were their influences on Drysdale? • Drysdale was taught by the innovative art teacher George Bell. Look at and compare the work by other artists taught by George Bell. For related information see the Essays. • Compare Drysdale's landscapes to those by Roberts, Streeton, McCubbin, Sutherland, Southern, and Heysen. Consider colour, brushwork and themes. For related information see the Maps of Australia. • Previous landscape painters recorded an Australia of lush flora and fauna. The desolate flat outback had been almost entirely ignored until Drysdale. Why? • Draw a map of Australia and mark in the following places which Drysdale visited: Albury, Alice Springs, Broome, Halls Creek, Hill End, Melville Island, Mt Olga, Sofala, Uluru. For related information see the Maps of Australia. • Make a list of the art materials and supplies you would need to take with you when visiting such places. English • Read some stories on life in the bush by Australian authors such as Henry Lawson, Banjo Patterson, A.B. Facey, Miles Franklin. • For a description of life in urban Australia during the 1930's and 1940's read George Johnston's My Brother Jack or Ruth Park's Harp in the South. For related images see the Monday Morning and The Bath. • You are a journalist for The Sydney Morning Herald. Write an article to accompany Drysdale's drawings of the drought. For related images see Deserted out-station, Dead bullock, Red landscape, Desolation, Walls of China and The Crucifixion. • Write a poem or short story based on one of Drysdale's works. Media • During the 1930's American photographers, such as, Walker Evans and Dorothy Lange were commissioned by the Roosevelt government for the Farm Security Administration Project to record images of the depression and drought in rural America. Compare these images to those produced by Drysdale. • Find examples of other artists who were employed by newspapers to record an event, eg. Sidney Nolan, Lloyd Rees, John Spooner. Compare their work to the work of Drysdale. • Look at some Australian films or television mini series that are set in the bush or the city and compare the various images of Australia that they portray. For example: My Brilliant Career, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Wake in Fright, A Town Like Alice, Caddie, Harp in the South, Sunday Too Far Away, The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, Careful He Might Hear You, The Shiralee, Come in Spinner, I Can Jump Puddles, Kiss and Kill. History • When was the Second World War? Who was Australia at war with? Who were its allies? For related images see The medical examination, Soldier, The deserted town hall, Home leave, Local V.D.C. parade, Soldiers, Albury platform, and The station yard. • What political parties were in power during Drysdale's lifetime? • List some key historical events in Australia during the lifetime of Drysdale. • In what year did Australian Aborigines receive the right to vote? For related images see the paintings Mother and child, north Queensland, Station blacks, Cape York, Shopping Day, Youth at Broome, Basketball at Broome, Young girl at the rockpool, The ruins, Lake Callabonna, and the photographs Avon Downs photograph, Daly River Mission I, Daly River Mission II, Spectators at night. • Compare Drysdale to other artists working in Australia who have dealt with issues regarding migration and aboriginal culture, eg. Yosl Bergner, Arthur Boyd, Ian Fairweather, Tracey Moffatt, Gordon Bennett, Leah King-Smith. • Look at the work of other Australian artists who recorded the activities of the armed services during the Second World War, eg. William Dargie, Donald Friend, Ivor Hele, Frank Hinder, Eric Thake, Albert Tucker.
		This Education Guide was prepared by Graham Parker and Kim O'Loughlin, Education Services and Geoffrey Smith, Curator. 20th Century Australian Art, National Gallery Victoria. See additional Russell Drysdale website acknowledgements.
		An Australian Broadcasting Corporation and National Gallery of Victoria Collaboration © 1999 ABC and NGV