2011-12 Report

Outcomes

Queensland Art Gallery Board of Trustees Annual Report 2011–12 11

Acquisition highlights

Australian art to 1975

Vida Lahey

Morning light, Brisbane River

c.1925–30

Vida Lahey (1882–1968) is one of Queensland's best-loved

artists, recognised as much for her work in promoting art and

art education in Queensland as for her art works.

The exhibition ‘Vida Lahey: Colour and Modernism’ (16

October 2010 – 11 January 2011) revealed the strength

and vibrancy of the artist’s foral studies in watercolour, her

accomplishments in landscape painting and her particular

skill in depicting light on water. The latter is a feature of the

light-filled work

Morning light, Brisbane River

, acquired for

the Collection. As with

Beach umbrellas

1933, another of the

Gallery’s holdings, Lahey’s handling of oil paint has a strong

impressionist touch, in both colour and execution.

Charles Blackman (

Self-portrait in front of a boarding house,

Spring Hill

) 1951

This painting by Charles Blackman represents a strong

personal and artistic link to Brisbane, and demonstrates the

major infuence that Blackman’s Queensland sojourn had on

his career from the late 1940s.

Blackman’s technique of drawing with a dry brush loaded with

white paint over a black ground creates the effect of eroded

paint on the exterior of the weatherboard building. The subject

is evocative of the timber and tin architecture that defined

Brisbane’s inner suburbs at the time.

Flavelle, Roberts & Sankey

Bracelet

c.1896–1910

This delightful gold and pearl bracelet is a significant piece of

Queensland jewellery. The natural pearls — possibly from the

Torres Strait — provide a point of reference to Queensland’s

pearling history, and the shells are likely those of a turbo snail

(either

Turbo brunneus

Turbo intercostalis

), due to their

spiral-grooved shells and wide distribution throughout coastal

waters of Queensland.

The bracelet was sold by Flavelle, Roberts & Sankey.

This firm was originally established in Brisbane in 1863,

and opened a branch in Rockhampton in 1896. It contributed

a display to the Melbourne Exhibition of Women’s Work in

1907, and to the Queensland Court of the Franco–British

Exhibition, held in London in 1908, which attracted the

attention of Queen Alexandra. This work was acquired with

funds from the Estate of Kathleen Elizabeth Mowle through

the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation.

Ian Fairweather

Bus stop

1965

This subject, a bus stop on Bribie Island, is unique in Ian

Fairweather’s oeuvre and was first exhibited at the Macquarie

Galleries, Sydney, in the Easter exhibition of 1966. The

writer Murray Bail describes the work as ‘an exploration of

relationships and a comment on an everyday but ritualised

event’. In a note of 15 March 1965, Fairweather commented:

‘the bus stop is part of the landscape as seen from the beach

outside the grocery — over my daily bottle of milk’.

One can imagine Fairweather, watching the procession

of people boarding the bus to work or to the shops, and

perhaps thinking that he had, at least, escaped this particular

monotonous daily routine in his life as a painter.

Bus stop

, a gift of the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert

Foundation for the Arts through the Queensland Art Gallery

Foundation, is an important addition to the Gallery’s holdings

of Fairweather’s work, the most extensive in the country.

Contemporary Australian art

Brent Harris

Station X (The disrobing)

1989

Prominent painter and printmaker Brent Harris explores

the fine line between figuration and abstraction. This early

work illustrates Harris’s journey from geometric abstraction

towards his idiosyncratic exploration of the mind and body.

Station X (The disrobing)

is from ‘The Stations’, a body of

work comprising a series of 14 paintings and a portfolio

of prints (also in the Gallery’s Collection). The work refers

to the Stations of the Cross, which represent the Passion

of the Christ.

Gifted to the Gallery by James Mollison,

, former director

of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, and the

National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, this donation

demonstrates Mollison’s continued commitment to public

art collections in Australia.

Judith Wright

A wake

2011

Suggesting mystery, loss and sorrow, this work is both

memoriam and celebration for a lost child, the artist’s only

daughter, who died shortly after birth many years ago. The

mother of three sons, Wright’s experience has provided the

emotional impetus for some of her most powerful works over

several decades.