ALBERT TUCKER

The theme of parrots attacking explorers, bushrangers, gamblers, masked figures and fauns runs through many of Albert Tucker's paintings of the sixties. Sometimes friendly, oft times not, the parrot plays an important role in Tucker's journey of the antipodean everyman. For him the parrot was 'a ready-made symbol'.

While Tucker was a master of archetypal images, the parrot was part of his visual surrounds in the bushland at Hurstbridge, where he had moved in 1961. It was an exhilarating experience and he responded to the Australian bush and bird life with enthusiasm. Observing the birds gave him particular pleasure, and they soon began to populate his paintings. His explorer and parrots series of paintings, however, had their genesis a little earlier in such grand examples as Explorer Attacked by Parrots, 1960 (National Gallery of Victoria) and Explorer and Parrot, 1960, (Dr Joseph Brown Collection, National Gallery of Victoria).

Moving as these images are, his later version of 1967 is one of the most powerful paintings in the series. Cut back to the essentials, raw in colour and form, it shows Tucker at his starkest and most challenging best. The skeletal image of the explorer is one of Tucker's boldest images, in which sand and paint are combined to develop the three dimensional modelling of the face, medium becoming a metaphor for the grit and determination of those who face the harsh environment of the outback - on another level, of life itself. The figure, like the landscape, is parched and gaunt, echoed in trees reaching upwards in an anthropomorphic appeal to the heavens. The spanner-like open-beaked parrots are likewise changed, ready to bite and screw, their plumage of former beauty transformed into images of screeching sound. The crescent mouth that dominated Tucker's Images of Evil of the forties was reborn.