RAY CROOKE

Corporate collection, Sydney

Overall good original condition, no visable defects or retouching - some slight frame rubbing along top right edge and right hand edge where board has slipped in it's frame.
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Ray Crooke fell in love with the tropics during his WWII military postings on Cape York and Borneo.  After completing art studies at Swinburne Technical College after the war he travelled north again, to Thursday Island and Cairns.  There he met June Bethel, who he married in Melbourne in 1951, and the young couple spent the first half of the 1950s living in Cairns and on Moa and Thursday Islands.  They returned to Melbourne in 1955 for Ray to pursue his career as an artist, and the present work is one of those which were 'done in Victoria in that first surge of painting ... at Ferntree Gully I started painting and I hadn't yet formed any distinct style - I had a lot of things I want to say but I didn't know how to say them.  So one day, I thought "I'll just paint a place I like and where I know" and I did a tempera painting of Thursday Island in a style which I liked and exhibited at the Australian Galleries and it was an immediate success ... that was the first big breakthrough ... when I realised all I had to do was more or less paint things of my own experience.'¹ 

Thursday Island and Cape York were to become Crooke's most favoured and most popular subjects over a long and distinguished career, so the present work is particularly notable for its early date.  It was conceivably included in that August 1959 Australian Galleries show, but is more likely to have been exhibited the following year, one of the more than seventy Queensland subjects shown at the Johnstone Gallery in Brisbane in September 1960. 

In these first island pictures, the figures have a hieratic, primitive-modern weight and calm.  The compositions usually contain one or two main figures, with relationships and communication implied but not precisely articulated, producing an overall mood described by Gertrude Langer as 'a gentle, tranquil humanity touched with some impenetrable melancholy.'²  In the present work this quality is brightened and sharpened by a fringe of frangipani flowers, and by the striking, almost mystical-talismanic image of the pink, spine-frilled murex shell. 

1. Ray Crooke, interview with Barbara Blackman, 23 October 1983, quoted in Sue Smith (ed.), North of Capricorn: the Art of Ray Crooke (exhibition catalogue), Perc Tucker Regional Gallery, Townsville, 1997
2. Gertrude Langer, 'Thursday Island Paintings', Courier Mail, 20 September 1960, p. 2