ARTHUR BOYD

Australian Galleries, Melbourne
Infinite Art Gallery, Melbourne
Private collection, Melbourne; purchased from the above in 1988

Australian Galleries, 6 - 18 August 1979, cat. no. 17

Good condition. Has five small black marks in top centre of the sky. A small area of surface paint grazing of the bottom right hand corner.
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The Shoalhaven paintings mark Boyd's return to the Australian landscape after a long hiatus.   In these works Boyd artfully employs a tiered composition of sky, hillside and river to varying degrees to reveal the landscapes natural beauty.  In fact the tranquil Shoalhaven river and its surrounds were Boyd's life force, where he explored a landscape that changed not only in colour and form every day but from season to season and where he depicted natural events such as drought, floods and fire into his paintings.  Hardship, whether from flood or drought, was represented with the inclusion of the stiffened carcass or skull in what appears to be a benevolent setting.

 

Boyd also incorporated events he either witnessed or heard about on his trips to the Shoalhaven.  In Aeroplane, riverbank and carcass Boyd revisits a subject he noted in 1974:

 

'During the Shoalhaven flood in 1974 a neighbour went in a helicopter to try and save his herd by shepherding them towards dry land.  I made the helicopter a bi-plane because it removed it from the present.  The plane is a bit like a 1914-18 war plane'¹

 

1. Sandra McGrath, The Artist and the river: Arthur Boyd and the Shoalhaven, Bay Books, Sydney, 1982, p.228