Glimpse: Inside Gold Coast Art City Gallery’s Collection A survey of highlights from the city collection including artworks collected through our significant prizes and artworks about the Gold Coast region including the beach and beach culture. Features photography, indigenous arts and Australian art post 1950. Essays Brett Adlington and Virginia Rigney. Exhibition catalogue; Pages 96 ISBN 0 95775023 2 5 Published by GCCG 2007
FOREWORD
NIGEL THOMPSON Portrait of Pat Corrigan 1996 Oil on canvas 73.5 x135 Gift of Pat and Barbara Corrigan under the Cultural Gifts Program 1999.
I have been particularly pleased with the growth of works in our Sculpture Park from 5 works in 1996 to over 40 today including works on long term loan. My thanks to Gallery Directors Fran Cummings, and for the last 11 years John Walsh, together with their hard working teams. It is only fitting that we are now able to produce this publication in celebration of the ongoing development of the collection and highlight the diversity and quality of the works included in it. This publication
VEDA ARROWSMITH is an important project in the recognition of Hinterland 1975 the hard work done to date in developing synthetic polymer such a collection and I would like to paint on board 3 panels, acknowledge all those who have been 61 x 102 cm each Purchased 2003. involved over the years. I am excited by the Reproduced courtesy prospect of expanding on the current gallery the estate of the artist. facility to allow more of this significant collection to be displayed to the public. This publication by no means signifies an end to our collecting activities as we continue to source appropriate material for the collection to develop further over the years to come. Finally, my sincere thanks to Gold Coast City Council for their ongoing support for our City Gallery.
Patrick Corrigan AM Chairman
3 GLIMPSE
It is with great pride that I have seen the Gold Coast City Art Gallery Collection grow from 832 artworks to well over 2000 artworks since I was asked in 1996 by the then Mayor, Councillor Ray Stevens, to be Chairman. This increase also represents an increased value of this city assetto over 9 million dollars. This has been achieved predominantly through the ongoing generosity of donors to whom we remain eternally grateful.
GOLD COAST COLLECTION HINTERLAND
Virginia Rigney
The long stretch of golden beaches may have claimed pre-eminence as the most distinctive of the Gold Coast landscapes, however the imposing mountain ranges of the hinterland that swell up from the plains are equally defining for this region. The Gold Coast Hinterland extends in a strip running inland and parallel to the coast, from the Lamington Range in the South through to the Darlington and McPherson Ranges and to the Tamborine Plateau in the north. Ecological richness and dramatic geological history have their foundation in the actions of an enormous shield volcano centred on Mt Warning. As a place of natural beauty, their value was officially recognised in 1908 when the Witches Falls area was named the first National Park in Queensland. Listed as part of Australia’s World Heritage Areas in 1994, they contain the most extensive and richly bio-diverse areas of subtropical rainforest in the world. Alongside luxuriant forest, escarpments and waterfalls, feature pockets of small cattle, dairy and crop farming, supported by a number of communities including Canungra, Beechmont, Springbrook – and the largest -Tamborine Mountain. The Coomera, Albert and Logan Rivers all originate from here but accessing the land was hard won with only a small number of roads leading like fingers into the area. Many artists have been drawn to this dramatic landscape. The Gallery holds some small works from the time of first European settlement of this area, as well as a larger group of works from the Twentieth century that reflect changing responses to our engagement with the natural environment. Edwin Bode was the first artist to permanently reside in the area and the Gallery holds a number of his watercolours. Emigrating with frail health from Birmingham in 1882, he worked in the Ipswich area and then bought acreage on Maybury Creek adjoining the Coomera River where he planted oranges. This work was difficult, and in 1886 he moved to the then tiny settlement of Canungra where only two years earlier the Lahey family had established a saw and planning mill. His intimate little painting, At Canungra, executed not long after this move, possibly in return for board and lodging, depicts a humble cottage and land owned by James and Clara Auld with Mt Misery in the background. James had a bullock team and Bode depicts these cattle in lazy repose contained by a neatly built post and rail fence in newly cleared grassland. Preparatory notes on the back of the painting reveal something of Bode’s working methods and the fresh intensity with which he sought to faithfully capture the new kinds of light and foliage that he saw around him. He records the “warm grey light “ and the “grassland with purple and brown flecks” and these observations have been carefully rendered in the final picture. One senses the pride of both artist and landowner in their achievements, however a later painting of the Numinbah Falls suggest that Bode is now much more entranced with the natural,
EDWIN BODE At Canungra 1886 watercolour comp: 18 x 29.5cm Purchased 1995. VINCENT BROWN The Hay Yard, Upper Coomera 1938 oil on board 47.5 x 39.5 cm Purchased 2001. Reproduced courtesy the estate of the artist.
29 GLIMPSE
untouched environment. In this painting the crashing falls in full flood are bathed in a golden light and almost hidden in this paradise of tree ferns and soaring gums are two figures - native indigenous people. After decades of frontier violence the traditional owners of this region, the Wangerriburra people, had been displaced for well over a generation. Bodes’ depiction is a nostalgic imagined scene, that satisfied an audience now happy to see native people as belonging only to some Arcadian primeval past. Isaac Walter Jenner was another self-taught English artist who immigrated with his family to Brisbane at the same time as Bode. His earlier career as a sailor in the Royal Navy gave him the maritime subjects for which he is best known. During his first years in the colony he actively campaigned for the establishment of a Public Art Gallery and Museum, making a donation of one of these paintings to the fledgling State Gallery. His preference for sunrise or sunset to bring drama to a landscape is exemplified in a recently acquired oil painting, Pimpama Creek, where he depicts the red glow of the setting sun seen through the brown scrub and shadows reflecting onto the still water. Jenner anxiously witnessed the rapid pace of land clearing in the wider Brisbane area following the Subdivision Act of 1885 and a tiny painting now held in the National Gallery of Australia – A Martyr to Civilisation of 1889 showing a burnt out tree at Taringa, indicates his concerns. His sensitivity to the natural environment, albeit through the prism of the English Sublime tradition, is more quietly reflected in this finely executed painting of a peaceful moment on the Pimpama creek. Vida Lahey, one of the most important painters of the Gold Coast region in the early 20th century, was born in Pimpama ten years before Jenner’s painting was executed and attended Coy-Te-Lea school at Southport – later to become St Hilda’s. The eldest of 11 children, her family were pioneer settlers and saw-millers, yet Vida took an independent path as an artist informed by modernism and became one of Australia’s best-known women artists before WWII. Beechmont to the coast is a different kind of rendering of the hinterland in ISAAC WALTER JENNER Pimpama Creek (alternate that it is a view that places the mountains looking title ‘Pimpama Scrub’) out in proximity to the coast. The Hinterland held 1892 oil on academy board special significance for Vida, for even though the 14.7 x 30 cm Purchased with the family business was built on a saw milling assistance of the Gold Coast Australian operation at Canungra, she had worked Decorative Fine Arts Society, 2006 passionately with her brother Romeo, for the gazetting of Lamington National Park in 1915. VIDA LAHEY Untitled This picture, painted possibility after her return (Beechmont to the Coast) n.d. from her second European trip in the 1930s, is as oil on canvas 42.2 x 55.3 cm much a painting about sky and light as land and Gift of the Theodore Collection, 1969. reflects the connection to her artistic colleague, Reproduced courtesy Queensland artist Kenneth Macqueen. the estate of the artist.
Vincent Brown, another early Queensland modernist, worked primarily in Brisbane. He developed a connection with the Coomera area after his sister was appointed a teacher at the local school there in the 1920s and was an occasional visitor to the coast. His early style of atmospheric watercolours changed dramatically while studying at the Slade School and concurrently at the Grosvenor School in London from 1936 to 1939, which was then regarded internationally as the place to study for a modern art education. It is therefore significant, that The Hay Yard, Upper Coomera, was painted during this time, when the artist was 10,000 miles away from the subject. Brown only took up oil painting in 1936 and this small picture with its bright composition and blocks of colour is an important transitional work that points towards his more simplified cubist style pictures that date from 1940. Perhaps the work is also the affectionate recollection of a homesick young artist. Albert Tucker first came to the Hinterland shortly after returning to Australia in 1960 after twelve years spent in Europe and America. Wishing to reacquaint himself with the Australian landscape, the dripping rainforests of South East Queensland held refreshing appeal after a series of paintings of desolate and devastated landscapes peopled by haunted totemic figures. Later in 1971 he quietly purchased an 18-acre section of rainforest in Springbrook to save it from imminent subdivision and he subsequently enjoyed the opportunity to visit and paint in the area. This watercolour of Springbrook Falls tumbling over a black and brooding escarpment connects to the broader tendency within his work to uncover the darkness within. Fred Williams visited Tuckers’ Springbrook studio in 1971 and this stay precipitated a significant shift in the work of this major Australian painter. His sparsely abstract works of the 1960s, in tones of browns and ochres, gave way to a richer more exotic pallet following this Queensland trip that extended up to the Sunshine Coast. Inspired by the dense exuberant foliage he encountered, Williams enthusiastically depicts ferns, vines and flowers and uses the vertical format of the paper to emphasise the elongated tree forms. William Robinsons’ The Rainforest, is an enveloping panorama that places the viewer above, below and literally immersed within the landscape. (illus. page 10 – 11) His rich vision developed through the daily rhythms of living in that environment; the morning walk down to the creek to turn on the pump that would send water up to the studio and the experience of being out in all weathers - passing showers, brilliant sunshine, moving shadows and mist. Yet this monumental painting is much more. It is also about the mysteries of Creation, the infinity of time and the possibility of making a human connection with these great questions.
ALBERT TUCKER The Falls, Springbrook 1974 watercolour on paper 50 x 65.5 cm Purchased 2000. Gold Coast City Art Gallery Trust Reproduced courtesy the estate of the artist. EDWIN BODE Numinbah Falls 1907 watercolour on paper 50.5 x 40cm (framed) Purchased 1992.
GOLD COAST COLLECTION THE LURE OF THE COAST
Virginia Rigney
The South Coast as it was known, began to attract holidaymakers from the sweltering heat of Brisbane from the 1880s. The decision of the then Governor Musgrave and his American born wife, Lucinda, to build a summer residence at Southport gave the area an instant caché. Graziers and the wealthy society of Brisbane quickly followed their example, arriving either by coach or paddle steamer and staying by the calm waters of the protected Broadwater. A train, first to Southport and then all the way to Coolangatta in 1903, gave democratic access to the new craze of ocean bathing, the fresh bright light and the invigorating ocean breezes of the coast. The lure of Queensland was aided after 1916 when the southern states enacted 6pm closing of hotel bars as a wartime measure and then continued this law until the 1960s. You could buy a drink in Queensland up until 10 o’clock at night and, at places like Jim Cavill’s Surfers Paradise Hotel, which opened in 1926, you could still order supper after nine. The hubs of Coolangatta, Burleigh, Surfers Paradise and Southport saw a proliferation of hotels and boarding houses and a sense of fun and relaxation - and in the days before affordable overseas travel - something of the exotic, pervaded. Artists have been particularly attracted to depict the beach views of the southern beaches of the coast with its’ six prominent headlands providing distinctive geographical markers. Rubery Bennett, who was born in Clayfield Qld in 1893, spent his childhood and teens in Brisbane and made a number of holiday trips to the south coast. The Gallery holds two of his small paintings from the 1920s, Currumbin Estuary of 1922 and a brighter, slightly later work Sunny morning from Tugun, painted possibly after the artist had been living and operating a commercial gallery in Sydney for two years. Bennett was a committed plein air artist, and worked within the Impressionist tradition of capturing fleeting effects of light with a high key palette and free brushstrokes. His paintings were small in scale for ease of working outdoors and the light vigour of the Tugun beach scene, with its distant figures on the edge of the wave break, with the Burleigh Headland in the background, is an enticing view. Ethel Carrick Fox also worked within an Impressionist tradition. She was an English artist who was introduced to Australia through her husband, the Edwardian painter Emanuel Phillips Fox. After his early death in 1915, she returned to Europe and in the 1920s spent some time working in Paris. There she briefly taught Queenslander Vida Lahey and they became friends and it is likely that this small view, From Kirra, North Coast, was painted on one of her return visits to Australia in 1933. Like Vida, she was an energetic and independent woman and this is an unusual view looking away from the beach and towards the distant ranges, framed by the domesticity of a picket fence and orchard tree. The most prolific artist of Gold Coast beach scenes was Herbert Clarke Simpson, who developed an unabashed popular market for affordable views that would appeal both financially and aesthetically to honeymooners and tourists. He claimed to have painted over 500 views of Currumbin Rock alone and was often seen working in the beach hut at Kirra. Born in Casino, he studied under Godfrey Rivers at the Brisbane Technical College and exhibited a number of local beach scenes at the Queensland Art Society in Brisbane from 1920 to 1934, moving permanently to the Kirra area with his family in1926. This early work of Shark Bay looking to Greenmount and Kirra shows his deft handling of a breaking wave, and, although he worked up to the 1950s he seems not to have wished to document the dramatic changes to the beachside built environment that were beginning to occur around him.
RUBERY BENNETT Sunny morning from Tugunc 1927 oil on board 15.0 x 22.5 cm Purchased 2002.
H.C. SIMPSON [Shark Bay looking towards Greenmount Hill and Kirra] c1926 watercolour on paper comp: 23.6 x 62.8cm Purchased 1997.
FACING PAGE ETHEL CARRICK FOX From Kirra, North Coast c1930s oil on canvas on board 25.5 x 35.5 cm Purchased 2004
GOLD COAST COLLECTION THE 1950s: THE GOLD COAST BOOMS
Virginia Rigney
After over a decade of stifled development, the Gold Coast blossomed from the mid 1950s. Strict post war building restrictions were lifted in 1952 and a new generation of entrepreneurs were able to resume the vision of Jim Cavill for Surfers Paradise to become a modern international resort. They transformed a village of holiday shacks and guesthouses and built new American style Motels with private facilities, pools and enticing highway signage that catered for the car owning family who wanted service and convenience. Kinkabool at ten stories was the first apartment tower and just down the road the first canal estates were being dredged. Clearly taken by the general atmosphere, the pre-eminent Australian architect Robin Boyd, wrote in 1957, “Here is a fibro cement paradise under a rainbow of plastic paint. It is any Australian town plus optimism. It is a utopia of souvenir shops, bamboo bridges spanning murky rock pools, nightclubs, ‘fabulous floor shows’, bikini bars selling floral wisps of bathers and Hawaiian shirts through windows open to the footpath, ill-lit cabarets, ... beer gardens in no apparent hurry to close at 10, shops open as long as there are customers awake, Sunday movies, signs, hoardings, posters, neons, primary colours purple, green and orange straight from the brimming pot…there is never a plain surface, never a pause and everywhere the sound of pumping, building, road making and dredging.” Paula Stafford ran the most famous of Bikini Bars. Upon arriving in town, the fashion conscious tourist would stop in at Paula’s to have a new bikini individually fitted and made, ready for wearing to the beach the next day. Most featured a unique reversible design and the latest European fabrics. Although Paula had begun making the two piece suits for her daughters in the late 1940s, she received nationwide notoriety in 1952 scoring a moral and media victory when an over-zealous beach inspector claimed her swimming costumes were too brief. Subsequently used in numerous tourism campaigns, the bikini clad girl has gone on to become the most significant popular culture icon of the Gold Coast. Jeff Carter took this carefully staged image in 1957 with a large format camera on one of a number JEFF CARTER of trips he made to the Gold Coast Inside Paula’s bikini bar at this time, shooting images 1957 (printed 1996) silver gelatin photograph for popular magazines such as 27.7 x 27.5 cm Purchased 1996 Walkabout, Pix and People. Carter is Reproduced courtesy the artist. one of Australia’s most important
DONALD FRIEND Crab farm, Coombabah Creek 1954 crayon, ink, gouache on paper on board. sheet: 31 x 47.5 cm Purchased 1994 with funds provided by the Gold Coast City Art Gallery Advisory Panel and Primrose, Couper, Cronin, Rudkin Solicitors and Notary. Reproduced with permission from the estate of the late Donald Friend.
documentary photojournalists and the Gallery holds a number of his beach related subjects, which convey his sharp and sensitive eye for people and place. Betty Quelhurst depicts another icon of the period in her Tropical Beer Garden, Surfers Paradise. Quelhurst had been an outstanding student at art school in Brisbane and Melbourne and travelled in Europe from 1951- 53, spending much of her time in Paris. Delighted to capture something of that exciting time when she came back to a otherwise drab Australia, she virtually transposes the atmosphere of the Left Bank in this small oil of the popular beer garden of the Surfers Paradise Hotel. The lush garden and adjacent zoo was the passion of Jim Cavill’s wife Elsie, and locals and visitors would spend a sunny afternoon there
listening to a band under gaily-stripped umbrellas. In a pattern of rapid change that has become synonymous with the development of the Gold Coast, two years after this picture was painted, the Hotel was demolished and Stanley Korman built the more modern and luxurious Chevron Hotel which brought a new standard of entertainment and accommodation to the burgeoning resort. Away from Surfers Paradise, development occurred at a slower pace. John Rigby’s sober picture of Currumbin may have been painted in a gently modern style, yet the small seaside cottages seem a world away from the bustling neon further north. The Gold Coast had experienced a major storm event in 1954 and the high retaining wall of boulders that feature prominently in the composition were put
in place to stop further encroachment. The beach is now totally recovered with sand dunes, and so the work becomes a reminder of the dynamic nature of the marine environment. Margaret Olley and Donald Friend were close friends and fellow travellers in art and life. Both come from a rural background, Olley was born in Lismore and Friend grew up in that area. They met in Sydney and Olley spent some time painting at the old mining community of Hill End where Friend had a cottage. This experience may have been the precedent that attracted Olley to make this confident study of sandmining at Main Beach. She includes a figure almost subsumed within the twisting mechanical components and the image is certainly at odds with the natural beach image normally associated with the Gold
MARGARET OLLEY Main Beach sand mining 1956 pencil, charcoal, wash on paper 38.5 x 50.8 cm Acquired 1979. Purchased with funds provided by Gold Coast City Council. Courtesy the artist and Philip Bacon Galleries, Brisbane.
Coast. Sandmining had been an important local industry, especially during World War II, but it stopped shortly after this work was made and the dunes revegetated. Friend helped Olley on a large commission for murals for Lennon’s Hotel in Brisbane in 1954 and this crayon and ink sketch of the famous Crab Farm at Coombabah dates from around this time. Located right next to the Brisbane - Gold Coast Highway, the Farm was a favourite spot for travellers to pick up some freshly boiled crab. Les and Dorothy Schneider ran the farm for over 50 years from 1927, so by the time Friend drew the ramshackle hut with its jetty by the lake it was already a Gold Coast institution. Robin Boyd ‘Developing a Fibro Cement Paradise’ Melbourne Age Literary Supplement Dec 28 1957. Quoted in Alexander McRobbie The Surfers Paradise Story Pan News 1982
GOLD COAST COLLECTION CONTEMPORARY RESPONSES TO THE GOLD COAST
In the space of two generations the Gold Coast has been transformed from a lively little beach resort of around 30,000 permanent residents, clustered along the so called ‘string of pearls’ of the beach communities from Coolangatta to Southport, to become an internationally recognised destination of over 500,000 people. Retirees made up the initial migratory waves and baby boomers and young families seeking their slice of a sophisticated sea change lifestyle have followed them. Uninhibited by an existing urban landscape, the city has been able to grow upwards and outwards, offering planners and developers the opportunity to create whole canal islands, sky homes and master-planned urban centres. Bare statistics and bricks and mortar belie a much more layered and illusive cultural landscape. Maligned with clichés as a place of excess, rampant growth and cultural emptiness, artwork, made particularly in the last decade, reveals much about the complexities, tensions, contradictions, possibilities and sheer excitement that has arisen in the city. The strength of these works in fact suggest that there is rich fuel here for artistic engagement with place and that work made about, or informed by, life on the Coast over the past decade has a significance that goes beyond the local. A parallel could be drawn with the kind of work that was made in Sydney in the 1920s and 30s when that city was being transformed from its 19th century form to a modern city, symbolised by the construction of the iconic bridge. The Gold Coast City Art Gallery has responded to these recent developments with a series of exhibitions; All that Glitters, Contemporary Visions of the Gold Coast (2004), The content of these paintings is known only to the people of Surfers Paradise Scott Redford and the Gold Coast (2005) and Sold! The Gold Coast Real Estate Dream (2006). In 1992, then
Director, Fran Considine Cummings organised an artists’ camp and touring exhibition of seven artists’ responses to the semi-wilderness of South Stradbroke Island. Works by all the artists involved, Jim Brodie, Elisabeth Cummings, Mal Leckie, Merv Muhling, Shelagh Morgan, Ruby Spowart and Tan XXXXXXX were acquired for the collection. A new addition to the cultural landscape over the past decade has been the establishment of a Fine Art Degree Course offered by Queensland College of Art, Griffith University at its Gold Coast campus and the Gallery has hosted its degree shows since 1999. In the early 1990s, the Gallery instigated both Joe Furlonger and Ian Smith to work as Indy Artists in Residence and both developed significant bodies of work from that time. Scott Redford was born and grew up on the Gold Coast and his work operates in a seamless blur between popular culture, personal recollection and contemporary theory. Works about his hometown are a continuing project within his many practices. Some of his key reference points are his old school song of Miami High (sung to the tune of the Mickey Mouse Club song), Robin Boyd’s 1957 summation of Surfers Paradise (quoted on page 34) and the writings of American Post modern architect Robert Venturi. The decal in his ‘surf painting’ “Our goal must be nothing less than the establishment of surfers Paradise on earth” was originally coined as an artists’ statement for the Gold Coast Art Prize in 1991, but the irony of the futurist proclamation was lost in the contemporary media, clearly already used to such bold statements of local intent. That statement, now Gothicised and absorbed into the cannon of Redford’s own art history, here appears emblazoned on one of the shiny otherworldly fibreglass surf paintings, made by local shaper Chris Garrett for Redford. For the visiting tourist, the Gold Coast is a place of temporary escape, a whirl of theme
Virginia Rigney
park multipasses, water sports, retail therapy and indulgence. Sydney based artist Anne Zahalka investigates these zones for her Leisureland series, a body of work first begun in 1998, which goes into the fully constructed immersive experience of contemporary leisure. The ‘Worlds’ provide an environment where it is possible to suspend belief - here at Sea World the Bermuda Triangle erupts every time, on time. The gallery also holds Zahalkas depictions of Movieworld, the Big Brother set at Dream World and Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary. Patterns of change within the built landscape are reflected in the work of Elizabeth Tanke, Janet Bodan and also Mike Taylor, who combines two of the most ubiquitous elements within the local landscape – the concrete Breeze blocks and surf boards to create Breeze-block board. An early graduate of the QCA Gold Coast course in 2002, Mari Hirata draws on some of the surreal experiences of her part time job as an interpreter for a Japanese wedding tourism company in her series The white shoes. Armed with a range of shoe sizes intended for the diminutive Japanese brides to pose at beach or hinterland beauty spots, Hirata takes the shoes on trips of their own, and draws on her own love of creating repeat patterns and telling juxtapositions. The recently acquired large oil painting by Michael Zavros, Et in Arcadia Ego (trans – Even I (death ) am in Paradise) is a highly prescient multi layered work. Zavros grew up on the Gold Coast and now lives in Brisbane and his finely rendered paintings deal with the seduction and frailty within luxury, beauty and perfection. Drawing from the famous work of the same title by 17th century French artist Nicholas Poussin, the painting depicts an anonymous group of immaculately attired architects or developers, gesturing towards an ellipse, a symbol of perfection, on an otherwise blank roll of plans. For a city which has been built on the visions of entrepreneurial developers, the work has a particular resonance. These works from the Gold Coast collection demonstrate the value and importance of acquiring works that give us a deeper, sometimes confronting insight, into the dynamics of this extraordinary city. ELIZABETH TANKE Gold Coast suburbia 1986 paint, collage, wood, mixed media on board 119.5 x 85.3 cm Judges selection, 1986 Gold Coast Art Prize. The John Powell Ash Memorial Award. Acquired 1986. Reproduced courtesy the artist. MARI HIRATA The waterlily tales 2002 inkjet print 75.5 x 113 cm Gift of the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Foundation For The Arts 2004.
TRACY COOPER Untitled (Souvenir) 1997 oil on canvas 60.7 x 50.5 cm Gift of Pat Corrigan under the Cultural Gifts Program, 2005. Reproduced courtesy the artist.