John Perceval
Birth name	Linwood Robert Steven South
Born	(1923-02-01)1 February 1923 Bruce Rock, Western Australia, Australia
Died	15 October 2000(2000-10-15) (aged 77) Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Nationality	Australian
Field	Painter, Ceramicist
Awards	McCaughey Prize (1958) Wynne Prize (1960) Officer of the Order of Australia (1991)

John de Burgh Perceval AO (1 February 1923 - 15 October 2000) was a well-known Australian artist. Perceval was the last surviving member of a group known as the Angry Penguins who redefined Australian art in the 1940s. Other members included John and Sunday Reed, Joy Hester, Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd and Albert Tucker.

Born Linwood Robert Steven South at Bruce Rock, Western Australia, the second child of Robert South (a wheat farmer) and Dorothy née Dolton. His parents separated in 1925 and he remained at his father's farm until reunited with his mother in Melbourne in 1935. Following the marriage of his mother to William de Burgh Perceval, he changed his name to John and adopted the surname de Burgh Perceval.

In 1938 Perceval contracted polio and was hospitalised, giving him the opportunity to further his skills at drawing and painting. Enlisting in the army in 1941 Perceval first met and befriended Arthur Boyd. After leaving the army and moving into the Boyd family home at Open Country, Murrumbeena, he married Boyd's younger sister Mary in 1944. Together he and Mary Boyd produced four children.

Perceval held his first solo exhibition at the Melbourne Book Club in 1948 and showed regularly with the Contemporary Art Society. Between 1949 and 1955 he concentrated on producing earthenware ceramics and helped to establish the Arthur Merric Boyd Pottery in Murrumbeena. Returning to painting in 1956 Perceval produced a series of images of Williamstown and Gaffney's Creek.

Moving to England in 1963 Perceval held solo exhibitions in London, and travelled to Europe, before returning to Australia in 1965 to take up the first Australian National University Creative Fellowship. John Perceval, a major retrospective exhibition, was held at Albert Hall, Canberra in 1966. Author Margaret Plant's monograph John Perceval, was published in 1971.

Suffering from alcoholism and schizophrenia in 1974 Perceval committed himself to the psychiatric hospital Larundel, Melbourne, where he remained until 1981. John Perceval: A Retrospective Exhibition of Paintings was held at Heide Park and Art Gallery in 1984. Perceval was awarded Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) in 1991, the year after the National Gallery of Victoria organised John Perceval: A Retrospective.

In 2000 from 19 August to 19 October John Perceval Retrospective Exhibition was held in Galeria Aniela Fine Art Gallery and Sculpture Park officially opened by Chairman Sotheby’s (included 80 oil paintings and works on paper from 1946 to 1999). It was Perceval last Retrospective and shown on the ABC TV Australian National News.

Prior to his death Scudding Swans (1959) sold for $552,500, a record for a living Australian painter. In March 2010 John Perceval Scudding Swans sold for $690,000.

Perceval is survived by his four children; Matthew, Tessa, Celia and Alice all of whom are practicing artists today.

Honours and awards[link]

• 1959: McCaughey Prize
• 1960: Wynne Prize for Dairy Farm, Victoria
• 1991: Officer of the Order of Australia for service to the visual arts

Biography[link]

• Allen, Traudi (1992). John Perceval. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. ISBN 0-522-84489-8. 
• Plant, Margaret (1971). John Perceval. Melbourne: Lansdowne Australian art library. ISBN 0-7018-0350-9. 

External links[link]

• Biography: John Perceval, National Gallery of Victoria
• John Perceval Remembered, Radio National, 18 January 2001
• Kate Williamson: John Perceval, Art Interview
• John de Burgh Perceval (1923-2000) - Artist, Potter and Soldier

Russell Drysdale
Russell Drysdale with some canvases, taken by Australian photographer Max Dupain
Birth name	George Russell Drysdale
Nationality	Australian
Field	Painter

Sir George Russell Drysdale, AC (7 February 1912 – 29 June 1981) was an Australian artist. He won the prestigious Wynne Prize for Sofala in 1947,^[1] and represented Australia at the Venice Biennale in 1954. He was influenced by abstract and surrealist art, and "created a new vision of the Australian scene as revolutionary and influential as that of Tom Roberts".^[2]

Young life and career[link]

George Russell Drysdale was born in Bognor Regis, Sussex, England, to an Anglo-Australian pastoralist family, which settled in Melbourne, Australia in 1923. Drysdale was educated at Geelong Grammar School. He had poor eyesight all his life, and was virtually blind in his left eye from age 17 due to a detached retina.

Drysdale worked on his uncle's estate in Queensland, and as a jackaroo in Victoria.^[1]. A chance encounter in 1932 with artist and critic Daryl Lindsay awakened him to the possibility of a career as an artist. Supported by a fellow artist, Drysdale studied with the modernist artist and teacher George Bell in Melbourne from 1935 to 1938. He also made several trips to Europe; during 1938–39, he attended the Grosvenor School in London and the Grande Chaumière in Paris.^[3] By the time of his return from the third of these trips in June 1939 Drysdale was recognised within Australia as an important emerging talent, but had yet to find a personal vision. His decision to leave Melbourne for Albury and then Sydney in 1940 was instrumental in his discovery of his life-long subject matter, the Australian outback and its inhabitants. Equally important was the influence of fellow artist Peter Purves Smith in guiding him towards his characteristic mature style with its use of desolate landscapes inhabited by sparse figures under ominous skies.^{[citation needed]}

Sydney[link]

Drysdale's 1942 solo exhibition in Sydney (his second in point of time; his first had been in Melbourne in 1938) was a critical success, and established him as one of the leading Sydney modernists of the time, together with William Dobell, Elaine Haxton, and Donald Friend. In 1944, The Sydney Morning Herald sent him into far western New South Wales "to illustrate the effects of the then-devastating drought".^[4] With his series of paintings of drought-ravaged western New South Wales and, later, a series based on the derelict gold-mining town of Hill End, his reputation continued to grow during the 1940s. A painting of the nearby town of Sofala won the Wynne Prize for landscape in 1947. His 1948 work, The cricketers has been described by the National Gallery of Australia as "one of the most original and haunting images in all Australian art."^[5]

London 1950[link]

His 1950 exhibition at London's Leicester Galleries, at the invitation of Sir Kenneth Clark, was a significant milestone in the history of Australian art. Until this time, Australian art had been regarded as a provincial sub-species of British art; Drysdale's works convinced British critics that Australian artists had a distinctive vision of their own, exploring a physical and psychological landscape at once mysterious, poetic, and starkly beautiful. The exhibition initiated the international recognition of Australian art that quickly came to include Dobell, Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, Clifton Pugh, and others who came to national and international prominence in the 1950s.

Last years[link]

Drysdale's reputation continued to grow throughout the 1950s and 1960s as he explored remote Australia and its inhabitants. In 1954, together with Nolan and Dobell, he was chosen to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale, and in 1960, at Bouddi near Gosford, New South Wales.

In 1969, Drysdale was knighted for his services to art, and in 1980, he was awarded the Companion of the Order of Australia.^[6] His later years saw a marked falling off in the quantity of his output, which had never been large.

Drysdale died in Sydney on 29 June 1981. At his request, Sir Russell's cremated remains were placed in the shade of a tree by the church in the burial ground beside historic St Paul's Anglican Church, Kincumber.

Personal life[link]

He was married twice, and had a son, Tim, and a daughter, Lynne. Tim took his life in 1962, aged twenty one, and the following year his wife Bon also committed suicide. In 1964 Drysdale married Maisie Purves Smith, an old friend.^[7]

Style and themes[link]

Australian art scholar and gallery director Ron Radford argues that towards the end of World War II, Drysdale triggered "'a general reddening' of Australian landscape art".^[4] Radford describes Drysdale's work as follows: "His dried up earth suggested that man had lost control of the land - nature had fought back and taken back".^[4] Drysdale's Australia was "hot, red, isolated, desolate and subtly threatening".^[4] His The Drover's Wife "cohabits in Australians' minds with Nolan's Carcass paintings" as conveying a sense of desolation.^[4] Dysdale's red presents "a landscape deeply, intrinsically inhospitable" and conveys the "utter alienation" of the figures he paints in the landscape.^[4]

Christine Wallace suggests that Drysdale "was the visual poet of that passive, all-encompassing despair that endless heat and drought induces", but that it was Sidney Nolan who, with a similar view, "most powerfully projected this take on Australia to the outside world".^[4]

Lou Klepac, summing up in his 1983 work on Drysdale, says: "He found in the common elements of the landscape permanent and moving images which have become part of the visual lingua franca of modern Australia...Those who see in Drysdale's paintings a world remote from the comforts and pleasures they depend on, feel that he depicts loneliness and isolation. To him it was the opposite, a liberation from the anguish of the civilised world."

See also[link]

• Australian art

References[link]

Further reading[link]

External links[link]

• NGV/ABC Drysdale exhibition (also available at ngv.vic.gov.au). Contains biography and images of many of Drysdale's works.
• A football game 1943 - Ballarat Fine Art Gallery
• Russell Drysdale on Artabase. The Bath 1941