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(b Holywood, County Down, Ireland, Jan 26, 1922).

Australian painter, printmaker, book designer, lecturer, collector, gallery director and publisher of limited edition artists’ books, of Irish decent. He worked as a draughtsman before entering war service in the British Admiralty from 1940 to 1949, including five years in Colombo, where he made sketching trips to jungle temples with the Buddhist monk and artist Manjsiro Thero. Between 1949 and 1951 Adams worked as an exhibition designer in London and studied wood-engraving with Gertrude Hermes in her evening class at the Central School of Arts and Crafts (now Central St Martin’s College of Art and Design). In 1951, after moving to Melbourne, Adams began a 30-year teaching commitment at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), where he instructed many of the younger generation of Australian printmakers, including George Baldessin and Jan Senbergs. A brief return to Britain and Ireland in 1957–8 provided experience with Dolmen Press, Dublin, which published his first book of engravings, ...

(Foster)

(b Burnside, Adelaide, Dec 23, 1881; d Adelaide, Sept 13, 1951).

Australian painter and printmaker. She worked in an undistinguished tonal Impressionist style following her studies at the South Australian School of Art and Crafts, Adelaide, from c. 1909 and from 1915 at Julian Ashton’s Sydney Art School. Between 1927 and 1929 she learnt a more modern style and philosophy at the Grosvenor School of Art, London, and André Lhote’s academy in Paris, supplemented by lessons with Albert Gleizes: paintings such as the mildly Cubist Mirmande (c. 1928; Adelaide, A.G. S. Australia) were the result. Black was particularly influenced by the artistic theories of Clive Bell and at the Grosvenor School by the linocut teacher Claude Flight (1881–1955). In 1929 she returned to Sydney, where she attempted to promote the linocut as an original art form that the ordinary person could afford. Black’s most notable linocuts were produced between 1927 and 1937, for example Music (1927)....

New Zealander, 20th century, male.

Born 9 June 1906, in Westport; died 15 April 1971, in London.

Painter, printmaker, graphic designer.

Artists' International Association, London Group.

James Boswell came to England to study at London's Royal Academy in 1925. In 1933 he joined the Communist Party and became a founder member of the ...

Australian, 20th century, male.

Active from 1959 active in England.

Born 1920, in Murrumbeena, near Melbourne; died 24 April 1999.

Painter, pastellist, lithographer, potter. Allegorical subjects, landscapes. Designs for tapestries.

Antipodean Group.

Arthur Merrick Bloomfield Boyd was born into a family three generations of which were potters and painters. He is said to have received advice from his grandfather, landscape painter Arthur Merric Boyd Sr. His father, Merric Boyd, was a potter. Arthur Boyd himself started very young to draw, paint and model. From 1930 he was already painting landscapes and portraits. In the middle of the 1940s he was active as a ceramicist. He moved more or less definitively to England in 1959, joining Sidney Nolan and the group of Australian emigrants....

Australian, 20th century, male.

Born 1920, in Melbourne; died 11 February 1999.

Painter, lithographer.

Antipodean group.

Brack studied at the National Gallery and the Victoria Art School. He drew his inspiration from urban life, which he depicted realistically but with a hint of irony. In the 1950s, he created modern variations of famous 19th-century French paintings by Manet, Degas and Seurat. Having denounced the rituals and customs of modern Australian society in the 1950s, he focused his attention on unusual objects in the 1960s, as can be seen in the series of pictures of shop windows displaying medical instruments. In ...

Australian, 20th century, male.

Active also active in the USA.

Born 30 January 1885, in Kew (Melbourne); died 11 February 1969, in London.

Painter, draughtsman, stage set designer, engraver (etching, linocut), illustrator, writer, critic. Scenes with figures, portraits.

London Group.

Horace Brodzky was born in Australia but ultimately settled in Britain. In ...

New Zealander, 20th century, male.

Active in Europe from 1926 to 1939.

Born 3 December 1897, in Dunedin; died 1954.

Painter, engraver, illustrator.

London Group.

Buckland-Wright illustrated many works, including the Sonnets of J. Keats, The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe, Stendhal's ...

(b Mount Barker, March 24, 1911; d Adelaide, May 15, 1995).

Australian painter, printmaker, potter, teacher and art critic. Chapman studied at the South Australian School of Arts and Crafts (1928–32) and became a fellow of the Royal South Australian Society of Arts (RSASA) while still a student. Ivor Hele (1912–93) was a notable influence on her and when he became a war artist, Chapman taught his life-drawing and painting class at the school from 1940–41. From 1942–5 Chapman served in the Australian Women’s Army in army education in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney. In 1945 in Sydney she married the artist James Cant (1911–82). With Cant she was a co-founder of the Studio of Realist Art (SORA). While supporting realist artists as secretary–organizer of SORA, Cant experimented with abstraction and surrealist automatism. She exhibited abstracts works with the Contemporary Art Society in 1947–8.

From 1949–55 Chapman and Cant lived in England, but she did little painting, being then and later the main breadwinner in her marriage. They returned to Australia and settled in Adelaide in ...

Australian, 20th century, male.

Born 1942, in Warrnambool (Victoria).

Painter, printmaker, sculptor.

Tony Coleing studied at the National School of Art in Sydney and continued his training in England. In 1964, he travelled in Europe and exhibited in London. In 1968, back in Sydney, he began exhibiting his colourful sculptures regularly....

(b Melbourne, Oct 4, 1913; d Melbourne, July 5, 1986).

Australian painter, printmaker, draughtsman, sculptor, cartoonist and illustrator. Largely self-taught, he began printmaking in 1931 and worked as a caricaturist, cartoonist and illustrator for the weekly and left-wing press, his outlook influenced by experience on the dole and political struggle during the Depression. In 1941 he began oil painting, his first pictures being mainly a celebration of Australian working-class tenacity during the 1930s: for example At the Start of the March (1944; Sydney, A.G. NSW). A founder-member of the Contemporary Art Society in 1938, he initiated its 1942 anti-Fascist exhibition and helped organize an Artists’ Unity Congress, receiving awards for his paintings of miners in the ensuing Australia at War exhibition in 1945. From 1939 to 1940 he was in New Zealand and from 1949 to 1952 in Europe, mostly London. Later he made frequent trips to Britain and France, as well as visiting the USSR and Mexico.

Counihan’s imaginative and creative versatility enabled him to produce extended pictorial metaphors for inherent contemporary crises, embodying potent artistic responses to specific conditions of oppression and discrimination, the nuclear threat and attendant social alienation. From the late 1960s he created images in numerous interrelated series challenging Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War, for example ...

Australian, 20th century, male.

Born 4 October 1913, in Melbourne; died 5 July 1986, in Melbourne.

Painter, printmaker, cartoonist, caricaturist. Figures, portraits.

Noel Counihan took classes at the National Gallery School in 1930, but was mainly self-taught. During the 1930s he contributed to the Melbourne Argus...

New Zealander, 20th century, male.

Active in Britain.

Born 19 January 1905, in Cheltenham, New Zealand; died 1997, in London.

Painter, engraver, fresco artist, watercolourist, poster designer.

Frederick Coventry studied at evening classes in New Zealand and Australia. He painted in oils and watercolour. He also painted frescoes, produced copper engravings and designed posters. During World War II, he made independent submissions to the War Artists Advisory Committee. He became a member of the Society of Mural Painters in ...

Australian, 20th century, female.

Born 9 May 1895, in Ashfield, Sydney; died 1935 or 1936, in Queensland, of meningitis.

Engraver, illustrator.

Olive Crane studied under Albert Collins at Julian Ashton's School of Art. She illustrated a number of books, including The City of Riddle-Me-Ree by Zora Cross...

(b Wellington, NZ, Dec 27, 1930; d Wellington, NZ, July 24, 2005).

New Zealand painter and printmaker. After training as an art teacher he was awarded the National Art Gallery travelling scholarship in 1957 and studied at the Central School of Art and Design in London. His initial interest in textile design shifted to printmaking and he gained wider experience from 1960 to 1961 in printing workshops in Paris. He was one of a number of New Zealand artists working in England at the time, including Melvin Day (b 1923), Patrick Hanly and Don Peebles (b 1922). He was commissioned to produce a large mural for New Zealand House in London, completed in 1963.

Drawbridge returned to New Zealand in 1964 to teach in the School of Design at Wellington Polytechnic. He continued to produce both paintings and prints, particularly the group Tanya Coming and Going (1967; Canberra, N.G.). He also completed further major official commissions. One was a kinetic work for the New Zealand pavilion at Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan: a rotating dish behind the mural caused light passing through perspex rods to ripple across the work’s surface. A similar effect was achieved when this mural was reworked for installation in the National Library, Wellington (...

Australian, 20th – 21st century, female.

Active also active in France.

Born 1959, in Melbourne.

Painter, engraver, collage artist. Figure compositions, figures.

From 1970 to 1973, Rebecca Driffield studied at Swineburne College in Melbourne, graduating with a fine arts degree. In 1974, she studied engraving at Camden Art College in London. In ...

(b Alfredtown, Victoria, Sept 3, 1880; d London, Jan 21, 1938).

Australian draughtsman and printmaker. In his formative years he worked as a caricaturist for several Australian magazines. He moved to London in 1910 where he worked as a cartoonist for the Labour newspapers, the Daily Herald and New Age, and achieved great success with his biting cartoons (e.g. ‘Give Us this Day’; Cartoons, 1913), which made him a leading figure among English intellectuals. He worked in the humanist tradition of Honoré Daumier, Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen and Jean-Louis Forain. He was a determined satirist calling for a better world, concerned with political hypocrisy and social injustice, and his cartoons were admired for their apt captions as well as for the hard-hitting images that accompanied them. Dyson visited the Western Front as an Official War Artist during World War I to record the Australian involvement in the war. He worked in the trenches among battle-weary soldiers and was wounded, though not seriously, at Messines and Passchendaele. He made numerous compassionate and frank watercolour-wash drawings of the ordinary soldier (e.g. ...

Australian, 20th century, male.

Born 28 June 1894, in Narrandera (New South Wales); died 25 April 1971, in Sydney.

Painter, engraver, illustrator. Landscapes, flowers.

Adrian Feint studied under Julian Ashton and Elioth Gruner at Sydney School of Art. In 1916 he joined the Australian Imperial Force and was sent to the Western Front. He was granted three months leave in ...

Australian, 20th – 21st century, female.

Born 1964, in Maryborough (Queensland).

Painter, engraver, sculptor.

Fiona Foley is an Aboriginal from the Wondunna clan of the Badtjala people. She studied at Sydney College of the Arts and Sydney University. She was a founding member of Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Cooperative in Sydney in ...

Australian, 20th century, male.

Born 1915, in Sydney; died 1989, in Woollahra, Sydney.

Painter (gouache), watercolourist, printmaker. Scenes with figures, nudes, portraits, still-lifes.

Donald Friend is known for his picturesque scenes of military life and for paintings inspired by jazz music. He studied at the Royal School of Art in Sydney. He lived in London for a number of years and in ...

(b Birmingham, March 15, 1863; d Waverley, Oct 1, 1930).

Australian painter, etcher and illustrator, also active in England. In his formative years he undertook illustrative commissions for the Picturesque Atlas of Australasia, as well as for the Australian Town and Country Journal and other publications. For a time he painted with his friends Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton and Charles Conder at their camps around Mosman, or on trips to Richmond and along the Hawkesbury River. In his best paintings of this period he achieved a lyricism and sure handling of paint that resembles the work of Conder. During this period he also became interested in etching. In 1900 he moved to New York and the following year he travelled to London, where he continued to work as a black-and-white artist with the London Graphic and Black and White. He painted landscapes depicting picturesque sights and developed an interest in monotypes, using the delicacy of this medium to create soft, low-key images of atmospheric subjects. He worked in the tradition of English landscape painters, such as John Constable and John Sell Cotman, producing calm, quiet, understated images....