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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 It is with great pride that I have seen the Gold Coast is an important project in the recognition of VEDA ARROWSMITH Hinterland City Art Gallery Collection grow from 832 artworks to the hard work done to date in developing 1975 synthetic polymer well over 2000 artworks since I was asked in 1996 by the such a collection and I would like to paint on board 3 panels, then Mayor, Councillor Ray Stevens, to be Chairman. acknowledge all those who have been 61 x 102 cm each This increase also represents an increased value of this city Purchased 2003. involved over the years. I am excited by the Reproduced courtesy assetto over 9 million dollars. This has been achieved prospect of expanding on the current gallery the estate of the artist. predominantly through the ongoing generosity of donors facility to allow more of this significant to whom we remain eternally grateful. collection to be displayed to the public. This publication I have been particularly pleased with the growth of works in by no means signifies an end to our collecting activities as our Sculpture Park from 5 works in 1996 to over 40 today we continue to source appropriate material for the collection including works on long term loan. My thanks to Gallery to develop further over the years to come. Finally, my sincere Directors Fran Cummings, and for the last 11 years John Walsh, thanks to Gold Coast City Council for their ongoing support 3 NIGEL THOMPSON for our City Gallery. Portrait of Pat Corrigan together with their hard working teams. It is only fitting that 1996 we are now able to produce this publication in celebration of the Oil on canvas 73.5 x135 ongoing development of the collection and highlight the Patrick Corrigan AM Gift of Pat and Barbara Corrigan under the Cultural Gifts Program 1999. diversity and quality of the works included in it. This publication Chairman GLIMPSE 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 EDWIN BODE At Canungra grassland. Preparatory notes on the back of the painting reveal something 1886 of Bode’s working methods and the fresh intensity with which he sought watercolour comp: 18 x 29.5cm to faithfully capture the new kinds of light and foliage that he saw around Purchased 1995. him. He records the “warm grey light “ and the “grassland with purple and VINCENT BROWN The Hay Yard, Upper Coomera brown flecks” and these observations have been carefully rendered in the 1938 oil on board final picture. One senses the pride of both artist and landowner in 47.5 x 39.5 cm their achievements, however a later painting of the Numinbah Falls Purchased 2001. Reproduced courtesy suggest that Bode is now much more entranced with the natural, the estate of the artist. 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 that it is a view that places the mountains looking Pimpama Creek (alternate 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 operation at Canungra, she had worked Gold Coast Australian Decorative Fine Arts passionately with her brother Romeo, for the Society, 2006 gazetting of Lamington National Park in 1915. VIDA LAHEY Untitled This picture, painted possibility after her return (Beechmont to the Coast) 29 n.d. from her second European trip in the 1930s, is as oil on canvas much a painting about sky and light as land and 42.2 x 55.3 cm Gift of the Theodore reflects the connection to her artistic colleague, Collection, 1969. Reproduced courtesy Queensland artist Kenneth Macqueen. the estate of the artist. GLIMPSE 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.

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