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ARTHUR BOYD AO COA  1920 Murrumbeena Victoria.

Arthur Boyd was one of Australia’s greatest painters. His reputation was also international.

He was always considered to be an innovative artists. Having studied with his grandfather also an artist, Arthur Merric Boyd, he developed a flair and passion for oil painting. His heavy palette-knife technique was ahead of its time and certainly unique to Arthur Boyd’ s paintings.  It was this technique that set him above other artists.  In the early 30’s this technique was used to produce many fine land and seascape paintings.

The war deeply effected Boyd and from this period of seeming devastation he produced some of his best work in the form of disturbing psychological images that expressed his horror at and suffering during the war years.

After his marriage in 1945 he launched himself into another style of painting influenced by the old master Breughel. Religious images and crowd scenes were the subjects of these works. Prior to this, his association with the Contemporary Art Society and artists such as Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker and John Perceval introduced him to expressionism. He took pleasure in studies of the old masters while he lived with his artist wife making ceramics for a living. 

He embarked on paintings of the Wimmera and Berwick regions.  These landscapes won him enormous critical and public recognition and continued on with his now famous Half-Caste Bride Series based on the style of Chagall.

The year 1959 was a turning point for Boyd’s career. He satisfied a need to experience more of the world and he moved his young family to London.  This audacious move proved to be fruitful with his first London exhibition of his Lovers Series being widely acclaimed influencing his subsequent representation in the Tate and Whitechapel Gallery exhibition in the following years.

On his return to Australia in the 70’s he took up an artist-in-residence position at the Australian National University. After this he settled at a property at Shoalhaven and later Bundanon on the south coast of New South Wales and began painting the surrounding landscapes. The Bundanon and Shoalhaven landscapes are examples of some of Boyd’s finest work. They form part of the Australian landscape tradition and can be separated into distinct areas;- naturalistic, narrative, fantastic, biblical and mythological. When Boyd first viewed the Shoalhaven he commented,

 “I had done fields before, but I had never seen or touched such rugged terrain before. When I first saw the Shoalhaven it was so foreign that I didn’t know how to treat it" The Artist and the River Sandra McGrath, Bay Books1982)

With every image Boyd began to master the visual world that encompassed him.

During these later years Boyd travelled between homes in England and Tuscany.

Apart from his paintings, Boyd produced lithographs and etchings as well as illustrating books.

In the 1970’s  he gave thousands of  his works to the National Gallery of Australia and in 1993 he donated his Shoalhaven and Bundanon properties to the nation.

Arthur Boyd is represented in all state galleries throughout Australia, as well as many university, regional and public gallery collections. His work is held in many private and corporate collections in Australia and overseas.

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