Over the 1940s and 50s Russell Drysdale AC (1912-1981) produced a series of stark, foreboding paintings of the landscapes, towns and people of outback and rural Australia, amongst which are many of the best-known images in Australian art. In 1963 he and his friend, composer Peter Sculthorpe AO OBE (1929-2014), took a working holiday in Tasmania. Out of this trip emerged Sculthorpe’s best-known piece, ‘Small Town’, inspired in part by Drysdale’s paintings of towns and dedicated to the painter. In 2014, after the composer’s death, an American writer for the New Yorker described visiting Victoria for the first time, and finding that Sculthorpe’s pizzicato and percussive effects ‘perfectly evoked the landscape . . . its vernacular architecture, beautiful stands of eucalyptus, red hills, dry grass, and sudden screaming flocks of lorikeets’. The composer once said that like the painter, he had come to look on his ‘whole output as one slowly emerging work’. At Tallow Beach on the central coast of NSW, close to Drysdale’s property at Bouddi, David Moore photographed two men who profoundly influenced Australians’ way of imagining their own place, creating, as he did so, one of the great Australian portraits-in-the-landscape.
Collection: National Portrait Gallery
The series 'David Moore: From Face to Face' was acquired as a gift of the artist and with financial assistance from Timothy Fairfax AC and L Gordon Darling AC CMG 2001
© Lisa, Michael, Matthew and Joshua Moore
http://davidmoorephotography.com.au/
David Moore (age 42 in 1969)
Russell Drysdale (age 57 in 1969)
Peter Sculthorpe AO OBE (age 40 in 1969)
Tim Fairfax AC (53 portraits supported)
The Gordon Darling Foundation (36 portraits supported)
Little faces is for babies and toddlers (with their grown up) to play, sing and have fun discovering a portrait together.
On one level The Companion talks about the most famous and frontline Australians, but on another it tells us about ourselves: who we read, who we watch, who we listen to, who we cheer for, who we aspire to be, and who we'll never forget. The Companion is available to buy online and in the Portrait Gallery Store.
Legendary Australian composer, Peter Sculthorpe, describes the development of his career.
