When the young Birmingham artist Arthur Henry Fullwood (1863-1930) arrived in Maitland in 1886, what were his first impressions? Having recently migrated to the colony, Fullwood was commissioned by the Picturesque Atlas Publishing Company in Sydney to travel to the Hunter Region and depict its principal town, Maitland. Among the various locations Fullwood visited in […]
Suzanne Archer (1945-) has been painting the Australian landscape since she arrived here from England in 1965. She won the Wynne Prize in 1994 for her work Waratahs – Wedderburn. Her large, abstract works interpret country through collaged and layered elements that retain some aspects of figuration, such as the trees and horizon lines in […]
Judith White’s (1951-) view of the Hunter River at Maitland is painted in a most appropriate medium – watercolour. White has used the transparent washes of paint to suggest the smoothly gliding waters of the river and its reflection of the stormy sky above. The massing, dense clouds threaten to burst at any minute with […]
In On the bank John R Walker paints the banks of the Hunter River at Maitland. The rooftops and spires of the city fill the top quarter of the canvas while the expanse of the river dominates the painting’s middle section, painted in swipes of earthy olive to convey the muddy water and its reflection […]
Perhaps Leo Robba’s (1962-) view of the Hunter River at Maitland was a presage of his future research. Since painting this view in 2006 for the exhibition View of Maitland from the riverbank (with apologies to Jan Vermeer and View of Delft) at Maitland Regional Art Gallery (MRAG), Robba has gone on to complete a […]
In his avowedly ‘selective’ view of Maitland from the riverbank, Peter Pinson (1943-2017) has created an abstract rendering of the natural and built forms of the city that simplifies them to their essence. Using acrylic paint, Pinson divides his composition into black-rimmed horizontals of river and bank, balanced by the vertical blocks of buildings. A […]
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