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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen
• Sale Name:
  The Sunday Art Emporium
• Sale Date:
  11 Oct 2015 ~ 2pm
• Lot #:
  127
• Lot Description:
  Ray Austin Crooke
  (Born 1922)
  Village
  oil on canvas
  121 x 181 cm
  signed lower left: R Crooke; bears Holdsworth Galleries label verso
• Notes:
  Ray Crooke has achieved critical acclaim for his lush tropical village scenes, of which this painting is a fine example. Crooke studied at Swinburne Technical College in Melbourne in the 1940s, during which time he was also sent for army service in Western Australia, North Queensland and Borneo, later working on Thursday Island, which provided the inspiration for many of his Gauguin-esque, naive paintings. Crooke's successful solo exhibition at Australian Galleries, Melbourne in 1959 led to his work being sought after by major galleries and they are indeed included in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, state galleries and the Vatican collections in Rome. He was made a member of the Order of Australia in 1993 for his services to the visual arts, particularly landscape painting. Though trained primarily in draughtsmanship, Crooke began painting after the war and by the late 1950s had consolidated his technique, style and subject matter. In his early career in the 1950s and 1960s, he shared an emotional connection to the landscape with his contemporaries, Arthur Boyd and Sidney Nolan. Crooke won the Archibald Prize in 1969 for his insightful portrait of the novelist, George Johnston. The following year Johnston said of Crooke: ÒHis search for the profound subtleties of light, his quiet but intensely evocative landscapes, his native figures glimpsed in the cool of shaded rooms or snared in webs of light and shade beneath jungle vegetation have made him for some years a very potent and popular Australian painter.Ó Village was likely painted in 1985 and of a Honolulu Village scene - Crooke visited Hawaii in April 1985, where he made a number of sketches to prepare for his solo exhibition at the Holdsworth Galleries in Sydney in 1986. In Village, Crooke has depicted the serenity of a domestic scene with characteristic sensitivity. As in many of these paintings, Crooke has highlighted the harmonious relationship of the subjects with the natural environment, portraying the interior of a dwelling but leading the eye to the adjacent landscape through an opening. In a number of Crooke's earlier works of island imagery, the interiors are frequently in shadow. In this painting, sunlight floods the room. The four women sit contemplatively, decorated with leis, while the tranquil water sparkles in the background. The island paintings depict Thursday Island, Fiji, Tahiti, New Guinea and other Pacific Islands. Crooke kept journals containing sketches and studies from the places he visited and also painted subjects from memory, but he was most interested in conveying what he knew or sensed, rather than an accurate scene. Thus the gently idealised images of island life appear timeless Ð anachronistic even.
• Estimate:
  A$30,000 - 40,000
• Realised Price:
  *****
  

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• Category:
  Art

This Sale has been held and this item is no longer available. Details are provided for information purposes only.