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Ray Crooke
born 1920, is represented in all major Australian State and National
Galleries, many regional galleries and private collections both within
Australia and overseas, including the Vatican in Rome. He has exhibited
extensively both nationally and internationally and from 1997 to 1999 a
major Retrospective exhibition of his work toured throughout Australia.
Awarded the Archibald Prize in 1978 for his portrait of literary
antipodean, George Johnston. He was included in the Tate Gallery
Exhibition of Australian Art (1963), and was an Official War Artist in
Vietnam (1966). His work is represented in major collections including
the National Gallery of Australia , all State and many regional
galleries, the Vatican Collection of Rome as well as numerous private
collections overseas. His work depicting the landscape and people of
Fiji is particularly coveted. Ray Crooke traveled extensively throughout
Australia and the South Pacific. His sojourns in rural Victoria, New
South Wales, Cape York Peninsula, the Torres Strait, the Kimberley
region, Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Tahiti have significantly influenced
his work. Ray Crooke currently lives in Cairns yet spends part
of the year in Sydney and still visits Fiji every year. Ray Crooke art at
www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/crooke_ray.html
Ray Crooke is the master painter of Australia’s far
northerly regions and offshore Pacific environs. He is the painter of
opalescent, slightly melancholic outreaches where homespun rituals such
as flower picking and promenading are replenishing enough to engross
individual citizens or whole townships of people. In the classic
compositions of Crooke, sitting around is a time consuming, indeed
constructive activity undertaken with gravity. He is enjoyed for this
quality and purchased for it. To own a Ray Crooke is to possess a
passport to reverie. It is to be granted leave to eat lotuses.
Guiltlessly. Aimlessly. It is to gather with parrots, drunk on nectar
and the sun. Crooke offers his avid multitudes of buyers safe passage to
the province of introspection. A stress-free zone mortgaged only to
pleasure. I am a long time admirer of Crookes immobilized vision which
seems to me to accord with the inner truth of the distant topographies
it depicts, even if it contradicts the external facts from time to time.
He is perhaps the only Australian painter of his generation who gets the
slow-motion effect of the tropics down pat- the way foliage, so quick to
propagate and grow, and the way water, so ready to run in silvery
rivulets down volcanic rocks or whip into foam over coral reefs, the way
natural phenomena of all kinds come to a halt around one - contradicting
commands of physics and time. Immersed in a gumbo of humidity, sweat,
scent and sleep, Crooke’s human figures are the embodiments of radical
torpor-effigies with heartbeats. It is his great accomplishment as an
artist, cumulatively enterprised, to have carved out of a mere state of
mind a shape liness visible to the eye. Extract from article by Bruce
James in the Sydney Morning Herald, 6 March 2006 p 13. |
