RAY CROOKE biography

Ray Crooke (1922- ) is an Australian artist born in Melbourne is the master painter of Australia’s far northerly regions and offshore Pacific environs. He won the Archibald Prize in 1969 with a portrait of George Johnston. His painting The Offering (1971) is in the Vatican Museum collection. Many of his works are in Australian galleries. He is known for serene views of Islander people and ocean landscapes, many of which are based on the art of Gauguin. He spent time in Townsville, Cape York and other parts of northern Australia during the Second World War. Returning from the Second World War, he enrolled in Art School at Swinburne University of Technology and later travelled to New Guinea, Tahiti and Fiji. While a portrait of his won the Archibald Prize in 1969, he is not known usually for portrait painting. He has received an Order of Australia medal.

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.

Title:     Banana Sellers circa 1985
Medium: oil on canvas
Image Size: 52.5 x 41.5cm
Signed:  R Crooke Lower left
Provenance: Private collector NSW purchased in Melbourne.

How to BUY           About buying art

Title:      ISLAND WOMEN circa 1960-70
Medium: oil on canvas on board
Image Size: 50.5 x 50.5cm
Signed:   R Crooke Lower left
Price:     SOLD

Title:     GIRL ON VERANDA circa 1960-70
Medium: mixed medium
Image Size: 26 x 30 cm
Signed: R Crooke Lower left
Price:     SOLD

 

Title:      Beach, Mornington Island Mission c.1952-54
Medium: oil on board
Image Size: 15 x 22 cm
Signed: R Crooke Lower left
Price:     SOLD

Title:     THURSDAY ISLAND  circa 1957
Medium: oil on canvas on board
Image Size: 22 x 30 cm
Signed: R Crooke Lower left
Price:     SOLD