The
Life, Career, and Legacy of
Ray Crooke
Ray Crooke presents his true worth |The
Australian 22 March 2013
 Ray Crooke
AM (1922- 2015)
was
the master painter of Australia’s far northerly regions and offshore
Pacific environment. He trained at Swinburne Tech from 1946 to 1948. Having worked on Thursday
Island for the Diocese of Carpentaria, he painted landscapes and native people,
comparisons with Gauguin are inevitable.
A
resident of Cairns, he travelled extensively in northern Australia and painted
remarkabe landscapes, such as Chillagoe 1962 Landscape with rocks in
foreground 1967 and Ant Hill Country, Laura 1969, all in the
collection of the National Gallery of Australia. In 1966 he served as an
official war artist in Vietnam.
Ray
Crooke won the Archibald Prize in 1969 for a portrait of a close friend, the
writer George Johnson. In the mid-1990s Ray Croke donated his collection of
works by Drysdale, Friend, Olley and Boyd to Perc Tucker Regional Gallery,
Townsville, which mounted North of Capricorn, a major retrospective of
his work that toured in 1998-1999. He is represented in all major Australian galleries and his work remains
popular amongst collectors
Ray Crooke
portrait
of
George Johnston
won the
Archibald Prize
in 1969
University of Queensland
owns three of Ray Crooke's portrait paintings: Portrait of Xavier Herbert
(1977), Portrait of Professor Emeritus Sir Zelman Cowen, (1919–2011),
Vice-Chancellor 1970–1977 (1977) and Portrait of Sadie Herbert (1980)
Crooke was responsible for the dust-jacket for
Poor Fellow My Country
by
Xavier Herbert.
 Ray Crooke painting The
Offering (1971) is in the
Vatican Museum
collection.
Many of his works are in Australian National and Regional galleries.
"North of Capricorn" was an
Australian touring retrospective exhibition in 1997 organised by the
Perc Tucker Regional Gallery
(Townsville), initiated and curated by Grafico Topico's writer and curator Sue
Smith.
Ray Crooke was made a
Member of the Order of Australia
in the 1993
Australia Day
Honours, "in recognition of service to the arts, particularly as a landscape
artist".
In
1969
Ray Crooke won the Archibald Prize with a
portrait of George Johnston, and has been
the recipient of several notable awards.
Ray Crooke was
awarded an honorary doctorate and was made a member of the Order of
Australia in 1993 for his contribution to Australian art. Ray Crooke painting ‘The Offering’ is in the Vatican Museum collection.
Ray
Crooke
work is represented
by all state galleries, many regional galleries and overseas collections.
Ray Crooke, the
much-admired artist died at his home in Palm Cove, north of Cairns. He was 93.
Artist Ray Crooke was the champion
of the tropics, he stood removed from the everyday rhythms of Australian art,
playing out a romance with the tropics that spanned decades.
Ray Crooke is known for serene views of Islander people and ocean
landscapes, many of which are based on the art of
Gauguin.
Crooke 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
is represented in all major Australian State and National
Galleries, 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.
Ray Crooke
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.
Please visit:
art-encyclopedia-Ray Cooke
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.
Ray Crooke
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 enterpriser, to have carved out of a mere state of
mind a shape lines visible to the eye.
Extract from article by Bruce
James in the Sydney Morning Herald, 6 March 2006 p 13.
Ray Crooke
painter of the far north, dies at 93 | afr.com
Artist
Ray Crooke, best known for his Gauguin-inspired paintings of islander life
in Fiji and the Torres Strait, has died at the age of 93. Read more:
http://www.afr.com/lifestyle/arts-and-entertainment/ray-crooke-painter-of-the-far-north-dies-at-93-20151206-glgpop#ixzz3ukIA1xNc
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Ray Crooke,
the much-admired chronicler of the north, died on Saturday night at his home
in Palm Cove, north of Cairns. He was 93.
Artist Ray Crooke was champion
of the tropics, he stood removed from the everyday rhythms of Australian
art, playing out a romance with the tropics that spanned decades.
Ray Crooke,
whose popular paintings depicted the simple island life of North Queensland,
dies at 93
|
The
World’s Local Fine
Art
Ray
Crooke (1922-2015)
trained at Swinburne Tech from 1946 to 1948, he was one of the most important Australian
artists from post-WWII up until today. 
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