JAMIE BOYD

Jamie Boyd was born in Victoria in 1948 into the Boyd family, a veritable dynasty of famous Australian artists. To be the son of Arthur Boyd must have been simultaneously a privilege and a burden, but not a burden that has inhibited him to any degree as he is still prolifically making pictures at the age of sixty. He has lived most of his adult life in England but travels periodically to Australia to work and exhibit in the very different light and landscape of his native land.

This exhibition is something of a retrospective in that it includes work from several periods of a career which has spanned over forty years.

He started painting very young and, with only a very brief attendance at the Central School of Art and Design, was largely self-taught. He had his first one man show in 1966 and has had dozens since in Australia, London, Germany, Holland and Italy.

Some of his earliest oil paintings from the sixties have recently been rediscovered and are seeing the light of day for the first time in a very long time. Even then there were two main subjects: landscapes and the female nude and these were developed separately (though sometimes together) through the years in different media: oil paint, pastel, graphite, drypoint and watercolour.

Later Suffolk landscapes in oil were done on family visits to Ramsholt and Tuscan landcapes in pastel on frequent sojourns in Italy. His recent drawings of Venice are matched with gentle, lyrical watercolour versions of a pale Turneresque or Impressionist luminosity. Other watercolours of Florence and Paris, are brighter and peopled with busy little figures. The common thread between the watercolour cityscapes and the superficially very different nude studies in bright oil paint is the energy of the marks, an energy undimmed after all these years.