Deutscher and Hackett

The following excerpts are from Pearce, B., Arthur Boyd: Retrospective, The Beagle Press in association with the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1993:

'Boyd soon felt the urge to go well outside his circumscribed world. In the summer of 1948-49 he accompanied Jack Stephenson, a poet, to Horsham where he painted landscapes near the border of the Wimmera River, and was to return on several painting trips to the far north-west of the state over the next few years. He discovered there the hint of something that had drawn other painters of his generation, a subject tentatively recorded by only a few artist of the nineteenth century, and touched upon be even fewer in the twentieth: the empty space of the great interior.'¹

'Of course the Wimmera was wheat country, and not by any means forbidding, nor forsaken. But in dry, hot weather it could have, over sparse, unbroken horizons, a searing expanse of sky that elicited an acute sense of the infinite. Russell Drysdale had already made unforgettable images in this vein through his drought paintings of 1948-49. Boyd's tempera technique invested his paintings of the Wimmera, and of the Grampians at this time, with a luminosity that enhanced his subjects to just the right pitch, and his landscapes between 1949 and 1951 were greeted with acclaim.'²

1. Pearce, op. cit., p. 18
2. ibid., p. 19