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Lot Essay
In 1937, Eric Wilson won the New South Wales Travelling Art Scholarship. This enabled him to spend over two years in England, where he studied under modernists Elmslie Owen at the Westminster School and Henry Moore at Ozenfant's Academy, Earl's Court, and also gave him the opportunity to travel to Italy, Paris and The Netherlands.
Wilson returned to Australia at the outbreak of the Second World War with an artistic sensibility shaped by his travels, particularly a new-found appreciation for cubist abstraction. In 1944 he wrote that an abstract picture is "no longer a window through which one views a charming piece of nature, but is itself the object. This is the final reality [the artist] is alone concerned with, not at all an illusion of nature's appearances." (in A. Sayers, Eric Wilson, Exh. Cat., Newcastle Region Art Gallery, 1983, p.6).
Wilson was invited by Sir Keith Murdoch to paint at his property on the Murrumbidgee, Wantabadgery East, in November and December 1945. While inspired by the landscape around him, the abstract ideas about which he had written two years earlier continued to shape his approach. Wilson made a series of images during his time on the property, but in each, the painted image was not a photographic reproduction of what the eye perceived. Rather, the artist concentrated on producing works as a synchronous whole, in which "the subject is respected only so far as it provides shapes, lines, colours, textures and rhythms." (Ibid).
In the meticulously painted Wantabadgery Landscape Wilson favours subtle tones of ochre and olive green. Softly styled patches of light and shadow and the finely rendered birds and branches of the tree in the foreground give perspective to the gently undulating hills in a coherent and subtle illustration of the artist's profound skill.
Wilson returned to Australia at the outbreak of the Second World War with an artistic sensibility shaped by his travels, particularly a new-found appreciation for cubist abstraction. In 1944 he wrote that an abstract picture is "no longer a window through which one views a charming piece of nature, but is itself the object. This is the final reality [the artist] is alone concerned with, not at all an illusion of nature's appearances." (in A. Sayers, Eric Wilson, Exh. Cat., Newcastle Region Art Gallery, 1983, p.6).
Wilson was invited by Sir Keith Murdoch to paint at his property on the Murrumbidgee, Wantabadgery East, in November and December 1945. While inspired by the landscape around him, the abstract ideas about which he had written two years earlier continued to shape his approach. Wilson made a series of images during his time on the property, but in each, the painted image was not a photographic reproduction of what the eye perceived. Rather, the artist concentrated on producing works as a synchronous whole, in which "the subject is respected only so far as it provides shapes, lines, colours, textures and rhythms." (Ibid).
In the meticulously painted Wantabadgery Landscape Wilson favours subtle tones of ochre and olive green. Softly styled patches of light and shadow and the finely rendered birds and branches of the tree in the foreground give perspective to the gently undulating hills in a coherent and subtle illustration of the artist's profound skill.