Russell Drysdale: A Biographical and Critical Study by Geoffrey Dutton

Book Description

Secondhand. Good condition. Wear to book corners and edges. Previous owners have signed inside pages. Pages are sunned. Foxing marks on top foredge.

Born in England in 1912, to Australian pioneer families on both his parents' sides, Drysdale went with his family to Australia while still a boy. He at first expected to become a sheep farmer and it was not until 1935 that he began his artistic training in Melbourne.

Eventually, after further studies in Paris and London, he settle in Sydney in 1940. A countryman by upbringing and temperament, Drysdale communicates in all his work a passionate love of his Australia - not the conventionally attractive scenery of the rich sheep stations, but the glaring light, the vast distances, the menacing skies, and the parched red earth of the interior.

Yet Drysdale's world is not an unpeopled world. His rendering of the lonely men and women who inhabit these plains and mountains is vibrant with human sympathy, conveying a piercing sense of the heroism of lives in a desolate and hostile environment. (back cover)