Arthur Boyd

Arthur Merrick Bloomfield Boyd was one of the most significant artists of Australia of the 20th century, a painter, ceramist, sculptor, engraver who has worked in England for more than 10 years.

Born into the family of artists, in the suburb of Melbourne, Murrambine.
His father was a sculptor and a ceramist and his mother was a painter; both older brothers became artists: David became a painter, Guy was a sculptor. Arthur left his school at age 14 to devote himself to painting.

The work of A. Boyd, based on his outstanding talent and powerful, though somewhat gloomy imagination, played a big role in the development of the newest art of his country. He was one of the first artists to raise important social themes in painting. He was recognized during his lifetime and awarded many prizes and orders. He donated the vast territory of his estate and most of the paintings to the Australian people.

The series of paintings created by Boyd and his very life are an integral part of the history of Australia, and not just its culture.

Key ideas:

– The early paintings of A. Boyd were portraits and views of the sea near the port of Philip, where he lived with his grandfather, a landscape painter. Having moved to the city, he got acquainted with European refugees, and the subjects of his works, as well as their form, changed – fanciful images of the city appeared there and the palette became more gloomy.

– Even more work moved to the genre of picture-descriptions after his service in the army – Boyd’s expressionistic military paintings depicted cripples, other hardships that the war brings. Agitated lines, expressing the painful emotions of the young author, appeared in his technique. The artist turned to Bible in search of plots for the expression of horror and suffering. The picture “Exile” is based on the narrative about punishment, and the canvas “Australian scapegoat” with its mystical color and fantastic landscape, which gives it an expressionistic character, conveys the author’s thoughts about betrayal, feelings of guilt.

– The theme of the work was strongly changed by the trip to remote areas of Australia and learning the aboriginal life. The series “Love, marriage and death. Semi-Kast”, known in the world as “The Bride”, which made the master famous, was a plot with the figures of the “groom”, always rough and brutal, and almost ethereal white “bride”. The series rightly deserved a canonical place in the history of not only Australian art with a powerful statement of questions of social justice and the unusual technique of execution. Boyd depicted tribal rituals, rituals of indigenous people in the outback, which are not properly assimilated with Western traditions. Not intending to present a simplified symbolism of the alliance between white and black Australia, the artist made both characters metis. At the same time, the complexity of the narrative is aggravated by doubling the figure of a real bride with her phantom form, which is the object of an impossible dreamy desire for the groom.

– Later, unable to abandon the topic, the artist developed images – turned the bride into a half-nymph, whose ephemeral presence is hardly felt, then into an insect-like creature. This continuation of the series led to a combination of the figure with Abstract Surrealism.

– Social upheaval did not leave Boyd’s paintings in the future. He responded to the Vietnamese war with the series “Nebuchadnezzar”, where the character perishes in the fire, then under the waterfall. Mythological by theme, the series is made in an expressionistic manner – bright colors, aggressive lines. Returning to Australia in the 1970s, the artist led “ecological wars”, protesting against the thoughtless destruction of nature, depicting its consequences.

– In the final period of his creative career, Boyd painted landscapes, on which he was inspired by the river Sholhaven. At first, he considered it stormy and wild, but then was captured by the theme, creating thousands of paintings, depicting the tremendous might of the terrible river landscape, the fortress of the banks, the approach of dusk, the glowing clouds in the deep sky. The poetic style of these paintings is imbued with allegorical narratives about the state of a man. This is a fusion of European and Australian painting.

– As a teenager, Boyd developed a special drawing technique: the paint was applied to the canvas thickly, often with his fingers and palm. He believed that this allows one to paint more freely and get more pleasure from the process itself.