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LYNE PARK, ROSE BAY

MEASUREMENTS

120 by 150 cm each panel; 120 by 300 cm overall

Oil on canvas on board, diptych One panel signed lower left; the other signed upper right

PROVENANCE
Purchased by the present owners from Art Galleries Schubert, Gold Coast, in 1990 Private collection, Sydney Charles Blackman explained to the owner of this painting that he had lived across the road from Lyne Park in Rose Bay during the 1980s. His wife, believing he worked too hard, used to send him out for walks; and so he went over to the park to draw and paint and simply to watch the other visitors. Lyne Park, close to the Rose Bay shops on New South Head Road, is a popular picnic spot as well as a ferry stop. Here, bathed in warm evening light as blue as the waters of Sydney Harbour, children play and young girls dance. The white sails of yachts punctuate the horizon to the right. A picnic basket and a large bouquet mark the spot beneath a shady tree where an al fresco meal might continue into the night. In this expansive diptych Blackman characteristically encapsulates the human intimacy that is possible even as the busy parade of life is all around. Having grown up in Sydney and never lived far from the sea, Blackman has often painted the harbour and its foreshore. After a long and successful career, Blackman is now ranked among the most important modern Australian artists. He came to artistic maturity in Melbourne as one of the generation that included the slightly older Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker, John Perceval, Joy Hester and the Boyd family. He was part of the now celebrated 'Heide' circle; and one of the 'Antipodeans', who in 1959 launched their manifesto upholding figurative expressionism in avant-garde art. Yet Blackman's work speaks with a wholly individual voice. Lyne Park, Rose Bay is imbued with the imaginative power and strong poetic bias that has always distinguished his art.