Artist of the day: Artist of the day, March 7, 2020: Sir George Russell Drysdale, AC, an Australian painter (#936)

Sir George Russell Drysdale, AC (1912 – 1981), also known as "Tass Drysdale", was an Australian artist. He won the prestigious Wynne Prize for Sofala in 1947 and represented Australia at the Venice Biennale in 1954. He was influenced by abstract and surrealist art, and "created a new vision of the Australian scene as revolutionary and influential as that of Tom Roberts".

George Russell Drysdale was born in Bognor Regis, Sussex, England, to an Anglo-Australian pastoralist family, which settled in Melbourne, Australia in 1923. Drysdale was educated at Geelong Grammar School. He had poor eyesight all his life and was virtually blind in his left eye from age 17 due to a detached retina (which later caused his application for military service to be rejected).

Supported by a fellow artist, Drysdale studied with the modernist artist and teacher George Bell in Melbourne from 1935 to 1938. He also made several trips to Europe. By the time of his return from the third of these trips in June 1939 Drysdale was recognized within Australia as an important emerging talent but had yet to find a personal vision.

Drysdale's 1942 solo exhibition in Sydney. In 1944, The Sydney Morning Herald sent him into far western New South Wales "to illustrate the effects of the then-devastating drought". With his series of paintings of drought-ravaged western New South Wales and, later, a series based on the derelict gold-mining town of Hill End, his reputation continued to grow during the 1940s.

His 1950 exhibition at London's Leicester Galleries was a significant milestone in the history of Australian art. Until this time, Australian art had been regarded as a provincial sub-species of British art.

Drysdale's reputation continued to grow throughout the 1950s and 1960s as he explored remote Australia and its inhabitants. In 1954, he was chosen to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale. Also in 1960, he was the first Australian artist to be given a retrospective by the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Drysdale's use of color photography as an aide-mémoire was the subject of an exhibition in 1987 at the NGV and publication which reveals in previously unknown photographic imagery this method of working and his stylization in the interpretation of subject matter and specific locations.

Christine Wallace suggests that Drysdale "was the visual poet of that passive, all-encompassing despair that endless heat and drought induces", but that it was Sidney Nolan who, with a similar view, "most powerfully projected this take on Australia to the outside world".

Lou Klepac, summing up in his 1983 work on Drysdale, says: "He found in the common elements of the landscape permanent and moving images which have become part of the visual lingua franca of modern Australia...Those who see in Drysdale's paintings a world remote from the comforts and pleasures they depend on, feel that he depicts loneliness and isolation. To him, it was the opposite, a liberation from the anguish of the civilized world."

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