Early this month, courtesy of a story by Tim Colebatch, I became aware of a wonderful art exhibition in Adelaide.

It features work by Clarice Beckett, whom I confess I'd never heard of.

Glancing through the illustrations in that article, and then following up with this excellent post by Marcus Bunyan on Art Blart, I was not only captivated by the paintings but also visited by a host of memories.

Beckett resided and painted in Melbourne, you see, where we also lived for a while.


Melbourne, as seen on our first trip in 2001


My favourite gryphon ever, ever, ever




In 2007 I moved to Melbourne, following Nigel, who had started work there the previous year. Occasionally, the balcony of our urban flat was visited by sulphur-crested cockatoos





Blurred and dappled, with lines that reject straightness and colours that merge and blend, Beckett's work is extraordinarily atmospheric and evocative. She captures equally well the essence of rainy, misty days and vibrantly sunny ones. 

Her life was short. Born in 1887, into a comfortably off middle-class family, she painted prolifically, never achieved particular fame during her lifetime, and died of pneumonia in 1935 at the age of just 48. The 2,000-odd canvases she left behind were stored in an open-sided old shed on her sister's property near Benalla. By the time art historian Rosalind Hollinrake became interested in them in the late 1960s, only 369 could be salvaged. The rest had fallen prey to possums and weather. Counting the works from the shed and others located in different places, about 600 canvases have been preserved.

Beckett didn't travel outside Victoria, but she was a keen reader, and had a mystical bent. Tracey Lock, curator at the Art Gallery of South Australia, where the exhibition is being staged, comments that "she travelled in her mind... [and] turned to nature for her solace, to replenish herself on repeat, every day."

Now that's an attitude that resonates with our current times....

Lock continues: "There is a vibration to the work, an optical one. It’s as though you can walk into that space with her, you feel as though she is there. To create that spatial depth, that mistiness, that veil, her works are transcendent, taking us into a spiritual realm."

Beckett spent her childhood in places like Bendigo, Ballarat, and Phillip Island.


Ballarat, 2007




Bendigo, 2008




Phillip Island, 2009





Later she lived in Beaumaris, and painted Melbourne localities such as Sandringham, St Kilda, Hawthorn, and Brighton.

We also paced these areas, in all weathers, and my pre-blog diary entries are full of accounts of Victorian villas, cake shops on Acland Street, beach huts, pelicans, fish and chips, and jacaranda trees.


Brighton beach huts, 2007


Williamstown, 2007


Elsternwick, 2008


Port Phillip Bay, 2008 and 2009







Once my first blog had started, in 2010, and we were back from Singapore, the entries regularly featured trips to the attractions of Saint Kilda, and walks along the coast.

I guess I'm lucky to have always loved the places I've lived in. The corollary of that, though, is that I also feel a great nostalgia for all the localities I have once called home. Seeing Beckett's depiction of a home I left almost a decade ago brought, therefore, not only unexpected pleasure, but also a little pang of regret.