Sidney Nolan

The newest addition to the Artist’s Materials series offers the first technical study of one of Australia’s greatest modern painters. Sidney Nolan (1917–1992) is renowned for an oeuvre ranging from views of Melbourne’s seaside suburb St. Kilda to an iconic series on outlaw hero Ned Kelly. Working in factories from age fourteen, Nolan began his training spray painting signs on glass, which was followed by a job cutting and painting displays for Fayrefield Hats. Such employment offered him firsthand experience with commercial synthetic paints developed during the 1920s and 1930s. In 1939, having given up his job at Fayrefield in pursuit of an artistic career, Nolan became obsessed with European abstract paintings he saw reproduced in books and magazines. With little regard for the longevity of his work, he began to exploit materials such as boot polish, dyes, secondhand canvas, tissue paper, and old photographs, in addition to commercial and household paints. He continued to embrace new materials after moving to London in 1953. Oil-based Ripolin enamel is known to have been Nolan’s preferred paint, but this fascinating study—certain to appeal to conservators, conservation scientists, art historians, and general readers with an interest in modern art—reveals his equally innovative use of nitrocellulose, alkyds, and other diverse materials.

Sidney Nolan was one of Australia's most renowned artists. This is the story of how Sidney came to create his iconic Ned Kelly paintings.

Digging through the myths around Australia’s most famous artist, many of which he created himself as a masterful self-promoter, this book is the biography that Sidney Nolan deserves. In an authoritative, insightful and often irreverent biography that fully charts Nolan’s life and work, Nancy Underhill peels back the layers from a complicated, expedient and manipulative artistic genius. She carries the story from Nolan’s birth in 1917 to his death in 1992, tracing his early life, his experience as a commercial artist, his involvement in theAngry Penguins magazine, his painting and set design, his difficult marriages and friendships with some of the twentieth century’s most famous figures: Patrick White, Albert Tucker, Benjamin Britten, Robert Lowell, Stephen Spender and Kenneth Clark.

"Sidney Nolan's 1946-47 paintings on the theme of the 19th-century bushranger Ned Kelly are one of the greatest series of Australian paintings of the 20th century. Nolan's starkly simplified depiction of Kelly in his homemade armour has become an iconic Australian image. Highlighting these works makes the point that Australian art is part of the world, with its own stories to tell. This dual emphasis of connectedness and distinctiveness in relation to culture and place is integral to Nolan's Ned Kelly series."--

Sidney Nolan (1917 1992) wove a compelling narrative around the figure of Ned Kelly as the 'wronged' anti-hero who forged his own homemade armour and was pursued by police through the often featureless Australian bush. Though the Kelly myth didn't start with Nolan's paintings, his images remain the most enduring and instantly recognisable evocations of the legend. Kelly's stark black silhouette gave Nolan his most powerful poetic metaphor for Australians' relationship with their land. The text is by Andrew Sayers, Director of the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, and Murray Bail, whose novels include the prize-winning Eucalyptus.

Autumn Laing has long outlived the legendary circle of artists she cultivated in the 1930s. Now old and skeleton gaunt, she reflects on her tumultuous relationship with the abundantly talented Pat Donlon and the effect it had on her husband, on Pat’s wife and on the body of work that launched Pat’s career. Autumn Laing seduces Pat Donlon with her pearly thighs and her lust for life and art. In doing so, she not only compromises the trusting love she has with her husband, Arthur, but she also steals the future from Pat’s young and beautiful wife, Edith, and their unborn child. Fifty-three years later, cantankerous, engaging, unrestrainable eighty-five-year-old Autumn is shocked to find within herself a powerful need for redemption. Written with compassion and intelligence, this energetic, funny and wise novel peels back the layers of storytelling and asks what truth has to do with it. Autumn Laing is an unflinchingly intimate portrait of a woman and her time.