Mining paintings

 

One strand to my research here has been to track down depictions of mining landscapes in major art gallery collections. I have been working with Senior Curator of Australian Art at the South Australia Art Gallery in Adelaide to identify  items in their collection and use them for future study as the project develops.

I was also interested to discover that the celebrated Australian painter, Sidney Nolan, from 1949-53 created a series of quirky paintings depicting industrial and mining landscapes in Wimmera and Ballarat in the goldfields of Victoria. I was able to view these in the Ian Potter Centre in the Art Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. Theses are really interesting to me as industrial landscapes being worthy subject matter for landscape painting is very rare. Much historic Australian painting has concentrated on celebrating idllyic unspoiled landscapes, raw nature.

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