.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
A reworking of Boyd's first picture of this subject, painted in 1944, The Hunter II (The Flood), in the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. 'These landscapes of 1944, with their dense tangles of trees, and figures which appear to have some kind of metamorphic relationship to the vegetation, are filled with the same cloying anxiety as the images of South Melbourne. Their personae are pervaded by loneliness and isolation, yet under the gaze of some sentinel of nature, or human voyeur hidden in the undergrowth.' (B. Pearce, Arthur Boyd retrospective, Sydney, 1993, p.16)
'It is in the latter half of 1944 that Boyd's doomed, nasty (in the Hobbesian sense) primitives find their truly primeval setting, exchange their suburban habitat for the dense wilderness of the bush. The Lucretian nature-myth of dark primitivism loses its last thin links with the social realism of the early war years. ... In a series of paintings entitled Hunter ... the haunting oppression of this claustrophobic landscape -- as opposed to the agoraphobic South Melbourne paintings -- with its zoomorphic luxuriance of growth encloses the panic of hunted hunters (Hunter I, cat.2.36), of huddled, gnarled, root-like figures, men in the first awareness of the 'other', forlorn in the wild solace of sex, brooding, quenching their thirst in the creek that traverses the dense wilderness, or being swept away by it: The Hunter II (cat.2.37) ... This primordial mountain bush landscape of 1944 was to play a focal part in the later development of Boyd's nature-myth in his paintings of 'synthesis' during his first London years and again in 1966.' (F. Philipp, op. cit., pp.38-40)
'It is in the latter half of 1944 that Boyd's doomed, nasty (in the Hobbesian sense) primitives find their truly primeval setting, exchange their suburban habitat for the dense wilderness of the bush. The Lucretian nature-myth of dark primitivism loses its last thin links with the social realism of the early war years. ... In a series of paintings entitled Hunter ... the haunting oppression of this claustrophobic landscape -- as opposed to the agoraphobic South Melbourne paintings -- with its zoomorphic luxuriance of growth encloses the panic of hunted hunters (Hunter I, cat.2.36), of huddled, gnarled, root-like figures, men in the first awareness of the 'other', forlorn in the wild solace of sex, brooding, quenching their thirst in the creek that traverses the dense wilderness, or being swept away by it: The Hunter II (cat.2.37) ... This primordial mountain bush landscape of 1944 was to play a focal part in the later development of Boyd's nature-myth in his paintings of 'synthesis' during his first London years and again in 1966.' (F. Philipp, op. cit., pp.38-40)