CLARICE BECKETT

Private Collection, Melbourne; purchased by the present owner's mother, circa 1976

What could be more pedestrian than people walking along a path or road? Yet from such prosaic subjects Clarice Beckett created a work of art of fascinating beauty. Figures on a Bayside Path and other works in similar vein demonstrate the captivating power of her pictorial imagination, and the transforming enchantment of her soft focus style. Angular cars and trams, telegraph poles, fences and roads, the daily trappings of modernity are the stuff of her paintings. People walk, the perspective directed by white posts and trees, the pull of recession brought back to the picture surface by colour and dominant form. It is as if it were seen through gauze, as if in a dream, extended through the delicate transparency of the muslin on which it is painted. Given her time taken in caring for her parents, Beckett needed subjects close at hand, scenes of suburban Beaumaris or the city of Melbourne. Avenues of trees dividing people on paths from cars on roads are the ingredients of a 1925 painting, Yellow Leaves, Alexandra Avenue (private collection); or a dark hatted figure walks along a quieter path, the green colour scheme filled with a burst of spring yellow - October Morning, c.1927 (private collection).¹ In Beach Road, c.1933 (private collection) the colour key is higher and brighter, even the walking figures are garbed in touches of orange. As in this work, the subject is not the attention of her painting. It is the occasion for the creation of a work of art, assembled out of the formal elements at her eminent command.