ARTHUR BOYD

Arthur Boyd's imagery is invariably powerful and arresting, at times highly enigmatic, as in this painting. Favoured motifs, like the bent tree, reoccur, as do figure types and dogs, influences being as wide and varied as Boyd's imaginative inventions. The motif of boots comes from those his father had worn; his own image of the dog enriched by that of the late fifteenth-century Florentine painter, Piero di Cosimo. The tree that sprouts from Nebuchadnezzar's navel in Nebuchadnezzar's Dream of a Tree, 1966-69 (National Gallery of Australia, Canberra) is a metaphor of regeneration. In another work a flame tree grows out of a skull in Flame Trees, Horse's Skull, Black River, 1983 with the Pulpit Rock in the background, and dogs red and black populate many a major work. Another Shoalhaven painting, Chained Figure and Bent Tree of 1973 (National Gallery of Australia) shows the artist chained to his work within the primeval forces of nature. Boyd's art reveals a strong concern for the oppressed, the wronged and persecuted. The vulnerability of man, hands bound behind, face pleading upwards, lashed by a helmeted other, reflects 'the artist's sensitivity to human torment, the lonely tree implies the despair of the forsaken…'.¹ Human suffering, themes of cruelty and compassion recalled even on the banks of the Shoalhaven River, run throughout Boyd's art, expressed in the most individual of images.

1. Gunn, G., Arthur Boyd: Seven Persistent Images, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 1985, p. 3.