1971

Catalogue / Memoir
Introduction Pictures Objects Animations

PICTURES are both finished and ephemeral works made for animations.

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Gardens with eggs in the sky

1971 Moon Garden. Acrylic on canvas.
Private collection, Adelaide

 

Page of words found in my 1972 diary
Against the Art Object
(The Hornsey Affair)

In my diaries I recognise my arrogant young self
as part of the very so-called 'educated' bourgeois elite I would scoff at.

Many artists and aesthetes ... claim to crave only for artistic freedom... and haven't time to change the world.

Author unknown

 

1971 Photo: Geoffry Smith
from Nudes of Australia. Pub. 1971
Artist's collection, Sydney.

 

2004 Photo: Ken Wilson. Me in the Newcastle Art Gallery looking at myself in John Brack's painting, The Pink Carpet.

 

1971. Ian and I at Edithdale beach, Victoria

 

I love my husband. I love my life.

I model for artists John Yule, John Brack, Ian Armstrong, William Kelly and a group of photographers. All men. I go to their studios and observe how they work.

One retired dentist owns a large studio in Melbourne where he hosts photo shoots with his dentist friends. Not long into my first session as a model with the group I am handed a pair of scissors and asked to trim my pubic hair. One day I am driven to model for the group on the back beaches of Rye. The men follow me with cameras as I dance around the dunes. It's cold and windy. I feel goose bumps on my skin. The wife of one photographer follows me around with things to keep me warm - a huge woolen dressing gown. A thermos full of hot chocolate laced with rum.

I love dancing on the sand to the rhythms of the wind, waves and birds.

 

Modelling for artists is a different kind of pleasure, an intimate kind of freedom. Rather than being the subject for a group of people occasionally, I work one-on-one regularly and for long periods. I form relationships and exchange ideas.

In 2004 I visit Newcastle Gallery and see myself in John Brack's painting, The Pink Carpet. Seeing this brings fond memories of Brack and his artist wife Helen Maudsley. Brack had a studio built in the back garden of their home. Quite large, quite bare. Like a pre-fab school building. I went there once a week while he made preparatory pastel drawings for finished oil paintings, like this one. After each modeling session with John, Helen would make us all a pot of tea and we would sit in the around the big wooden kitchen table and talk. There were always home made biscuits. I caught glimpses of Helen's studio inside the main house.

My first modeling session with Brack was awkward. He paced in silence up and down the room, his tweed hat pulled over his bushy brows. During breaks I wore his big woolen dressing gown and I would sit in silence until he was ready to start drawing again. Later we began talking during breaks. He introduced me to Tolkien and lent me volume after volume of The Lord of the Rings until I'd read the complete series. I loved the philosophical conversations we then had in his studio, and afterwards in the kitchen with Helen.

Brack explained that he drew and painted in series; he would focus on an idea, and draw and paint to explore different ways to express the idea. He said he painted nudes in between series, as a way to allow new ideas to emerge - new ideas for the next series. The nude, he said, is a neutral, elemental form.

 

 

1971, 22 Feb: CONFIDENCE

This note from Guy Stuart, on my desk at art school:

Lisa, If you are painting into a wet surface you have to be conscious that the painting has to be done over a period of a couple of days while the paint surface is still fluid. This means you can't walk off and leave it without spoiling it, and it of course means that it can be hit and miss. It is very easy in colour mixing or blending of colours wet on the canvas to take on a hue you don't like, or become muddy. You can literally mix a lot of your colours on the canvas.

Try using linseed oil with an equal quantity of turps, and paint it into a primed piece of canvas but don't leave the canvas oily and slippery. Work it up with a brush till it's just slightly slippery under your fingers. Leave it before painting into it to let some of the turps evaporate.

When you paint into it, use straight oil paint, confidently, and try to apply more actual paint to the surface of the canvas.

Quite a good simple exercise could be to put down several plain colours at points on the canvas and then spread and blend them to cover the whole canvas, to see what happens to the colour and the paint surface. The thinner you apply the paint, the glossier the surface will remain.

Extract from my 1971 diary

 

1971, 5 March: PERFORMANCE

Guy says that oil painting is very much a kind of performance which may or may not have to be repeated. You can too-easily over-work an area in one session (causes greying of hues, paint brush pick up paint after a while). So you must do the best you can at the time. Afterwards you can cover the painting with oil and turps, and re-work the areas you're not pleased with. You can event re-paint altogether. Oil painting is very touch-and-go; every brush mark pulls in or out (creates spatial illusions) in some way. And this has to be controlled.

This is kind of what happened with this painting. I over-worked it to death. The instead of re-working on the same surface I turned the canvas over and painted on the back of it from scratch. After all forcing for an outcome that never came, I painted freely, with confidence.

Lutruwita mountain Oil of cotton duck.
Made and named in 2001:
Golden Mountain: Mount Arthur evening
Stephen Taberner collection, Sydney.

 

 

From my 1971 diary:

1971, 8 Sept: PREGNANT

Dr Walpole confirms my suspicions. I AM pregnant and have been for the last three months! I ring Ian and he is overjoyed. He's going to be a terrific father. When Ian gets home I try eating a boiled egg. I feel nauseous and faint.

Extract from my 1971 diary

 

1971. 26 Jan: AUNT SYLVIA

My heart was pounding as we stopped outside Sylvia Purvis's house in Sydney. I wondered what on earth she would be like; everyone told me she was quite mad. I saw the head of an old lady peering 'round the front gate. Ian went towards her, saying "Are you Miss Purvis?"

I jumped when she said "Why? What do you want to know for?" But when it was clear we were related (she's the daughter of TR's sister Alice) she was really chatty and made us sit down - on an old dusty bench on the porch - and look at dusty old family photographs.

When she laughs she screws up her eyes as as Noel and Peter do. And her eyes are deep-set and brown, just as Ca's were - a very handsome woman. I didn't find her very mad. She's interested in life, and gets enthusiastic about many things; we talked about cars, pollution, building home units and pulling down nice old houses.

She said she was one of the first women in Sydney to drive a car. She said in her youth she surfed with the boy next door.

But the clothes she wore were mad; old bits of petticoat and nightie material hand-sewn together, with what looked like Kleenex tissue lining, or facing, at the neck - coming un-done. Between the wrinkles on her neck it was obvious she hadn't washed for a good while. How lovely to be so oblivious to such things.

She apologised for her dress, saying, "I'm in the middle of making another one."

When we first arrived she had said she had to be off soon to her ladies club, where she plays bridge etc. , so she didn't ask us in, which was a pity because I'd hear from Noel that she had some very nice TR's.

Extract from my 1971 diary

 

1971, 20 October: FLOWERS, EGGS, MOONS

I start paintings flowers with eggs in the sky.

 

1971, 2 November: BABY MOVES

Family lunch at the Botanical Gardens. We all sat on the lawn by the lake. A pair of swans came under the bridge into the little part of the lake near us. An angry swan, who seemed to assume territorial rights to this place, started to attack all three of them in turn. At times there were dramatic chases right across the water, shrieks, and pecking. It all caused quite a stir among the spectators who growled at the offending beast. The family eventually did go away under the bridge - and weren't bothered again.

There was some offending, loud pop music permeating, it seemed, everywhere. We went to investigate, and decided it must have been coming from the Music Bowl. Tom and I ran back to the others - chasing eachother. He put his hand on my stomach and felt the baby kicking, which delighted him no end.

From: Tom Roberts
To: Living Data
Subject: Re: 1971 Memory of you
Date: Thu, 30 Apr 2026 19:12:40 +1000

Hi Lisa, Yes, i definitely remember feeling the baby in your belly! No recollection of the swans though. Such a long time ago!

 

1971, 30 Dec: IDIOCY

I dreamed a girl I didn't know approached me. I had on the patchwork coat mum made me for Christmas. She said, "you dance so beautifully, you must let me dance with you". So up I got and actually rather enjoyed flaunting myself in front of everybody. We were the only ones dancing. I moved gracefully to the music - a classic sort of waltz - extreme corn - and our steps were very refined and correct. But I couldn't help smiling at my idiocy.

Extract from my 1971 diary

 

1971, 21 Dec: EMOTION

Reading Michael McChanan Mahler in Venice:

Everything human in us cries out against the idea that music - art - is devoid of emotion. It does not occur to us that all the artist has done is to create a matrix into which we pour our emotions. Neitzche believed, not that music expresses emotions, but ... that we bring our emotions to music in order to fill it out, to make it intelligible to ourselves.

Michael McChanan in Music and Musicians June 1971, p.28

 

1971, 25 Dec: READING

Ian and I lay around reading books (some Christmas gifts): How to Bring up your Parents (Dr Stanley Gold & Dr Peter Eisen. 1971); Nadja (Andre Breton. 1928); The Outcasts of Fulgarah (Frank Hardy. 1971 ); Adolph Hitler - My Part in His Downfall (Spike Milligan. 1971); Sun (D.H.Lawrence. 1926)

Extract from my 1971 diary

 

1971, 27 Dec: GROWTH

People stimulate you - some more than others. It may be some kind of flattering illusion, but I feel I can think some original thoughts I would not have otherwise thought without them. You can completely extend yourself with some people. With so many social situations you must limit yourself - only "work" within a small range of experiences.

Extract from my 1971 diary

 

 

EVENTS

 

By this year, 85 per cent of the Australian population was urban; 15 per cent was rural.

Senator Neville Bonner became the first Aboriginal member of any Australian parliament, filling a casual vacancy in the Senate. In 1972 he was elected on the Liberal Party ticket to represent Qld.

Evonne Cawley, ne Guolagong, the first Aboriginal to compete at Wimbledon or to represent Australia in world-class tennis, won the women's singles from Margaret Court.

Tension between the Minister for Defence, Malcolm Frazer, and the Army over the latter's activities in Vietnam let to Frazer's resignation when Prime Minister Gorton indicated he would support the army. Fraser accused Gorton on, significant disloyalty to a Senior Minister' and as a back-bencher, attacked the Prime Minister in the Party Room and the Parliament.

Gorton faced a 'No-Confidence' motion, the vote being divided 33:33. Gorton, as chairman, used his casting vote against himself declaring the office of Liberal leader open. William McMahon and Bill Sneddon stood for office and McMahon became Prime Minister. Fraser returned to the Ministry, but not the Cabinet, as Minister for Science and Education.

Jack Mundy, leader of the Builder's Labourer's Federation, applied the term 'green ban' for the first time, supporting conservation measures protecting historically and culturally significant landmark sites for redevelopment.

'R' rating for restricted movies introduced by the Commonwealth Film Board.

The Australian Almanac
Pub. Angus & Robertson 1985

 

 

Written by me, Lisa Roberts/Euphausia superba (Antarctic krill), on

20/04/2026

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