Oil on canvas, stretched and ready to hang.

Signed on the front.

This artwork comes with an external frame

I’m also obsessed with the family of the late Australian artist, Russsell Drysdale, 1912-1981.
As well as being one of Australia’s most famous painter’s of his era he was also a brilliant photographer.
Time and again I find myself returning to photograph’s of his son Tim, a beautiful but troubled young man.
Gentle, fragile, listless and beautiful, but also afflicted with schizophrenia, he killed himself when he was 21.
I’m also obsessed with Tim’s mother, Russell Drysdale’s wife, ‘Bon’ Drysdale.
She appears ever the white bread suburban house wife, and yet according to art world gossip, she was an alcoholic who would become loud and belligerent when drunk.
I guess I project on to her, my own ambivalence about my own mother.
My own mother struggled to maintain the façade of the suburban housewife when I suspect she wasn’t actually heterosexual.
She had a nervous breakdown the day I finished my last high school HSC, (VCE), exam.
Following her nervous breakdown she took a bucket load of prescribed medication, every day for the rest of her life and passed away at the end of 2019, thankfully just before COVID 19 got going.
She became an increasingly homophobic right wing conservative Christian as the years went by.
In the end I simply didn’t like her, and yet I had a profound empathy for the pressure she was under, to get married, have children and be a housewife in 1950’s Australia, even though she probably wasn’t heterosexual and how that led to her becoming, the person she became.
In this second painting, ‘Bon’ Drysdale is posing for the photo beside the back door of the car, a 1950’s suburban housewife.
She looks to be trying to put on an appearances for the photograph, and in doing so, her vulnerability becomes ever more clear and heart breaking.