Oil paintings by Alan Gemmell
Dreams or reality, sparked by Myths, places,
pollution, politics, people or their lives.
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Oil paintings by Alan Gemmell |
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About ...
STYLE METHOD Born: 1927. Lessons (watercolour) 1932 from Grandmother, Lucy Davies. School: 1934-46 included art lessons from Francis Roy Thompson. The early watercolour lessons were painful, nothing went where needed. Grandma taught patience, experimental pigment colours, their mixing and the need for preliminary drawings. Grandma was Lucy Walker (1863-1939). Before marrying Charles Davies. She attended Melbourne's National Gallery Art School for eight years, where George Folingsby taught many budding painters. Other students included Tom Roberts, Charles Condor, Arthur Streeton, Jane Sutherland and Walter Withers. She modelled, produced prize-winning paintings, and joined the Victorian Artists Society.
Then Lucy met Heidelberg neighbour Charles Davies, and moved to "Cintra." Their seven children, four girls and three sons, arrived in the four different homes that land speculator Charles bought during their lifetimes, before and after a rail line reached Heidelberg. My Mother was their first daughter. No time for art while kids were managed. Two sons, my uncles Martyn and Alan, were killed in France in World War 1. Their loss made Mum, trained teacher and wartime nurse, become a WW2 peace activist, doing all she could to prevent her son, my elder brother, Bruce, being sent overseas. Towards the war's end, Bruce had trained as a commando, spoke Indonesian, was a radio operator. Finally posted overseas he took part in a landing on Morotai, was wounded and flown to Heidelberg Hospital for surgery. Our father, William Bruce Gemmell, had died 1938, when I was eleven, his absence during WW2 creating a vacuum for us. During the war I had met Max Meldrum in his Hawthorn studio, where I photographed him. The photography hobby got me a job in Canberra, in Arthur Calwell's Dept. of News and Information, with the lofty title "Pictorial Librarian." While doing the same work in Melbourne I fell for another librarian, books, and was depressed when she moved to Canberra. A few years later, when I was sent back, it was in time to be best man at her wedding. Journalism had taught me indifferent typing and shorthand before the days of computers. I drifted into newspaper writing which provided travel, then married my late wife Margarita, began a new phase which lasted about 40 years. The final phase was moving to a studio in Carlton, for the first time indulging a painting addiction without deadline distractions. We all chase elusive rainbows, for they are goals to peace of mind. When on nightshift I organised drawing lessons from Dieter Prussner at the Victorian Artists Society, for 18 months, but chose to end drawing lessons then, until joining a class tutored by Chris Mooney, at North Carlton. |
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