A weft yarn: The Ferry

September 13, 2012

The Ferry

I have been doing some more needlepoint and research on the Ferry. In my travels I found a web page with a short video of some of E. Phillips Fox's paintings held in Australian art galleries. He was married to an artist and he while he was an Australian, she was English. They lived in Paris for about 10 years after they married (both reasonably late in life, but not shockingly late by the standards of the time). They travelled both physically and methaphorically in a group of artists around Europe and the Middle East and were particularly interested in capturing life as it was lived in "plein air". It is clear from The Ferry that he was influenced by the French Impressionists, and yet he had his own interpretation of this style.

They returned to Australia a few times in their marriage and he eventually died here quite young, in his 50s, of cancer. His wife, Ethel Carrick lived on, I think well into her 80s and spent a great deal of her artistic energy post-his death promoting his legacy. He has paintings in most major art institutions in Australia (National Gallery, SA gallery, Victorian Gallery and the NSW Gallery), some of which were bought in his lifetime, most afterwards. Ethel Carrick was interesting enough in her own right and was a much less mannered, more experimental painter than her husband, more forward looking in many ways. I can't quite tell from the research I have done whether she was as appreciated in her lifetime, as he was. Certainly she didn't have a widow promoting her lifeswork and keeping the memory alive in the years that it might take to get established within the canon. Nonetheless, there is a reasonable amount of academic study of her work now taking place and retrospective was held in Brisbane in 2007.

I did much of this stitching while I was watching Lewis and Clark on DVD. There are a whole series of historical DVDs that are made with voice overs, archival images and current photos of the landscape that convey interesting bits of history. As I think of the hardships, the courage, the boredom and the colonisation that the 'voyages of discovery' represented, I put in many hours replicating E. Philips Fox's impressionistic swathes of water. Which as we know from my previous research, is a harbour in France at Trouville. See Needlepoint can take you anywhere.