Ray Crooke

Woman with blossoms c.1962–1963

Ray Crooke was a romantic-realist artist who had a unique vision, particularly of the tropical north of Queensland. For more than fifty years he painted evocative and distinctive pictures that represented the light, shade, atmosphere and people of tropical landscapes. Woman with Blossoms is indicative of Crooke’s practice, with a darkened homely interior truncated by a slice of luminous sand and sea glimpsed through an open doorway. Here, his painterly style and block-like use of contrasting bright reds and textured browns combine to flatten the picture plane and disrupt our understanding of perspective.

Crooke’s figures have a static and monumental presence, appearing as players in his depictions of harmonious circadian routines of tropical life, rather than distinct personalities. This subject matter is central to Crooke’s oeuvre, which emphasised people within the landscape or in domestic settings going about their regular tasks.

In 1967, Russell Drysdale wrote in the foreword to ‘Paintings by Ray Crooke’, at the Johnstone Gallery, Brisbane, that ‘Ray Crooke … paints Australia’s tropical north as no one else has done … In his hands the unadorned interior of a simple dwelling becomes cool and quiet, warmed only by the glow of reflected light’ which ‘subtly transforms the figure … a moment of time imprisoned forever in amber’.¹