We acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land on which the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art stands and recognise the creative contribution First Australians make to the art and culture of this country.
Robert MacPherson / Australia 1937–2021 / 1000 FROG POEMS: 1000 BOSS DROVERS (“YELLOW LEAF FALLING”) FOR H.S. (detail) 1996–2014 / Graphite, ink and stain on paper / Purchased 2014 with funds from the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation, Paul and Susan Taylor, and Donald and Christine McDonald / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Robert MacPherson
Robert MacPherson1000 FROG POEMS: 1000 BOSS DROVERS (“YELLOW LEAF FALLING”) for H.S. 1996–2014
Not Currently on Display
1000 FROG POEMS: 1000 BOSS DROVERS (“YELLOW LEAF FALLING”) FOR H.S. 1996–2014 consists of 2400 individual drawings, all deliberately executed as if by the hand of a ten-year-old boy, the artist’s alter ego, Robert Pene — a grade 4 student at St Joseph’s Convent, Nambour — and stained to give them an aged patina.
They vividly evoke the resilient, determined spirit of the rugged individuals responsible for moving thousands of livestock and teams of stockmen and cooks along the great pastoral stock routes of Australia. Drovers are declining in numbers in the contemporary world thanks to the B-double and B-triple road trains that now populate Australia’s rural highways.
All the boss drovers’ names are those of real people, whose histories are known or documented. However, not all of their faces are derived from photographs or images of the actual subjects; in many cases no records are available. These drawings are therefore often imaginative.
Brisbane-born Robert MacPherson is one of Australia’s leading conceptual artists. A key aspect of his art is the way in which the identity of things is created by how we classify them.
His ‘serial’ works often combine local knowledge and humour with a highly informed commentary on contemporary art through the use of a sequence of similar or identical objects. The continuity suggested by serial, repeatable units, indicates that the work is a detail within a much wider system, a complex grid of interlocking factors that defines the meaning and identity of things.
MacPherson travelled extensively throughout Europe and the US during the 1970s, and held several solo exhibitions at the Ray Hughes Gallery in Sydney and the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane during the 1970s and 80s. In 1977 he received a Visual Arts Board Grant from the Australia Council for a studio in New York , and in 1992 was awarded an honorary doctorate from Griffith University. Five years later, he received the Australia Council’s Artist Emeritus award.
Discussion Questions
1. What is this artwork about? How does the artist represent his subject matter?
2. MacPherson creates a narrative using words and pictures through the eyes of a school student in this series. What visual clues create the context for this work?
Activities
Look at how the artist has used line to create the images. Find a partner and draw each other without lifting your pencil. Assume an alter ego. Consider the tradition of the graphic novel to inspire a narrative based on your character in a series of ten contour line drawings. Write text to accompany the drawings to provide context.