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FULLBROOK, Sam / Australia b.1922 d.2004 / Mt Cooroy with Bunya Pines 1966-67 / Oil on canvas / Gift of J.P. Birrell, Lorant Kulley and P. Conn 1967 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery / © Estate of the artist
Sam FullbrookMt Cooroy with Bunya Pines c.1966
Not Currently on Display
‘Mt. Cooroy with bunya pines’ is one of a series of paintings of Mt Cooroy that were painted by Fullbrook looking north from his farmhouse outside Eumundi. In 1966 he wrote to James Wieneke at the Moreton Galleries describing this view:
‘Have taken a farmhouse on the other side of Eumundi on the Kenilworth Road… It is [a] magnificent landscape that was once jungly scrub country and all the bunya pines have been left around the house paddock.’1
The most remarkable change in Fullbrook’s work when he came to Queensland was the considerable brightening of his palette. Works such as ‘The dancer, Ruth Bergner’ 1960 are decidedly sombre while the colours of the paintings produced on his sojourn on the Darling River, New South Wales, such as ‘River idyll I’ 1964, are quite bleached. During his years in the Buderim area his colours, (as in this work) with its closely related harmonies of yellow, blue and green, become quite luscious. Further, his painted patches of pure colour become more rhythmically disposed across the surface. Fullbrook brought a new lyricism to Queensland painting.
Endnotes:
1. Letter from artist to James Wieneke, c.1966, in the Moreton Galleries Collection file, QAG Library.
One of Australia’s most influential postwar painters, Sam Fullbrook was a highly skilled colourist and tonalist, often described as a painter’s painter. At 15, he worked as an itinerant bush labourer before enlisting and serving overseas during World War Two.
Fullbrook’s artistic career began on his return to Australia, when he attended the National Gallery of Victoria Art School in Melbourne. He regularly attended life-drawing classes, a practice he strongly advocated throughout his life.
Travelling all over Australia, and living at various times in Queensland — in Brisbane, Buderim, and the Darling Downs near Oakey — Fullbrook worked in the traditional genres of landscape, portraiture, and flower painting, recording the people and places that impressed him.
Sam Fullbrook won the Wynne Prize for landscape painting in 1963 and 1964, and the Archibald Prize for portraiture in 1974. Despite being a great portraitist, he was never fashionable as one, because his paintings were often seen as lacking the detail expected in a realistic portrait.