<
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/article/2024/jul/20/lesley-dumbrell-thrum-art-gallery-of-nsw>
"As a young art student at Melbourne’s RMIT at the end of the 1950s, Lesley
Dumbrell was among a cohort of mostly women, contemplating a profession that
was dominated by men. Even so, she was shocked when the head of the painting
department blithely told her that he was happy to have women in his class
“because no doubt they’ll get married, and if they marry well they will become
very good collectors of art”.
“That was enough to get me going,” she recalls. “I thought: right, I’ll show
you guys.”
That comment kickstarted a career that is now in its seventh decade, and which
hit a high-water mark this week with the opening of a major solo exhibition at
the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) – her first survey in a state art
museum, arriving at the age of 82.
Dumbrell is not finished, either: recent forays into sculpture have resulted in
an ambitious laser-cut metal work created specially for the new exhibition, and
ahead of the opening on Friday her brain was sparking with fresh ideas.
“Already, I can see there’s a thread here from what I’ve been doing that I
could take further,” she said.
Being “endlessly curious” is fundamental to Dumbrell’s endurance, says curator
Anne Ryan. Curiosity is also what led Dumbrell to abstract art – a genre that
was “forbidden” when she was at art school: “And once you shut a door like
that, you know, I’m the one that will always say, ‘Well, I want to find out
about it!’”
She pursued extracurricular lines of inquiry, studying Piet Mondrian
reproductions and reading Kandinsky’s treatise
Concerning the Spiritual in
Art, which argued for the transcendent power of abstract art. Something
clicked."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
