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Frank Hodgkinson, Black Cockatoo

FRANK HODGKINDON

(Australian, 1919-2001)

Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoo - Male, 1989

Screenprint

Edition: 30//30

70cm x 50cm

Acquired:1993

109464

Black Cockatoo 

Biography:

Born in Sydney, Frank Hodgkinson studied Fine Art at Atelier under Italian-born émigré art teacher, Datillo Rubbo, before serving in North Africa and Papua New Guinea during WWII.  After a short return to Australia, he went back to Europe in 1947, settling in Paris after travelling extensively through England, Spain and Italy where he continued his fine art studies, both formally and informally.  He practiced painting, drawing and printmaking and exhibited with some success, but returned to Sydney in 1953 where he exhibited his first abstract paintings.

In 1958 he won the Inaugural (and highly distinguished) Helena Rubenstein Travelling Art Scholarship[1] and again went to Europe, and additionally, the United States. His experience in Spain had a profound influence, and the heavily textured abstract paintings produced in the following decades are amongst his most celebrated works.

Throughout the 1970s and 80s Hodgkinson also travelled extensively throughout Australia and his painting, now in acrylic, reflected the central and coastal landscape, a rich source of inspiration – whether this manifested in figurative or landscape-based work.  Moreover, the Australian landscape provided a deep exploration of the ‘properties of light’, something which preoccupied much of Hodgkinson’s focus in his practice.[2]

Bibliography

Grishin, Sasha, Australian Printmaking in the 1990s: Artist Printmakers 1990-1995, Craftsman House, Sydney NSW, 1977

Pearce, Barry, Frank Hodgkinson, Beagle Press, Sydney, 1994

View more works by Frank Hodgkinson at the National Gallery of Victoria, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and two portraits, Jill Hickson Wran AM and Neville Wran AC QC at the National Portrait Gallery.

[1] A portrait of Helena Rubinstein is part of the collection of the National Portrait Gallery.  Brief biographical details are also included: https://portrait.gov.au/people/helena-rubinstein-1872

Accessed 28.3.2023

[1] Grishin, Sasha, Australian Printmaking in the 1990s: Artist Printmakers 1990-1995, Craftsman House, Sydney NSW, 1977, p. 128