Career
Beckett is recognised as one of Australia's most important modernist artists. Despite a talent for portraiture and a keen public appreciation for her still lifes, Beckett preferred the solo, outdoor process of painting landscapes. She relentlessly painted sea and beachscapes, rural and suburban scenes, often enveloped in the atmospheric effects of early mornings or evening. Her subjects were often drawn from the Melbourne bayside suburb of Beaumaris, where she lived for most of her life, caring for her ailing parents during the day and spending time around dawn and dusk painting. She was one of the first of her group to use a painting trolley, or mobile easel to make it easier to paint outdoors in different locations.
Her work, which had never been acquired for a public collection, was placed in storage, or remained hidden in private collections, and both the artist and the significance of her talent became largely lost to memory.
By a chance encounter in the 1960s Rosalind Hollinrake discovered some mysterious but compelling canvases signed C.Beckett. Embarking upon a search for the identity behind this unfamiliar name, her quest eventually led her to an open-sided barn in the Victorian countryside – and the horrible sight of 1200 rotting Clarice Beckett paintings, the majority of which had been destroyed by almost 40 years of exposure to the elements.
In these cityscapes, if you examine closely you can see how thinly the paint has been applied, how quickly the image has been formed to capture the moment of an emerging modern world of motor cars, electric lights, and telephone poles. Examining how each delicately placed brushstroke works together; we are granted a glimpse of Beckett’s private world, formed at a time when she was free to be alone with her thoughts and her paint.