THE BILLY BOY
Sir William Dobell 1899-1970
Australian War Memorial, Canberra
Comment by De Mercurio
In a previous painting by Rembrandt featured in the Masters Gallery we saw the artists ability to analyse himself. With William Dobell's The Billy Boy we see the artist as the psychoanalyst. Many people from outside Australia would be unaware of Dobell's presence in the artworld, but his ability and career are only now being perused and his status in Australia is building on into legend. All through Dobell's portraits (there are 100's of them) we see his unique ability to capture his subject, with not only his great observational skills but also the way he used artistic technique with brushwork to reflect other subtleties of character. In relation to this, the Billy Boy is a prime example. Painted in 1943 during the War War Two while working with other artists on a camouflage project (including an artist named Joshua Smith), Dobell gives us a character he had met at the time (a Scotsman named Joe Westcott). This type of character is one that many Australians would know or a person they would have encountered once in their life. The loud mouthed, big drinkin, uninformed pub brawling Australian. His eyes stare at you with a basic awareness, ready to tell you what the problem with Australia is and some unrelated event that made his life miserable. Dobell's use of paint reflects the Billy Boy's misty drunken look at the world with himself placed centrally in it. The arms folded in walrus chest defence, but the thumb up in roguish self confidence. Paint runs around the neck, the Billy Boy slobbers his words and his appearance is as sloppy as his thinking and thought processes.
From another famous Australian artist James Gleeson's "William Dobell" is this extract: " Insight shows the artist what he has to paint, and intuition guides him the way in which it would be best to paint it. Knowing his subject, Dobell has allowed his paint to become as sloppy and amorphorous as his sitters personality. Its slips about with oleaginous ease. Forms are as big and as vague as the Billy Boy's arguments, everything is loose, unmuscular, flabby, and puffed up with beer fat. In every great painting form and content are closely woven together"
All Dobell's portraits reflect his abilty to interweave this genius of observation and artistic technique and the result is a great array of high quality works including Mrs South Kensington, Joshua Smith, Margaret Olley, many other portraits of noted and not so noted persons and many paintings depicting work efforts by ordinary Australians and the military during WWII.
