Eveline SYME

Australian 1888–1961

In 1926 an influential artist named Claude Flight began teaching printmaking at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in London. Two years later a young artist, Eveline Syme, picked up his ground-breaking book on printmaking, Lino-Cuts. A Hand-Book of Linoleum-Cut Colour Printing, 1927, while browsing in the Arts and Crafts Society bookshop in Melbourne. Syme later recalled:

Here was something new and different, lino-cut no longer regarded as a base form of woodcut, but evolved into a distinct branch of 20th Century Art. I had seen nothing more vital and essentially ‘modern’ in the best sense of the word than the reproductions in this book.1

In January 1929 Syme began studying with Flight, joining her close friend Ethel Spowers who had preceded her by a month. Interested in capturing the vitality and activity of modern life, Flight encouraged the use of bold colour and the reduction of subject matter to simplified geometric shapes and rhythmic patterns. As Syme wrote:

Whatever subject he chooses … he builds into a geometric pattern of opposing rhythms, all the main lines following the lines of the circles and triangle which are, as it were, the anatomy of the rectangle he is filling … [T]he subject is merely the peg from which the pattern hangs.2

As part of this process Flight advocated the abandonment of the key block—one block, often printed in black, that carried the main design of the image. Rather, the design was created by the application of each colour of the multiple blocks. This approach is apparent in The works, Yallourn, 1933.

Although Syme and Spowers studied with Flight for only a few months, his ideas continued to have an impact upon their subsequent work (as they did on the work of Dorrit Black, the other Australian artist who studied with Flight). Each artist actively promoted interest in the colour linocut, exhibiting, writing, demonstrating and teaching Flight’s technique amid the active milieu of Melbourne and Sydney relief printing of the period. A series of exhibitions of their own work, as well as works by other members of the Grosvenor School, were displayed during the 1930s; the National Gallery of Victoria became the first gallery in Australia to collect the work of the Grosvenor School artists with the purchase of a group of prints in 1937.

1 E. Syme, The Recorder, Melbourne, September 1929, p. 2.

2 ibid., p. 3.

Alisa Bunbury

Syme’s four-colour linocut, The bay, 1933, is a dynamic rendition of Port Phillip Bay looking towards Arthurs Seat, in which the movement of the waves and sky and the strong line of the path are provided by the lighter blue block (note the overlapping of the yellow and blue inks to produce the green foliage). In contrast, Spowers’s image of the open-cut coal mine at Yallourn, in the Latrobe Valley, Victoria, a scene which one might expect to be full of activity, is instead a very modern but measured interpretation of an industrial landscape. This print contrasts with her many lyrical prints of children at play, for which she is predominantly remembered.

Alisa Bunbury