Roland WAKELIN

New Zealander 1887–1971
worked in Australia 1915–21, 1924–71, England 1921–24

Roland Wakelin migrated to Australia from New Zealand and studied at the Royal Art Society, Sydney, from 1912 to 1914. Together with his contemporaries who included Roy de Maistre, Margaret Preston, Thea Proctor and Grace Cossington Smith, Wakelin became one of the leading and most influential contemporary artists working in Sydney during the interwar period.

In August 1919 Wakelin and de Maistre held an exhibition Colour in Art at Gayfield Shaw’s Art Salon. This experimental and radical event included seven paintings, three designs of colour organisation in interior decoration, as well as a colour keyboard, discs and scales. The exhibition pronounced the close links that existed between colour and music and offered a methodical approach presenting a unity of harmonious colour forms. In a lecture delivered to accompany the exhibition, Wakelin methodically explained the theory behind such paintings as On Ball’s Head, 1919, an extremely rare and significant work from this decisive year:

By exploring the realm of colour, we have opened for ourselves new avenues of thought and enlarged our consciousness of the fundamentals of life. By giving our experiences concrete forms through the medium of pigment, we hope to convey to others the result of our study, that they too may increase their knowledge of life …

The colour scales which Mr. de Mestre will demonstrate, constitute a system of colour organisation, whereby the colourist may obtain definite colour harmonies in different keys, and in different graduations of colour tones, in somewhat the same manner as the musician obtains harmonies in sound …

One painter will seek to represent nature and give purely a description of what he sees. Another will translate what he sees through his temperament, endeavouring to give more to the Spirit than the Substance of the scene. A third will create his picture from within himself, using the forms and colours of nature as but a medium for the expression of his individual emotions. The modern tendency is towards this. The modernist does not attempt to give colour photography.

All will agree that a work of art should possess balance in its design, should be a cosmos, the total of whose part make a unity. Everyone knows that 5+3+2 equals 10. To the colourists, Yellow + Violet + Blue in the right proportions similarly constitute a unity.1

In works such as On Ball’s Head Wakelin created carefully ordered compositions with simple forms that freed colour from a naturalistic basis, becoming an important pioneer of abstraction in Australian art.

1 R. Wakelin, ‘Colour in art’, lecture, Sydney, August 1919

Geoffrey Smith