Ray Crooke (1922-2015) trained at Swinburne Tech from 1946 to 1948, he was one of the most important Australian artists from post-WWII up until today he is one of the best loved artists.

Having worked on Thursday Island for the Diocese of Carpentaria, he painted landscapes and native people, comparisons with Paul Gauguin are inevitable.

Ray Crooke won the Archibald Prize in 1969. In the mid-1990s Croke donated his collection of works by Drysdale, Friend, Olley and Boyd to Perc Tucker Regional Gallery, Townsville, which mounted North of Capricorn, a major retrospective that toured in 1998-1999. Crooke is represented in all major Australian State galleries and his work remains is overseas including the Vatican.

Ray Crooke (1922- 2015) was the master painter of Australia’s far northerly regions and offshore Pacific environment.

Ray Crooke AM trained at Swinburne Tech from 1946 to 1948. Having worked on Thursday Island for the Diocese of Carpentaria, he painted landscapes and native people, comparisons with Gauguin are inevitable.  

A resident of Cairns, he travelled extensively in northern Australia and painted remarkabe landscapes, such as Chillagoe 1962 Landscape with rocks in foreground 1967 and Ant Hill Country, Laura 1969, all in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia. In 1966 he served as an official war artist in Vietnam.

Ray Crooke won the Archibald Prize in 1969 for a portrait of a close friend, the writer George Johnson. In the mid-1990s Ray Croke donated his collection of works by Drysdale, Friend, Olley and Boyd to Perc Tucker Regional Gallery, Townsville, which mounted North of Capricorn, a major retrospective of his work that toured in 1998-1999.

Ray Crooke is represented in all major Australian galleries and his work remains popular amongst collectors

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"North of Capricorn" was an Australian touring retrospective exhibition in 1997 organised by the Perc Tucker Regional Gallery (Townsville), initiated and curated by Grafico Topico's writer and curator Sue Smith.

Ray Crooke is known for serene views of Islander people and ocean landscapes, many of which are based on the art of Gauguin. Crooke spent time in Townsville, Cape York and other parts of northern Australia during the Second World War.

Returning from the Second World War, he enrolled in Art School at Swinburne University of Technology and later travelled to New Guinea, Tahiti and Fiji.

While a portrait of his won the Archibald Prize in 1969, he is not known usually for portrait painting. He has received an Order of Australia medal.

Ray Crooke is represented in all major Australian State and National Galleries, regional galleries and private collections both within Australia and overseas, including the Vatican in Rome.

He has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally and from 1997 to 1999 a major Retrospective exhibition of his work toured throughout Australia.

Awarded the Archibald Prize in 1978 for his portrait of literary antipodean, George Johnston. He was included in the Tate Gallery Exhibition of Australian Art (1963), and was an Official War Artist in Vietnam (1966).

His work is represented in major collections including the National Gallery of Australia , all State and many regional galleries, the Vatican Collection of Rome as well as numerous private collections overseas. His work depicting the landscape and people of Fiji is particularly coveted. Ray Crooke traveled extensively throughout Australia and the South Pacific.

Ray Crooke sojourns in rural Victoria, New South Wales, Cape York Peninsula, the Torres Strait, the Kimberley region, Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Tahiti have significantly influenced his work. Ray Crooke currently lives in Cairns yet spends part of the year in Sydney and still visits Fiji every year.  Please visit:  art-encyclopedia-Ray Cooke

Ray Crooke is the master painter of Australia’s far northerly regions and offshore Pacific environs. He is the painter of opalescent, slightly melancholic outreaches where homespun rituals such as flower picking and promenading are replenishing enough to engross individual citizens or whole townships of people.

In the classic compositions of Crooke, sitting around is a time consuming, indeed constructive activity undertaken with gravity. He is enjoyed for this quality and purchased for it.

To own a Ray Crooke is to possess a passport to reverie. It is to be granted leave to eat lotuses. Guiltlessly. Aimlessly. It is to gather with parrots, drunk on nectar and the sun. Crooke offers his avid multitudes of buyers safe passage to the province of introspection.

A stress-free zone mortgaged only to pleasure. I am a long time admirer of Crookes immobilized vision which seems to me to accord with the inner truth of the distant topographies it depicts, even if it contradicts the external facts from time to time.

Ray Crooke is perhaps the only Australian painter of his generation who gets the slow-motion effect of the tropics down pat- the way foliage, so quick to propagate and grow, and the way water, so ready to run in silvery rivulets down volcanic rocks or whip into foam over coral reefs, the way natural phenomena of all kinds come to a halt around one - contradicting commands of physics and time. Immersed in a gumbo of humidity, sweat, scent and sleep, Crooke’s human figures are the embodiments of radical torpor-effigies with heartbeats.

It is his great accomplishment as an artist, cumulatively enterpriser, to have carved out of a mere state of mind a shape lines visible to the eye.

Extract from article by Bruce James in the Sydney Morning Herald, 6 March 2006 p 13.

Ray Crooke painter of the far north, dies at 93 | afr.com

Artist Ray Crooke, best known for his Gauguin-inspired paintings of islander life in Fiji and the Torres Strait, has died at the age of 93. Read more: http://www.afr.com/lifestyle/arts-and-entertainment/ray-crooke-painter-of-the-far-north-dies-at-93-20151206-glgpop#ixzz3ukIA1xNc - Follow us: @Financial Review on Twitter | financial review on Facebook

Ray Crooke, the much-admired chronicler of the north, died on Saturday night at his home in Palm Cove, north of Cairns. He was 93. Artist Ray Crooke was champion of the tropics, he stood removed from the everyday rhythms of Australian art, playing out a romance with the tropics that spanned decades.

Ray Crooke, whose popular paintings depicted the simple island life of North Queensland, dies at 93

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