Ros Goody

The Profile of AFBMNetwork Home Page Artist

Shown in the background of AFBMNetwork's home webpage is The Auction, a painting by Australian artist Ros Goody. AFBMNetwork is priviliged to have the artist's permission to use the painting in its webpage presentation. Ros Goody has a long-term attachment to the Australian bush. For those of you interested in her life and achievements, further information is given below.

The basis of Ros Goody's art is reality .real places, real working animals and real lives. The British-born watercolourist who made Australia her home in 1990 says she feels a conscious duty to honestly capture a world that will not always remain. "I paint real people and real dogs, and I do the things that I paint, because anyone can sit in a studio and make it up," she says. "Although I take my camera, and I take photographs like a press photographer, the fact that I "do" it, is the only way that I can paint it, because I know. I can remember what they were saying, what they were doing. I know all the names of the dogs and the horses and the people and they all mean something."

The people of rural Australia live in an environment many of us never see, yet Ros's art reminds us that they are always working hard in this unique, beautiful, rugged and unpredictable land. Australia now has a strong outback and rural art tradition, but for many years it was through the eyes of foreigners that we saw ourselves reflected. For more than a decade, Ros has immersed herself in the world of Australia's rural life, using her experiences and work in England to create connections, rather than contrasts. Her fine arts background enabled her to bring a traditional approach to watercolour painting in her "new" country. When she arrived, she was already painting full-time and was listed in the Directory of British Equine Artists, but needed to work hard to establish her name in her new homeland. "There is some fear of the unknown; it was an adventure," she says. "You have to be pretty determined. You have to work harder, because you're unknown."

Her first Australian exhibition, at the Hill-Smith Fine Art Gallery in Adelaide shortly before she emigrated, was a near sell-out, based on material from her first experiences of shearing and mustering in Australia. Ros was particularly taken with the Australian stockmen and country people and the unique ways they wear their hats. A collection of sketches of rural hats (and their owners) became the first work Ros published in book form in Australia. Entitled "I Dips Me Lid", after a line from Australian bush poet C.J. Dennis and this collection was published in 1994. While she works mainly in watercolour, Ros also uses pastels, conte, charcoal and occasionally oils. Everything is based on a firm foundation of drawing and sketching.

The crucial figures in Ros's Australian experiences are the farming families and workers who let the artist inside their lives and have since become good friends. While Ros Goody's art is a real representation of the world she is trying to capture, it is not photographic. Instead, it is imbued with a meaning beyond simply recording. "Absolutely staggering," is how Helen Stoney of Mansfield describes Ros's art. "She just seems able to capture the whole mood, the whole feeling, the whole spirit of it". Ros paints the characters, the light and shadows and the rural life of her adopted country, using colour to express a unique sense of place, to conjure the smell of the eucalypts or even the sound of wind forcing the leaves to shake on a grey, stormy day. The people of rural Australia live in an environment many of us never see, yet Ros's art reminds us that they are working as hard as those who came before them, in the same unique, beautiful, rugged and unpredictable land.

If you are interested in contacting Ros Goody, please click on the following email address to send her a message: longleat@fastlink.com.au