Study for 'Solstice'

Trained in Melbourne between 1959-62, Dumbrell’s early response to international abstraction, sparked by her encounter with op art in the 1960s, led her to form a distinct personal language of painting based on non-representational form. Abstraction became foundational to her practice and has remained the driving force in her art over the subsequent six decades.
Dumbrell’s career was shaped by the rise of the women's art movement in Australia - she was a co-founder of the Women’s Art Register, a member of the Lip collective and participated in exhibitions that asserted the rightful place of women artists within the art world. Her uncompromising commitment to her own practice - which stood in contrast to many of her female peers in terms of style - stands as a testament to her individuality, while also reflecting her embrace of ‘female’ decorative aesthetics within the forms of abstract painting.
While predominantly a painter, Dumbrell is also keenly committed to drawing, and lately, to sculpture. Inextricably linked, her work in all mediums coalesce in a harmonious oeuvre linked by colour and geometry, rhythm and light.
Study for ‘Solstice’ is a preparatory study for Solstice (1974), a painting in the Gallery’s collection. Drawings are always part of Dumbrell’s process, as are more realised colour works on paper. Solstice comes from a series of ‘Optical paintings’ made after the artist’s discovery of Op-art painters, particularly Bridget Riley, which proved seminal to her abstract practice. Painted in 1974, it comprises vertical blue lines overlaid with a repeated pattern of orange, pink, and green triangles, which combine to give an impression of movement and produces a hypnotic effect.