On Circular Quay

'On Circular Quay' is one of Carrick’s finest known paintings and one of her earliest depictions of a Sydney crowd. Rather than the more usual attention to harbour waters for those who painted this subject, Carrick focuses on the urban bustle of Sydney’s commercial centre. Her colours conjure movement with rich pigments of blues, reds, pinks, whites and black serving as the dappled presence of the crowd in the city street. The sweeping rhythm of these abbreviated figurative forms connect to the larger compositional movement of trams, roads and the block patterns of background buildings. The work has an immersive pull to it, with the dotted coloured momentum of figures drawing the eye through the serpentine structure of the streets. 'On Circular Quay' is a joyful chorus of the energy and motion that characterises the modern city.

The English-born Carrick studied at the Slade School in London, but it was her experiences painting outdoors, including at the artist’s colony at St Ives, Cornwall in 1903, that served as her greater training ground. She was inspired by impressionist painters including Monet and Pissarro and turned her attention to painting the fleeting effects of light and colour. As she painted en plein air, the action of the crowd became the primary subject of her work and her paintings – often small sketch-like vignettes of her immediate surrounds – which share certain affinities with the moving images of film that were developing at this time. Carrick’s preference for painting outdoors meant that she increasingly experimented with a freer style. By the 1910s she was using abbreviated forms to suggest the activity of the streets and she intensified her palette to give expression to the light and life around her.