Untitled - landscape

In 1960 Wendy Paramor joined the exodus of young Australian artists flocking overseas to experience the world of international art after studying in Sydney at East Sydney Technical College and the Julian Ashton Art School. She participated in group exhibitions in London, New York and Portugal before returning to Australia in 1963, achieving success on her return including a solo exhibition at Watters Gallery in 1965.

These charcoal drawings were made while Wendy Paramor was living in Europe in the early 1960s in the small town of Sigean in the south of France. Characterised by looping, sinuous lines, they reflect her response to the French landscape. There is a distinct corporeal presence in these works – the soft swelling forms of rolling hills allude to the human form, such as the curve of a thigh or the crook of an elbow. In her 1965 exhibition at Bognar Gallery in Los Angeles, Henry Seldis, art editor for the Los Angeles’ Times, wrote, ‘[they are]…strong and inventive drawings [which] seem to point a way towards strong and inventive abstract interpretations of landscape forms’.

In these drawings, Paramor was working in a language influenced by contemporary European post-war abstraction, in particular the work of Roger Hilton. They also share compositional and material elements with the drawings of her contemporary and close friend Brett Whiteley, who had settled in Sigean at Paramor’s suggestion and there experienced a breakthrough moment in his own work in which abstraction and the female form combined in drawings and paintings.