Non-objective painting

In 1941 Ralph Balson became the first artist in Australia to stage a solo exhibition of non-objective art. British-born Balson began painting in his thirties – studying first at Julian Ashton’s Sydney Art School in the early 1920s and in the early 1930s attending sketch club at Dorrit Black’s Modern Art Centre in Margaret Street, where he renewed his acquaintance with his former teacher, the modernist painter Grace Crowley. For the following thirty years or so, his working relationship with Grace Crowley strengthened and he continued to juggle his daytime job as a house painter while he privately devoted himself to non-objective or abstract painting. At the age of sixty-five Balson became eligible for the pension and pursued painting full-time.

This painting has been regarded as the climax of his painterly abstraction style, which began in 1956. His application of paint in this period encompassed a variety of techniques, including pouring, spotting and shaking to create beautifully layered and textural coloured surfaces.

Balson was inspired to record in paint his wonder of universal rhythms, the new discoveries of atomic and nuclear physics being of particular interest to him. The areas of coloured abstract forms are treated as constantly moving particles and represent the interchangeability of matter and energy.

Tracey Lock, Curator of Australian Art