‘SELBY WARREN: AUSTRALIAN BUSH ARTIST AND TRIBE OF ONE’

Abstract

In this thesis I have looked at the life and works of the Australian self-taught artist, Selby Warren, who was born in 1887 and spent his whole life in rural New South Wales near the small, inland city of Bathurst. Warren was typical of many self-taught artists in that he was completely untrained in art, unaware of the artworld and, having worked as a labourer, only began painting in earnest after semi-retiring at the age of seventy-six. Almost a decade later he was discovered by an art lecturer who introduced him to a city dealer and gallery owner and his work was exhibited in commercial galleries in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. During this brief (three year) period he was reasonably well known in art circles but this soon ended and he spent the remaining years of his life in his home town of Trunkey Creek. He died in 1979 aged 91. Warren exemplified the experiences shared by many self-taught artists both in Australia and overseas. I consider the events involved in the growth of interest in self-taught art and the ensuing influences it (and related phenomena like primitivism and primitive art) had on approaches to modern art movements from the turn of the twentieth-century until about 1980 in Europe, America and Australia. George Melly’s idea of the ‘tribe of one’ 1 and how it relates to artists like Warren and his ilk is explored. An analysis of Warren’s paintings and those of his Australian, European and American contemporaries is provided in a response to the view that it is the sometimes unusual lives rather than the output of self-taught artists that is too often used in the discussion of a unique, but not uncommon, art form.