Curio

State Library of New South Wales
Sketchbook

Sketchbook

c1965
Pencil, ink, crayon, chalk and wash drawings on paper
Purchased January 1979
DGA 62

Thea Proctor continued working up until her death in 1966. Writing to her friend and patron Jim McGregor that same year, she reported, ‘I am still able to do portraits at eighty-six and I am told by people whose opinions I respect that my latest portraits are my best’ [1].

One commission was by Barry Humphries for a portrait of his wife and daughter. Visiting Proctor at her flat in Double Bay in 1966, he recalled: ‘As she greeted us she stroked a large marmalade cat called Calico’ [2]. As evidenced in her sketchbooks, Calico was also one of Proctor’s favourite subjects.

Fellow artist Grace Cossington Smith remembered Proctor was ‘always up in arms for the women painters’, particularly when the art critic and director of the National Gallery of Victoria, Jimmy MacDonald commented, ‘there had never been a good woman artist’. Proctor responded to the comment by taking up a petition signed by women artists calling for his immediate dismissal.*


Footnotes

* Grace Cossington Smith interviewed by Hazel de Berg in the Hazel de Berg collection, National Library of Australia, 16 August, 1965, http://nla.gov.au/nla.oh-vn207757

‘Miss Proctor is one of those rarities – a woman who can draw.’*


Footnotes

* James MacDonald, ‘An Interview with Thea Proctor, Art in Australia, February 1922, p 46

Thea Proctor writing in 1926 on the process of composition:


‘Composition is something that is quite mathematical … every line you place in a certain shape must either conform to that shape or be in apposition to it. If you have a pronounced line going in one direction you must have another in the opposite direction to balance it.’*


Footnotes

*Thea Proctor, ‘Design’, Undergrowth, Sept/Oct 1926, p 5

Thea Proctor was a lifelong friend of fellow artist and mentor George Lambert, whom she had met in her teens while studying at the Julian Aston art school. Often described as beautiful, tall, dark-haired, languorous and dignified, she regularly posed for him as a model.