Prelude is the title of one of many watercolours produced between the years 1947–1950.
In a more general sense, the works within this series refer to the time when Elizabeth Durack, then based on Ivanhoe Station, East Kimberley, was witness to the last phase of the region's early pastoral enterprise. Working alone, (or occasionally in company with Jubul, an artist from Arnhem Land), she was recording this experience, walking over country with Ord River, Mirrriuwong people, reading widely, honing her talent and setting a course for her future.
Durack's art in Prelude is in marked contrast to the landscapes with gumtrees or traditional still-lifes dominating Australia's art salons of the time. While some notable contemporaries in Melbourne and Sydney were also breaking with tradition, Durack’s focus was metaphysical aspects of life associated with the effects of settlement and the pastoral industry upon the land and its original inhabitants.
Labelled by some post-war critics as 'an artist with a social conscience', Durack dismissed this assessment, her letters of the time attesting that her primary concern was aesthetics and with communicating a sense of interconnection between the past and the present and with all living and inanimate things. Notwithstanding the artist's claim that her choice of subject matter was incidental to the whole, most critics simply saw unpalatable social and political aspects in the work.
Undeterred by largely negative comment in places where it mattered, within four years Elizabeth Durack had held eleven solo exhibitions in major cities around the nation. By 1950 she was recognised as an artist of independent expression and ideas, outside of the mainstream — a position she maintained over the years.
Most of the works in Prelude were completed in a grass studio on the banks of the Ord River where Durack worked by day on a trestle table, and frequently at night by the light of a hurricane lamp. Along with lyrical watercolours of station life and landscape, reflecting ideas and concerns about Australia’s land and its people, Durack also produced a number of large oils on swag covers — notably Ord River Venus, Ivanhoe Camp, Jubul and War and Peace.
Signature, a 3000 word essay written on Ivanhoe Station in 1948, stands as a personal manifesto about art and life at the time.
