Clifford Dudley Wood studied art, design, and composition at Swinburne Technical College in the early 1920s and the Victorian Artists Society. During the Great Depression, he began exhibiting concurrently with his practice as a commercial artist as a primary income source. He produced covers for magazines such as New Idea, Life, Australia Today, Australian Journal, and later, Women’s Weekly, and his newspaper advertising design promoted establishments like The Myer Emporium, Berkowitz, and items like Pelacao Shirts, Nugget Boot Polish, and Meltonian Shoe Cream.
The National Gallery of Australia holds samples of these advertising posters, while the majority of these works were donated to the University of Melbourne Archives. Wood garnered commissions from the industrial sector, collaborating with corporations Broken Hill Pty Ltd, Australian Iron and Steel Pty Ltd, Rio Tinto Ltd, Australian Paper Mills Pty Ltd, and General Motors-Holden’s Ltd. These ventures afforded him opportunities to visit different landscapes in which he made his own landscape paintings beyond the confines of the industrial scenes he was tasked with illustrating.
By the late 1940s, Wood having developed proficiency in both watercolours and oil painting and he persisted during World War II in his creative pursuits during his service with the Allied Works Council in Queensland and Darwin, contributing to the field of camouflage. A selection of these World War II pieces are now held in the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.
In 1945, Wood wed Katherine Ewers, whose background was in art education and her serving with the Red Cross as an occupational therapist for WWII veterans. Although she dabbled in ceramics for personal pleasure, she assisted Wood with exhibitions, travel, and his students.
Subsequently, Wood turned to landscape and also took on a range of industrial commissions, in Newcastle, Wittenoom, Hobart, and Whyalla illustrating Australia’s post-war reconstruction efforts. In the 1960s, he depicted Australia’s Red Centre and its Indigenous inhabitants, for which Wood, as an accomplished artists earning a living from commercial art, still experimented with artistic materials, particularly his innovative use of diluted oil medium to capture the vibrant colour, as remarked by William Dargie.
Firmly of the traditional school of Australian landscape (Robert Menzies opened his solo show at the Athenaeum Gallery in 1946) C. Dudley Wood eschewed the contemporary art controversies and continued creating for a niche audience; artists whom Dudley Wood held in high regard were Lloyd Rees, Blamire Young, Sir Hans Heysen, and Harold Herbert who excelled in capturing the luminous effects with a lyrical touch.
During the 1960s to early 1970s, he conducted watercolour classes from his studio in Canterbury.
- Writers:
-
James McArdle
- Date written:
- 2023
- Last updated:
- 2023
