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Joy Roggenkamp was undoubtedly the most important watercolour artist in Brisbane during the 1960s and 1970s and may claim a broader Australian significance. Roggenkamp’s first major award was the Queensland Art Gallery’s L. J. Harvey Prize for Drawing in 1959. Her greatest success, however, was at the Art Gallery of New South Wales where she was awarded the Trustee’s Watercolour Prize in 1962 and the Pring Prize in 1966 and 1967. Watercolour painting is an art form in which Queensland-based artists can claim distinction. In earlier decades of the twentieth century artists such as J. J. Hilder, Vida Lahey, Kenneth Macqueen, Roy Parkinson and Wal Potts each established distinctive styles in this medium. The 1940s also marked a transition in style in the extensive series of free and colourful watercolours by W. G. Grant, then at the close of a long career.

Joy Patricia Roggenkamp was born in Roma, Queensland, in 1928 the second daughter of Oswald Christopher Martin Roggenkamp, a pharmacist, and his wife Vivienne May. The artist Kenneth Edward Roggenkamp (1915-76) was one of two brothers she had. Cecil (Peter) Roggenkamp (1914-2009). The family moved to Brisbane and she continued her education at the St John’s Cathedral Day School. When Roggenkamp enrolled at the Central Technical College she found the teaching methods far too restrictive and did not stay long preferring, to study with P. Stanhope Hobday at his commercial art school, the Hobday Art Studio – attractive examples of her fashion work date to this time.

Roggenkamp was involved in the artistic ferment in Brisbane’s war years especially in the relationship between the Young Artist’s Group and its parent body, the Royal Queensland Art Society (which, for all its good intentions was seen as old-fashioned) and the breakaway of the radical members to form the Miya Studio. Within these groups, Roggenkamp’s training was evident and put her somewhat at odds with the figurative expressionism of her compatriots. Roggenkamp and her brother took annual holidays to visit their sister in North Queensland after travel restrictions, imposed by World War Two, were lifted. In 1946 they held an exhibition of their work, and that of fellow Hobday student, Peter Abraham at the Cairns Council Chambers as 'The Yallalla Studio’ ( Cairns Post, 1946). Their approach had qualified approval: “They have done well to reject the violent and uninformed 'modernism’ of the Wild Colonial Boys and Girls of Barjai” ( Cairns Post, 1946) but their work was still very much within an Australian landscape tradition. She studied physiotherapy at the University of Queensland in the late 1940s but gave it up to concentrate on her art practice.

The most significant of the cluster of young artists in Brisbane at the time included: Peter Abraham, Laurence Hope, Charles Blackman, Betty Quelhurst, Quentin Hole, Betty Cameron (Churcher), Margaret Olley, Margaret Cilento and the sculptors, Leonard and Kathleen Shillam. John Cooper, proprietor of the Moreton Galleries, was also positive in his support of young Brisbane artists and gave Joy and her brother, Kenneth, their first exhibition with him in April 1949 when it was acknowledged that Joy’s paintings “. . . have, to an unusual degree, what her brother’s lack. Her work is interesting. Her handling of colour is bold and successful. She paints her verve and conviction. And she has a fine sense of design” (Cooper, 1949). When three of Joy’s paintings were rejected by the selection committee for the Royal Queensland Art Society’s annual exhibition in 1949 (Bradbury and Cooke, 1988, p. 161) he rose to her defence and to confirm his opinions of her artistry gave Joy her first solo exhibition in March following year – at the time she was the youngest female artist to hold a solo exhibition in Brisbane. It was her first successful showing with the sale of twenty of the twenty-eight paintings on display – one of which was purchased by the Darnell Art Fund (Grano, 1950). This was the first of an extensive exhibition history which eventually included nineteen solo exhibitions.

As a young practitioner, Roggenkamp acknowledged the influence of senior practitioner W. G. Grant’s vigorous free style on her generation and had lessons from the Melbourne painter, Athol Nicholas, who had several exhibitions at the Moreton Galleries in the late 1940’s ( Australian Home Journal , 1969. He also gave classes at Walter Orthmann’s Studio, Cairns, in 1950). Roggenkamp’s greatest inspiration at the time was the young Sydney Nolan who “ ... made me certain . . . that painting was what I really wanted to do and to put me on the right track to develop my own style” ( Australian Home Journal , 1969).

She married Ross McGowan in 1951 and the birth of her three children put paid to her exhibition career for the next few years. It provided her with the opportunity for further study. Her brother accompanied her to Jon Molvig’s classes at St Mary’s Studio, Kangaroo Point for few years from 1955 which inspired a new direction in her work. Molvig refrained from promoting his own style but encouraged his students to discover their own. Their friendship is reflected in the numerous drawings he did of her and in her remarkable portrait which he exhibited in the Archibald Prize for 1963. Roggenkamp developed a technique of wet-on-wet colours which created soft, bleeding effects expressive of her gentle and feminine sensibility. She recalled her influences after wining the Pring Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales:

I can’t bear labouring over anything. If I see something I want to paint, I want to do it and see it finished. It is a sort of expressionist painting. I started painting when I was about four and have been tutored mostly through a series of private teachers. I have been working with Jon Molvig for quite a while and he is quick with his painting too ( The Courier-Mail , 1967).

At least Molvig had the choice of revision in his oil paintings – the speed necessary to execute Roggenkamp’s expressionist watercolours also meant a number of failures. The success of this period both personally as a mother and professionally as an artist was shown with the award of the L. J. Harvey Prize for Drawing in at the Queensland Art Gallery in 1959 with a sketch of 'Baby’ – her young son, Paul.

Roggenkamp maintained her interest in contemporary art practice. She was an exhibiting member of the Contemporary Art Society of Australia (New South Wales Branch) from 1953. She was involved in the tentative establishment of the Queensland Branch in 1957 and contributed to the annual exhibitions for several years after it reformed in 1961.

Joy Roggenkamp was the only one of Molvig’s students to establish a high exhibition profile, with exhibitions at the prestigious Johnstone Gallery in 1960, 1962, 1964 and 1969. Her exhibition launched the Design Arts Centre in Elizabeth Street in 1966 and was followed with exhibitions in 1967 and 1968. In the period to 1980 she held at least another eight solo exhibitions in Brisbane and interstate. Roggenkamp’s husband, Ross McGowan, was involved in the building industry and took her with him on visits to New Britain in 1965 and New Caledonia in 1968. Such inspiration produced the large-scale watercolours which gained her successes at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Her favoured subjects from the late 1950s were children and beach scenes as the family had a holiday cottage at Dicky Beach, and also on nearby Bribie Island where her mother and brother lived. The mountainous hinterland at Maleny became a focus when they moved there in 1981 and the adjacent Glasshouse Mountains proved a major source of inspiration. In the 1980s also she experimented with a series of paintings of humming birds and flowers which had a distinctly Oriental sensibility. Roggenkamp produced oil paintings throughout this period but her colours are rather dark and gloomy and her use of the palette knife produced work which is at notable variance with her watercolours.

Michele Helmrich has made a particular point regarding the influence of Cézanne on Roggenkamp’s work. Ross McGowan recollected that Cézanne was one of Roggenkamp’s favouite artists reinforcing the opinion of critic Dr Gertrude Langer (who was a consistent supporter throughout her exhibiting career) “that this influence is entirely salutary” ( The Courier-Mail , 1960). Roggenkamp would have seen Cézanne’s works, including a watercolour of his revered Le Mont Sainte-Victoire , at the Queensland National Art Gallery in 1945 – a reduced version of the 1939 'Herald Exhibition of French and British Contemporary Art '- but the delicate mosaic of Cézanne’s watercolour patches is quite at variance with the vigourous, loaded brush that Roggenkamp brandishes – perhaps his influence is more to be seen in the overall working of the painted surface and the underlying structure. As James Gleeson remarked on her watercolour technique:

Such an approach has an inbuilt trap, for it can easily lead to formlessness, or the substitution of flamboyant but empty mannerism for honest observation and true feelings. Fortunately, Miss Roggenkamp’s hand is guided by a mind sharpened to an appreciation of formal values by the work of Cézanne ( The Courier-Mail , 1960).

Roggnkamp did not forget her brother whose support was important to her during his early years and after his death she and her mother arranged a retrospective of his work at the Sunnybank Galleries.

Roggenkamp had a distinguished and long standing career of more than fifty years in her chosen medium of watercolurs. Although Roggenkamp’s public profile was much reduced in later years she became involved with the arts community in the Maleny region maintained her art practice to the end. In 1997 she was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia in recognition both for her own art practice and for the support she had provided her local community in judging numerous art prizes.

Writers:

Cooke, Glenn R.
Mellara

Date written:

2011

Last updated:

2018