Dell Claire Scott was born in Rockhampton in 1931, the second child of Barney Scott and his wife Bronwen neé Milner. Scott worked as a projectionist in Yeppoon but, starstruck by the movie business, he left the family for the United States. Her mother remarried Thomas Clarke, a labourer and timber-getter, and the family moved to a farming district some 26 kilometres north of Rockhampton. Dell attended The Caves State School where she demonstrated a love for drawing. She drew every day, usually in the evenings by the light of a carbide lamp.
On completing primary school, she boarded in Rockhampton and worked in various businesses including a steam laundry and a couple of Greek cafés. When waitressing in one of these cafés she met her future husband Cliff Nash, a third-generation miner who worked as a fitter and turner for Mount Morgan Mine. They married in 1956 and daughter Leonie was born in 1957, their only child.
Dell Nash found the mining town west of Rockhampton fascinating and often returned to the subject of Mount Morgan in her career as a painter. The family relocated to Rockhampton around 1963 when Cliff Nash obtained a position as chief engineer for the abattoir owned by T. A. Fields Pty Ltd at Nerimbera.
Throughout the 1960s, her main focus was in turning the company house into a home, creating gardens and playing tennis. Health issues forced her to adopt a more sedate lifestyle and she joined the Rockhampton branch of the Royal Queensland Art Society.
Her art practice did not flourish until Mervyn Moriarty founded the Australian Flying Arts School (subsequently Flying Arts/ Alliance) in Brisbane in 1971 and brought painting workshops to regional Queensland. Nash repeatedly credited Moriarty and AFAS with opening up her life with art.
Bela Ivanyi, who had joined AFAS as co-pilot and tutor in 1974, instigated annual workshops near Yeppoon on the Capricorn Coast. The Cooee Bay Artist Workshops provided opportunities for ongoing professional development for Nash and fellow-artists such as Carmen Beezley-Drake, Linda Frawley, Rita Kershaw and Olga Morris for almost 4 decades. Ivanyi continued to mentor the largely regional clientele, bringing with him a series of high-profile contemporary guest tutors including Roy Churcher, Roy Orloff, Stanislaus Rapotec, Colin Lanceley, Fred Cress and Irene Amos. These influences gave Nash the confidence to paint boldly.
AFAS and later Queensland Arts Council exhibitions in Brisbane included work by Nash. She became a prominent supporter of the Walter Reid Centre in Rockhampton, and exhibited regularly and collected prizes in local competitions such as Blackwater, Emerald, Gladstone, Gympie, Mackay and Rockhampton.
In 1984, she enrolled in the Capricornia Institute of Advanced Education and completed a two-year course in etching, lino-print and screen-print, obtaining a Fine and Applied Arts Diploma. Painting landscapes, however, remained her favourite medium, largely due to her reverential connection to her environment. She sketched in ink, charcoal and pastel then completed the work in her studio.
Her success was confirmed when Double Heads Yeppoon (1984), a work featuring the volcanic plug that juts into Rosslyn Bay, was selected for ‘Queensland / Works 1950–1985: A Survey of 80 Painters’ at the University Art Museum, University of Queensland. In the same year, the semi-abstract Rolling Hills, Tanby (1985) won the Bundaberg Sugar Company prize of $2000.
The Queensland Arts Council and Rockhampton Art Gallery joined AFAS in showcasing Central Queensland contemporary artists and a number of her works were selected for travelling exhibitions, mostly to regional Queensland, in the 1990s and the early 2000s. Others were sold through local and Brisbane galleries. In all, Nash established a significant profile in the 1980s and 1990s.
Dell and Cliff Nash owned a beach house in Zilzie, south of Cooee Bay, and retired there. Nash embraced the burgeoning coastal art scene. She continued to sell though Rockhampton galleries Biroo Gallery and Spiral Gallery; a gallery in Emu Park known as ‘the’ Gallery and The Mill Gallery in Yeppoon; and spaces such as Gnomes Restaurant, Rockhampton and Rydges Resort, Yeppoon. Rockhampton’s daily Morning Bulletin consistently featured and photographed Dell Nash as did, on occasion, Brisbane’s Courier-Mail. In 1996, Rockhampton Art Gallery honoured Nash, then aged 65, with a retrospective exhibition as part of a series to recognise the contribution of artists from Central Queensland.
Nash continued painting and frequently won additional regional art competitions. She developed a canny sense of what might appeal: Cloncurry was awarded the Ernest Henry Art Prize, Cloncurry in 1996; Hills and Houses of Mount Morgan took the acquisitive $1000 prize in the Mount Morgan Inaugural Spring Fair in 1997. She engaged across the community, sharing skills and insights with TAFE students and high school students from St Ursula’s College in Yeppoon, Rockhampton Grammar, Rockhampton Girls Grammar and Rockhampton High School.
Always keen to explore new perspectives, Nash experimented with modelling and exhibited a bust of her granddaughter Courtney in ‘The Quarry Studio exhibition’ in Walter Reid Art Centre Gallery in December 2004. She attended art workshops in Brisbane led by John Rigby and continued to participate in the Cooee Bay Artists Workshop. One of the last she attended was in 2013, under tutor Joe Furlonger, just three years before her death.
Nash’s husband, who suffered from motor-neuron disease, died in 2011. She participated in ‘Reflections of Summer’, a group exhibition in The Mill Gallery, that same year. She continued to paint and exhibit after moving to Oak Tree Retirement Village, Yeppoon. The deep love of the natural world that was so apparent in the beginning of her career never left her. She died in 2016, aged 84.
Art critic and gallery director Sue Smith, writing in an email in 2020, observed, ‘Looking again at her work after many years I’m quite struck by its strong similarity to work by another Rockhampton artist, Carmen Beezley-Drake. This might be partly explained by the fact that Dell and Carmen and others in CQ were regular attendees at the annual three-day Cooee Bay artists workshops – I think these two and others were very strongly influenced by the workshop tutors, especially Bela Ivanyi.’
- Writers:
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- Date written:
- 2020
- Last updated:
- 2020
