Raymond Arnold

Also known as Ray Arnold
  • Artist (Printmaker)
Printmaker, winner of the 2001 Geelong Print Prize . Arnold's art has previously referenced the work of gay activist Rodney Croome and his MFA research focused on the colonial architect and artist Hans Hellyer who was charged for sodomy.
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printmaker, had a colour print with tombstone included in the National Gallery of Australia’s 1988 Bicentennial Print series. It quotes a colonial headstone of a hand chopping down a tree trunk. Arnold used this, not as a life chopped off, but as a comment about white destruction of the natural environment.

Arnold’s MFA focused on a painting in circular projection of Mt Ballantyre by Henry Hellyer (1790-1832), son of John Hellyer and Betsy, née Maine, of Porchester, Hampshire, who arrived in Tasmania on 4 March 1826 as architect and surveyor to the newly-formed Van Diemen’s Land Company. In October the company set up its headquarters at Circular Head, the base of various surveying expeditions taken by Hellyer. Watercolours such as The Lawn Front, Highfield Circular Head , signed 'Henry Hellyer Surveyor V.D.L. Co. August 1832’ (State Library of Tasmania), were done as visual information for his employers and were formerly in the company’s possession. Hellyer was officially transferred to the Government Survey Department in May 1832 but never took up the appointment. 'Busted for sodomy with a chain gang’, according to David Hansen, he committed suicide at Circular Head in September.

In 'Poets and Painters’, part of Tasmania’s first international arts festival, Ten Days on the Island , curated by Robyn Archer, Arnold did an etching, The Same Sex, The Same Land, The Same Fate , depicting 'the poetic words, sourced by gay activist Rodney Croome, of a condemned lover’s farewell letter to his male lover. The typeface used by Arnold in printing the “poem” gave it the gravitas of a headstone or page from a sacred text’ (Tasmanian news, Imprint 36/2 (Winter 2001, p17). Arnold was also in the exhibition Response to the Island (Long Gallery, Salamanca Arts Centre 29 March-29 April 2001, with a series of etchings, 'Imaginary Landscape – 18 months in Tasmania’. In 2001, Arnold won the Geelong Print Prize with his etching, Searching for Immortality in the Mountains 2001, acquired for the collection.

Writers:
Staff Writer
Date written:
1996
Last updated:
2007

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