Design and Art Australia Online

Painter, illustrator and cartoonist, was born in Sydney on 19 December 1910. He studied part-time at the RAS with Dattilo Rubbo and Sydney Long and at ESTC (where a fellow student was Jack Carington Smith ), at first while working as a commercial artist at Paramount Pictures then as a black-and-white artist on Truth . This was followed by a short stint in advertising after which he freelanced. He contributed to Labour Daily in the 1930s when he was married with a small child. A second child was born during a visit to England in the late 1930s, where he went to study at Westminster School, London, under Bernard Mehninsky and Mark Gertler. Fellow Australian students were John Passmore and Jack Carington Smith. He worked under Arthur Murch on the Australian Wool Pavilion Exhibition in Glasgow, along with Donald Friend , Bill Dobell , Fred Coventry and Rosalind Edkins.

Santry returned to Australia shortly before the outbreak of WWII and joined ACP as a 'creative artist’, doing illustrations and cartoons for the Daily Telegraph and the Australian Women’s Weekly . After an incident when he and the other cartoonists all refused to draw an anti-strike cartoon he decided to resume freelancing, which he combined with part-time teaching at ESTC. { Fifty years says he taught Creative Art at Sydney Technical College.}

He was Hon. Sec. of the Society of Artists when the president was his close friend Douglas Dundas , head teacher at the National Art School, ESTC. Later Santry taught drawing to Architecture students at SU with Lloyd Rees and Roland Wakelin , then at UNSW with Hector Gilliland , John Olsen and Leonard Hessing . He drew the Chesty Bond strip, taught WEA classes in the suburbs, and painted with the Norwood Grou

Santry always combined cartooning and illustrating with painting post-impressionist landscapes and more realist figure studies, mainly of Sydney people and places especially working-class areas like Glebe, Surry Hills, etc. (see cat.) His various appointments and painting prizes are listed in McCulloch. His retrospective in 1985 included pencil drawings of people (mainly studies for paintings) and four undated etchings, all rather Dobellian: Walking the Dog , 1/3, The Chinese Cafe 1/20, The Bath (Mrs Santry and Son) 11/20, and Naomi 7/20. His oil on board Guitarist 1977 was lot 387 in Deutscher-Menzies Australian and International Fine Art Auction on 28-29 August 2002 (est. $400-600).

Writers:

Kerr, Joan

Date written:

1996

Last updated:

2007