CARTER, MAURICE (1920-1968)

“Folk Singer” (c.1960) 
oil on board
50 x 35cm
signed lower right
*private collection, Melbourne
 
Carter is a forgotten Australian Expressionist & Social Realist. He was based in Boronia, Melbourne. He was a longtime member of the Victorian Artists Society, where he held his first solo shows in 1953, and a pioneering member of the “Melbourne Popular Art Group” alongside Noel Counihan & Ailsa O’Connor. The Melbourne Popular Art Group were a collective of social realist printmakers, known best for their publication “Eureka 1854-1954”, paying homage to the stand of the Ballarat miners in the Eureka Stockade, a series of 14 linocuts produced in 1954. As a social realist, Carter depicted “everyday life of ordinary folk”, & the “shamefully forgotten people” (Indigenous Australians), often showing the struggles of living in Post War Melbourne in the 1940s & 1950s. Carter also had an association with the Heide School of Painters, including the likes of Albert Tucker, Sidney Nolan, John Perceval, Joy Hester and Arthur Boyd. In fact @heidemoma acquired two of his original paintings in 1994 for their permanent collection. Carter was a self-taught painter. He only begun painting in 1945 when he was struck down by rheumatoid arthritis, which left him immobile and bed-ridden. The illness also prevented him from painting with his favoured right hand, so he learned how to paint with his left. He painted lying down with an easel suspended above his head. According to his friend Noel Counihan: “Carter’s indomitable militant spirit, breaking through the physical handicaps imposed by illness and disability, places him high among the company of those creative figures who are in the van of the people’s struggles for peace and freedom… it is true working class act”. According to writer Alan Marshall: “(Carter’s) pictures are a record of life seen richly by a matured and understanding mind. They contain protest, acclaim, indignation, but above all, compassion” (Tribune, 1953).