DALGARNO, ROY (1910-2001)

"The Miner" (1946)
oil on board
105 x 75cm
signed lower right
*exhibited at Studio Of Realist Art (SORA) in Sydney, 1946
*private collection, Sydney
 
Dalgarno was a leading Australian Social Realist. He was educated at Ballarat Grammar School. From 1926 to 1930 he attended National Gallery Art School in Melbourne, where he met social realists Noel Counihan and Herbert McClintock. He then attended the Academy of Art under Dattilo Rubbo from 1930 to 1932. From 1932 to 1934 he attended East Sydney Technical College Painting & Drawing. Later, between 1951 & 1953 he was at Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, including in 1951–52 William Hayter's Atelier 17 (etching). In 1980 he studied etching & collography at the Pratt Graphic Centre, New York.
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He joined the C*mmunist Party of Australia in the 1930s but, according to art historian Bernard Smith, his bohemian temperament was incompatible with party puritanism. He left the party in 1949. In the late 1930s he travelled to the canefields of North Queensland, where he concentrated on his painting.
He co-founded the Studio of Realist Art (SORA) Sydney in 1945. From 1947-49 he worked as lecturer at the East Sydney Technical College. After studying in Paris, he moved to India, where he co-founded Editions Anarkali, publisher of fine arts in Bombay, while being employed as a visiting lecturer in lithography at the School of Fine Arts. In 1953 he won the First Prize for Diploma Students, lithography, at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Paris. In 1965 he won first prize at the Mahasartra State (India) exhibition. In 1975 he moved to Auckland, New Zealand, where he worked as a lecturer in drawing & composition at the Auckland Society of Arts.
 
This impressive oil, completed as part of a series of commissioned works completed for the Zinc Corporation in Broken Hill, was exhibited at the Broken Hill Technical College, then the groundbreaking Studio Of Realist Art (SORA) in Sydney in 1946. The work was given special mention in the Tribune & Barrier Daily Truth newspapers!!