SANTRY, TERENCE JOHN (1910-1990)

"Reclining Nude" (c.1950)
oil on board
25 x 40cm
signed lower right
*private collection, Hunters Hill
 
Santry was a respected Australian Modernist. He studied at the Royal Art Society under Dattilo Rubbo and Sydney Long and at East Sydney Technical College. He subsequently became a commercial artist at Paramount Pictures before becoming a black-and-white artist on Truth . He went to study at Westminster School, London, under Bernard Mehninsky and Mark Gertler. He shared a studio with William Dobell, Donald Friend and Arthur Murch. Other Australian fellow students included John Passmore and *Jack Carington Smith who once called him 'the outstanding draughtsman of our era’. While in the UK he worked under Arthur Murch on the Australian Wool Pavilion Exhibition in Glasgow, along with Donald Friend , William Dobell , Fred Coventry and Rosalind Edkins. Santry returned to Australia shortly before the outbreak of WWII and joined Australian Consolidated Press as a 'creative artist’, drawing 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 East Sydney Technical College. He was honorary secretary of the Society of Artists, which prided itself on representing professional artists and illustrators of a progressive bent. The president was his close friend Douglas Dundas who was head teacher at the National Art School, East Sydney Technical College. Santry taught drawing to Architecture students at Sydney University with Lloyd Rees and Roland Wakelin , then at University of New South Wales with Hector Gilliland , John Olsen and Leonard Hessing . He was the artist for the popular Chesty Bond strip and at night taught WEA classes in the suburbs.After the War he joined with Lloyd Rees, Roland Wakelin and others to paint around the lower north shores of Sydney Harbour, forming a collective they called the Norwood Group. In the 1950s a young discontented boy, Brett Whiteley, tagged along with the older men, absorbing their knowledge. Santry remembered the young man as 'a nice boy,very talented’. His work is represented at many important institutions including the AGNSW, NGV & QAGOMA.