Norma Morton wrote the introduction to Take a Boyd or Two - the birth of a gallery memoir by Joyce Pepper, in 2003. Joyce, my grandmother writes about the early days of the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery in her book, including recollections of the second Exhibition ‘Through-the-Generations - Boyd Family ’ in 1970, which showed Arthur Boyd’s Girl in Wimmera Landscape’ and John Perceval’s ‘Ducks on Regent Park Canal’. These were significant times for Australian Art, as Alan McCulloch had just published his resource The Encyclopedia of Australian Art which started as a scrapbook of cuttings kept since the 1940s. Joyce and my grandfather Ivan worked closely along side Alan as committee members and artists/crafts-people.
In part….
“Joyce Marie Smith, who wished her name was Georgina, lived her young life in the Eltham district among an incredible wealth of writers, artists and craftsmen. The lives and works of many of these people have become part of the wider history of Australian art and Literature. ……
An appreciation of the vitality the artists, writers and poets had given to the life of the Eltham district came with Joyce to her new home in Mornington in the seventies and it was not long before she met Betty Meagher while assisting at the MPAC exhibition and joined the staff of Manyung Gallery in Mount Eliza….and spent most of her salary on the work of exhibitors there !”
“Paintings by Ulrich Staff, Lucy Boyd, Don Vidler, Joy Peck and Piers Bateman, a pottery goat and large Bacchanalian jug and goblets by Hatton Beck, mandala by Ted Moran, large tile and bowls by Lucy Boyd make up part of Joyce’s collection from the Manyung years”.
Threads of life stories from Joyce my grandmother and Norma my aunt, live on through family, self published books, the art collected, diaries and their own works of art. Lesley Mitchell my mother, holds many of the stories and interests, and together we enjoy evoking this shared love of the Arts together and within younger family members.
Norma - Postscript
“ The gallery is reality now on park lands outside the town of Mornington, an imposing and well-used monument to many a lovely people we worked with. Our first Director, the gentle Alan McCulloch, has died, as has Betty Meagher and so many of the initial workers, including my father Ivan Pepper, who did much of the structural renovating of the initial gallery in Vancouver Street…..”
Occasionally I have visual conversations with my grandmother’s paintings… looking to see how she achieved certain tonal values in her landscapes or perspective in her life drawings. Looking to understand what she may have been aiming to solve, sometimes hearing her patient dialogue persisting to a resolved point of joy.
