User:Richwell888/sandbox

Australian Beach Pattern
Born in England, Charles Meere trained in design and mural painting in London and spent a period studying painting in France in the 1920s. He settled in Sydney in 1932, and during the years of economic depression sought work primarily as a commercial artist. In 1934 he established a commercial art business and taught life classes at the East Sydney Technical College from 1936 while also pursuing his ambition to work as a mural painter.

‘Australian beach pattern’ is Meere’s most celebrated work and a major painting in the iconography of the Australian beach. In the 1930s, the image of the beach-goer had emerged as a new Australian national ‘type’. Figures such as life savers and surfers were identified as akin to a modern breed of classical Greek gods, with strong bodies that were a product of their environment. Meere, who was not a beach-goer himself, had previously used such popular imagery in his commercial poster work.

A celebration of physical culture in the inter-war period, this painting has contributed more than any other towards the myth of the Australian nation as told through the metaphor of the sunbather - young, healthy, sporty and outdoor loving. Yet with its Herculean figures, impeccable formal arrangement and subdued colouring invigorated by brash red accents (a product of Meere’s eye for commercial colour and design), the work’s precision creates a hyper-real atmosphere. It is through such qualities that ‘Australian beach pattern’ has more recently been used to critique the notion of a racial ideal which, as Meere’s painting shows, renders the figures as physically perfect yet ultimately inhuman