Rainy day

Clarice Beckett
Rainy day 1930
oil on canvas on board
Geelong Gallery
Purchased 1973
Photographer: Andrew Curtis

Rainy day is rich in motifs that recur throughout Beckett’s work, and clearly reveals her painting method. The trees that flank either side of a wet road are configured with dark tonal applications of rich green paint to create density and simultaneously ‘close-in’ on the centre of the picture. While empty winding roads are a repeated, psychologically charged subject in many of Beckett’s works, here her solitary, umbrella-covered figure walking by a cart lends pathos and loneliness to Beckett’s quiet visual narrative.

Posts and telegraph poles extend upwards and recede to give the picture a commanding structure, scale, and spatial depth. And as was her habit to revisit and envisage anew her local sites, Beckett returned again to this stretch of road, as we see in a picture of quite different atmosphere and painterly detail in Rainy morning further along this wall.