Bay

'In "Bay" with its expanse of doom-laden sky ... we are brought face to face with stark uncompromising grandeur: Here is the elemental, the majestical, repellent and at the same time fascinating.' - Frank Dibb, May 1965.

Nolan and Alan Moorehead flew to the American base at McMurdo Sound in mid-January 1964 as guests of Rear Admiral J.R. Reedy, Commander of the U.S. Navy Antarctic Support Force. 'Nolan took a box of watercolours and two hundred blank postcards to record his impressions during the helicopter tour of several research stations including the South Pole. The finished paintings are worked in oil mixed with an alkyd gel medium, instead of the usual linseed oil and turpentine. Sometimes Nolan employed the scraping back technique used previously with P.V.A.. In other passages the paint is as thick and ragged as the savage glacial landscape itself: repellent and absolutely inimical to man. Nolan remembers arriving with a "cliché idea" of the landscape as "rather a flat enormous paddock across which dogs would run"; haunted by the spirits of Shackleton, Scott, Bird and Mawson, of whom he had read as a boy. He found instead "a majestic kind of great continent ... [which] represented a reality stronger than oneself"' (J. Clark, Sidney Nolan, Landscapes & Legends, Cambridge 1987, pp.147-8).

Nolan's Antarctic paintings were begun in earnest after his return to London in late August 1964: 'Nolan temporarily finished with Burke and Wills and began a concentrated effort with Antarctica. Between 27 August and 20 September Nolan produced over sixty paintings. Alongside the four April paintings these works form the core of the series and were produced in a climate of great energy and resolve. He sometimes painted up to seven or eight a day.' (R. James, Sidney Nolan: Antarctic Journey, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery (exhibition catalogue), 2006, p.18). The series of Antarctic pictures was first exhibited by Marlborough in New York and London in 1965 with reprises of the Kelly and Burke and Wills series. As Moorehead underlined in his introduction to the exhibition catalogue, Nolan had found a remarkable parallel to his Central Australian landscapes and explorers in the Antarctic: 'In the Antarctic and in much of Central Australia one finds the similarity of great extremes. Both are dry deserts, the one of ice and the other of rock and sand ... In the cold, as in the heat, there is a rejection of all changes and growth, even of life itself, and it is frightening.' (Sidney Nolan, Recent Work (exhibition catalogue), Marlborough Fine Art, May 1965, pp.4-6).