Teeming with Life The Wongaloo Project

Pamela has also had one woman shows at Bundaberg Regional Gallery and at Fairfield City Gallery (curated by director Gavin Fry). The work she did on the Lord Howe Island Suite was featured by the Riverina Regional Gallery in 2006.

The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet commissioned Pamela to produce one of three iconic images of Australia for inclusion in a folio presented to the 21 Heads of Nations attending APEC 2007 in Sydney, as a gift from the people of Australia. The limited edition of her book “Australia - an artist’s journey through the landscape” was also presented to the Economic Heads of the 21 member nations of APEC.

Pamela’s main vocation is in the creation of original works of art in the traditional mediums of oil and acrylic painting, and in limited edition prints. Over the past 40 years she has produced over 400 editions of etchings and lithographs, capitalizing on her undoubted talent as a draughtswoman. She currently also produces some 20 to 30 major paintings each year, principally in oils, but including acrylics, water-colours and pastels where the subject is better suited to those media. Her subject matter ranges across still life, landscape (often with an environmental theme) and portraiture. Griffith has work in private and public collections throughout the world.

A dispassionate examination of Pamela Griffith’s total oeuvre, the art made during her long and productive career, has to rank her as one of our country’s quiet achievers. Perc Tucker Regional Gallery is fortunate to hold a magnificent collection of her etchings that show the intense colours of the Great Barrier Reef, teeming with life, black swans, brolgas, cockatoos and other birds unique to the Australian bush. This collection is echoed by other public collections of her work, notably in the National Gallery of Australia and the National Library.

The best way of describing Griffith’s work is as an artist committed to both recording and celebrating the fragile beauty of the earth. In this quest she has roamed far, from the Great Barrier Reef, Lord Howe Island and away from Australia to the Galapagos Islands with their abundant sea life, to New South Wales’ fecund Macquarie Marshes and the intense wild beauty of Kakadu. She has a rare ability to capture in detail the fleeting moments of nature, looking always for the slightly quirky moment in her studies of birds, turtles, lizards and other natural life. Some of her bird and animal works are surprisingly intimate, others capture nature in majestic full flight.

I first came to know of Pamela Griffith’s art many years ago, initially through her etchings, which have to be some of Australia’s technically most perfect works made in this challenging medium. Birds, flowers, fish, land and sea are rendered in exquisite small scale. She demonstrates a virtuoso control of the line bitten into copper, transformed into graduated forms by a controlled use of resin, all done with carefully controlled acid baths. The final result is even more magically printed in a multitude of colours. Her prints demonstrate the sensuality of softground, the subtle shades and clear tones of aquatint, and the modelling of embossed forms as she shapes the paper to her purpose. Griffith first studied etching in the 1960s under two of the seminal figures in the revival of etching in Australia, David Strachan and Earle Backen, and it is fair to say that she still works within the same Sydney tradition that values fine drawing, an acute sense of colour and the evocation of a magical reality.

The difference between their work and hers is subject matter as Griffith has always concentrated on celebrating natural life. She relishes painting both the tranquility of animals grazing on the plain in front of the Mt Elliot range or recording the whimsy of a barramundi confronting an eel under the sea.