Danila Vassilieff

[3] He was captured by the Red Army at Baku in April 1920, but escaped by motorbike[4] and made his way to China via Armenia, Persia, India and Burma.

He travelled to Paris and then on to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil where, in 1930 and 1931, he had his first formal studies in art, under Dimitri Ismailovitch, a specialist in Byzantine mosaics and frescoes.

While living in England, his ideas of using traditional Russian decorative art in a modernist context began to form.

[3] That was helped by his friendship with Vladimir Polunin, a teacher at the Slade School of Fine Art, who had previously a scene painter for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes.

[3] Vassilieff mixed in Melbourne's local Russian émigré and artistic circles, and joined the Contemporary Art Society.

His style began to influence younger artists such as Albert Tucker, Lina Bryans, Joy Hester, Charles Blackman and Sidney Nolan.

[5] He decided to sell Stonygrad and move to South Africa, but fell in love with the purchaser, Elizabeth Orme Hamill, née Sutton, a 31-year-old lecturer and a divorcee.

[3] He and Elizabeth separated in 1954, and he went to Mildura High School as an art teacher, transferring to Swan Hill the following year.

He was a keen fisherman and regularly shared this hobby with the Swan Hill High School principal, Fred Wells.

In his life he expressed the full pathos and loneliness, the violence and tragedy of our human condition ... he was an ikon in the bush, a gift, a mystery that informed us all.