Phyl Waterhouse
Contemporaries at the art school included Sidney Nolan and his first wife, Elizabeth Patterson, Howard Matthews, Joy Hester and her future husband Bert Tucker, and Alannah Coleman.
I had a few months under Bernard Hall who was a head of the art school then, and [he] put steel into my soul, because I'd worked for a long time on the antique sandled foot, the plaster cast of it.
Friends rallied round them on the first day, so that the stairs were far too narrow.’[8]Waterhouse's career was interrupted by World War II during which she took an army civilian job, but she was again showing work in 1945.
After the War, Bush's British Council grant enabled the couple to travel on the Otranto in early 1950 to London, and also to visit Italy, France and Spain to work.
[11] Sculptor John Dowie, Edward and Ursula Hayward, and Ted and Nan Smith were in London together with Bush and Waterhouse, and to economise they shared accommodation in Earls Court.
[14] McCulloch in 1945 associates Waterhouse with Margery Rankin and Eveline Syme,[15] and in 2006 classifies her work as ‘modulated’ post-impressionism, and her main subjects as ‘lyrical depictions of buildings, trees and people’, with partilcular talent in portraiture.
She worked direct from the model first, but not in a 'photographic manner' then, having established their appearance, would continue alone in the studio with her impression of the subject to achieve 'a good painting first and foremost', with a sufficient likeness.
[2] Attracted by its support of individuals without allegiance to a specific school, the couple were affiliated with the Independent Group, amongst Lina Bryans, Edith Alsop, Madge Freeman, Bernard Lawson, Norman Macgeorge, Margaret Pestell, James Quinn, Dora Serle, Eveline Syme, and R. Malcolm Warner, most of whom were post-impressionists and early modernists, and together showed their paintings annually.
[21] Reviewing the Melbourne Contemporary Artists exhibition at the Athenaeum Gallery in October 1945, which was also opened by Mr. Daryl Lindsay, George Bell commented that ‘Phil Waterhouse shapes up seriously with two of her townscapes’.
'[24]In review of the June 1959 group exhibition at Australian Galleries, Bulletin critic Mervyn Skipper, then in the last year of his life, extemporises a colourful comparison of the artists with the bodgie razor gangs of the era to indicate that these 'tortured Van Goghs,' 'flinging pots of paint at canvas and labelling the result “abstraction,”' had discarded all sense of style and craft.
[17] Patrick Hutchings writing in The Bulletin, on the 1961 Perth Art Prize, won that year by John Olson, remarked that Phyl Waterhouse's Queensiand Copper Country, amongst the many abstractions 'redeems the pledge of representative painting.
with a Boydish folded landscape of soft peach and buff, and shares with Henri Bastian's primitive Cooktown the task of reminding us that direct statement is still possible in painting.'.
[25] Writing on her entry in the 1970s Archibald Prize, which included radical works, Elwyn Lynn considered Waterhouse, with partner Bush, as being amongst the 'dedicated, dogged portrait painters.'.
[29] Leveson Street Gallery listed the artists it represented in a 1974 issue of The Bulletin as: Veda Arrowsmith, Charles Bush, Mary Beeston, Dorothy Braund, Italian sculptor Pino Conte, Robert Dickerson, William Drew, Tom Fantl, Sam Fullbrook, Robert Grieve, Nornie Gude, Hans Heysen, Max Hurley, Haughton James, Louis Kahan, Juliana Keats, George Lawrence, Francis Lymbumer, Mary Mac Queen, David Newbury, Helen Ogilvie, L. S. Pendlebury, Arthur Evan Read, Lloyd Rees, Bernhard Rust, William Robinson, Max Sherlock, Julian Smith, Constance Stokes, Dorothy Sutton, Roland Wakelin, Phyl Waterhouse, Douglas Watson and Maxwell Wilks.
'[2] Her sympathies were also with the labour and trade union movements, and she was one of 85 exhibitors who were recruited by Noel Counihan for the 6th May Day Art Exhibition in the Lower Melbourne Town Hall, 13–18 June 1958.
[34] Waterhouse was likewise a ready contributor to charitable causes, of flower arrangements for hospital funds for example; the design of tickets for a 1955 Red Cross 'Carnival Fantasy';[35] murals representing the ancient Greek Olympics for The Olympic Torch Ball, held in St Kilda during the opening night of the Games (held that year in Melbourne) to aid the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children;[36] and donation of works for an Anti-Cancer Campaign.
