Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

Left Frank Hinder Expansion 1938 Watercolour on paper 20 X 24cm Purchased 1982 Queensland Art Gallery Frank Hinder Office staff, Canberra, 1942 1946 Lithograph on cream wove paper 20.7x25.7cm Purchased 1975 Queensland Art Gallery Right Frank Hinder Mother and child 1947 Lithograph on cream wove paper 24.6X17.9cm Purchased 1975 Queensland Art Gallery Fountain in Civic Park, Newcastle (1961-66). They assisted each other on commissions for theatre or civic sculpture and both were involved in teaching. In 1950 their house, sited in bushland in the Sydney suburb of Gordon, was designed by the postwar modernist architect Sydney Ancher. Simple, sparsely furnished and integrated with the bushland, the house, like the Hinders' art, remained constant to an ideological position. Both Studio abstract and Diatropic were created in this environment and both have drawn on it for inspiration. Separated from the house by a courtyard, in which Margel often worked on full-scale sculpture commissions, was the studio, represented in Frank Hinder's painting. Here they worked, Frank's side neat and ordered, Margel's overflowing and often noisy with hammering and grinding tools, ft was an atmosphere of doing, of ideas. There were shafts of light, narrow stairs, coming and going, thinking and harmony — the subject of Frank Hinders work. Margel's inspiration was usually from the surrounding environment: 'I might be down in the gully sometime and come up to see the sun shining on the grass — I would try to interpret that in sculptural terms'. Spiderwebs in the corners of the studio inspired her wire constructions, and it was the tangle of vines in the wilderness of the garden that led to Diatropic ,15 The lives of these two artists remained committed to the ideals acquired in their formative years. Humanist values permeated every project they undertook. Both worked with line, space and light — Margel Hinder to articulate sculptural space, Frank Hinder to search for an underlying structure expressive of total harmony. Christine France is a freelance art historian and curator. EN C O U N T ER IN G DYNAM IC SYMMETRY 239