Cultural leader Max Angus turns 100 … still dreaming of a lake

Tasmanian watercolour painter Max Angus turns 100 years old today.

I was privileged to meet Max in 2005 while I was beginning to think about my first book,

Pedder Dreaming – Olegas Truchanas and a Lost Tasmanian Wilderness
(UQP, 2011). Max was one of a group of Tasmanian watercolour artists who worked with explorer, photographer and post-World War II Lithuanian emigre Olegas Truchanas to try to save Lake Pedder – a glacial lake with pink sand in Tasmania’s remote south-west – from inundation by a hydro-electric scheme in the early 1970s.

Here are some words from Max from my first interview with him. They didn’t all make it into the book.

I think it was once said, the greatest thing about a work of art is that which cannot be put into words. I’d say the same about Olegas. You can’t put it into words any more than I have done there – the incorruptible man, who passes into legend. I think if you take the Australian as a type – the Anglosaxon or Celtic Australian – he’s always outside. Olegas was inside.

…

Olegas [said] to me one day, ‘Max, I want you to do me a painting of Lake Pedder – I want a dream of Pedder – anybody can take a photograph, but an artist can give me a dream of Pedder.’ So I did it, and gave it to him. And he wanted to pay for it and I said, ‘No, you are Lake Pedder for us,’ and he said, ‘Well then I will take your painting, gratefully, because that is your work, but I must pay for the frame.’ He said, ‘I am not what Australians call a bludger – I must pay for the frame.’ That was Olegas.

…

‘I want to paint some dreams of the Derwent, and Hobart, and Mount Wellington. I’ve already done a fair bit of that in watercolours. And of course I’m still painting Lake Pedder. As it was …’

… and he still is.

On Friday 31 October at 17h, a new exhibition of works by Max Angus and his lifelong painting collaborator Patricia Giles opens at Colville Gallery, Hobart.

Copies of Pedder Dreaming will also be available.