Clive Ryder, Untitled, 2023, acrylic on canvas.

CLIVE RYDER

Local Bellevue resident for over 35 years, Clive Ryder presents his first solo exhibition in MJAC’s Studio 1. Displaying large scale acrylic landscape paintings created on the road from Marble Bar to Port Hedland, Telfer to Newman.

Clive Ryder is a self-taught artist and a Noongar descendant of the Stolen Generation. He captures the quintessential hues and forms of Western Australia, finding a connection to Country through memory, colour and creative practice.

BIO

As a local to Bellevue for 36 years, Clive “George” Ryder raised seven children and nine foster children with his wife, Anne, also born and bred in Midland. Clive is a Noongar Yued Ballardong descendant of the Stolen Generation through his father, a renowned artist in his own right, Cliff Ryder.

A self-taught painter with a practice spanning over 17 years, Clive took up painting to overcome the boredom and offer respite from work in mining and farming across WA, from Marble Bar to Port Hedland, Telfer to Newman. Selecting a minimal palate of five colours and a simple studio, set up impromptu in whatever donga he found himself in, he would “move the bed and tape the canvas to the wall” painting for a couple of hours each night. Clive would then sell work to colleagues, or undertake commissions, and is represented in countless unknown private collections. He has a “no waste” mentality and paints prolifically so as not to waste the paint before it dries, sometimes working on up to four or five paintings at a time.

In 2019 the Lawrence Wilson Gallery of UWA presented the work of his father Cliff Ryder in the group exhibition, Carrolup Revisited: A Journey through the South West of Western Australia. The exhibition highlighted the importance of these artistic expressions painted during the 1940’s and 50s by Noongar Children at Carrolup Native Settlement, as not only records of Noongar customs and life, but as significant contributions stylistically to Aboriginal Art “before the X-ray art of Western Arnhem Land in the 1950s and 1960s, and the acrylic dot paintings of the Papunya artists in the 1970s and 1980s was recognised by the canon of the Western artworld”.

The exhibition was an important acknowledgement of the Noongar community and a reminder of their artistic and cultural heritage.

In much the same way as his father, Clive paints from memory and intuition, continuing the legacy of his father’s artistic expression, and sharing the story of who he is and the journey he is part of across Country.