Vale - Brenda Humble (1933-2011)

Brenda Humble c.1958

Brenda Humble 

Figure 19 1994

Oil on canvasboard

17.5 x 12.5cm

no.7136

 Brenda Humble (1933-2001) The face of the people

Brenda Humble graduated from the from the National Art School with a Diploma of Painting in 1960. As an artist she was continually fascinated by faces.  In 1982 she was awarded the Portia Geach Memorial Prize for her portrait of Virginia Hall and the walls of her home and studio were filled with the brightly coloured likenesses of friends and neighbours. 

As an activist she was the face of the people. As Community Development Officer for the inner Sydney Regional Council for Social Development, Brenda was the face of activism for the thousands of faceless residents in the inner Sydney suburbs of Redfern, Woolloomooloo, Surry Hills and King Cross  whose homes were threatened and in some instances completely taken from them by the ivory tower social engineers of the 1970s.

In conjunction with the Brenda Humble Estate, "Brenda Humble: The face of the people" celebrates Brenda's life with an exhibition of 50 exquisite small drawings of faces on card sourced from her Redfern studio where she lived and painted for thirty years. Often working in a variety of mediums we see in each drawing Humble studying the faces of the broken hearted, the perplexed , the attentive, the bashful, the smug, the sleepy, the sickly, the cute and myriad other individual faces from the community for which she fought so hard and loved so much. Deceptively simple, these drawings show Humble's mastery of the subject and her unique brand of humanism with which each face is brought to life.       

Brenda Humble is Represented in Artbank Collection, Sydney; New Parliament House, Canberra; Reserve Bank of Australia Collection; University of NSW; IBM Collection, Sydney; Mackay City Library, Queensland as well as private and corporate collections in Australia, Canada, Japan, the UK and the USA. 

http://www.evabreuerartdealer.com.au/humble.html