National Gallery of Australia | Audio Tour | Home Sweet Home

PF: I was very fortunate to meet Rosalie. I met Rosalie at a time when I had left teaching and was starting to make work myself, and had struggled with painting, which I was not happy with, and it wasn’t right for me. And I met Rosalie and we just hit it off so well, and she immediately invited me down to her house, and to her studio, and this became a regular monthly event, and I used to really look forward to it, and I’d even take my own fledgling works down there, and Rosalie would give me a very severe but very wonderful crit., about work, and about what I was doing, and enormous encouragement, and it was as a result of seeing this piece, Down to the silver sea, which had been done in sort of a reverence or a sort of homage to James Mollison, reflecting the piece by Braque that the Gallery had tried to buy. But after the brouhaha of the Blue poles purchase there was an embargo on certain works over a certain value, and this work which Mollison desperately wanted for the Gallery; Grand Nu by Braque, was