Public Works: Guy Warren

A CHANCE encounter with David Attenborough in London in the early 1950s changed the direction of Guy Warren's career.

A CHANCE encounter with David Attenborough in London in the early 1950s changed the direction of Guy Warren's career.

 Warren had moved from Sydney to London after he won the Mosman Art Prize in 1950, but when he arrived he found himself at an artistic low point. He didn't want to paint London's city scenes and he couldn't relate to the manicured and tamed vistas of British and European landscapes.

However, in 1952 he happened to watch a BBC television documentary on Papua New Guinea made by Attenborough, who was then a young, little-known filmmaker. Energised after watching the documentary, Warren contacted the BBC and was put in touch with Attenborough, who lent him some black-and-white production stills.

Using Attenborough's photographs of PNG as source material, Warren suddenly knew what he wanted to paint. He tapped into his memories of Bougainville in PNG, where he had been stationed as a soldier during World War II. The photographs brought PNG and its untamed landscape back to him as subjects that would be seminal to his work.

Warren has always pointed to the Mosman Art Prize and the 50 guineas he received as its winner as being one of the turning points of his career because it gave him the means to travel to London. His prize-winning oil painting from 1950, Valley of the Albert, Queensland, is on display at the Mosman Art Gallery, alongside this year's Mosman Art Prize finalists.

"The Mosman Art Prize is Australia's oldest municipal art prize and winning it was a significant achievement because it gave Warren the confidence to pursue painting full time," curator Katrina Cashman tells me when I visit the gallery on Sydney's north shore.

The win came at an important time for Warren. Born in 1921 in Goulburn, NSW, he left school at 14 to pursue his love of art. He worked in Sydney at The Bulletin magazine and started formal art training part time at the J.S. Watkins Art School. Following his World War II service on Bougainville, he trained at East Sydney Technical College (now the National Art School) under the commonwealth government's rehabilitation scheme.

Just after completing his art training, he painted Valley of the Albert, Queensland, which facilitated the move to London in 1951. After his return to Sydney in December 1959, Warren continued to exhibit while also working as an advertising executive and then arts educator. He won the Archibald Prize in 1985 with his portrait of artist, friend and neighbour Bert Flugelman.

Valley of the Albert, Queensland is one of Cashman's favourite paintings in the Mosman Art Collection. "Painted in a palette of high key colour with short fractured brushstrokes, the image has a sense of freshness and vitality, as if filled with post-war optimism," she says.

Cashman believes Valley of the Albert, Queensland is one of Warren's first paintings to articulate what would later become the enduring themes within his practice; his acute sensitivity to his immediate physical surroundings and his concern with landscape and the interdependence of the natural world and the human presence.

"Warren's immersion in the wild and rugged rainforests of Canungra, Queensland, and Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, in World War II proved to be seminal and life-changing experiences [that] ignited his intense fascination for untamed landscapes," she says. "This has been an important influence on his art practice throughout his life and career."

The 2011 Mosman Art Prize is on display at the Mosman Art Gallery until September 4. It includes this year's winner of the $30,000 prize, Kerrie Lester's painting Out on a Limb, and Guy Maestri's highly commended landscape, Robertson #V.

• Guy Warren, Valley of the Albert, Queensland 1950, Mosman Art Collection. On display, Mosman Art Gallery, Sydney, until September 4.