The message is loud and clear. When the Eight of Wands appears in a tarot reading, it provides a cosmic signal from the universe that everything is about to get moving and FAST! After years lying in a barn in obscurity word of Clarice Beckett’s outstanding art work is gaining momentum and a life of its own.
The Eight of Wands tarot card holds a powerful message of swift action, rapid progression, and forward momentum. It urges us to seize opportunities and anticipate swift outcomes. Like rockets soaring through the sky, our desires are quickly moving from the realm of imagination to the realm of tangible existence.
Clarice Beckett was born in 1887 in Casterton in regional Victoria. Today she is recognised as one of Australia’s most important painters of the interwar period, yet her contribution was almost completely lost to art history. Many of Beckett’s paintings were either destroyed or damaged after her premature death in 1935 from pneumonia which she contracted while painting in the rain near her seaside home at Beaumaris, Melbourne.
“To give a sincere and truthful representation of a portion of the beauty of Nature, and to show the charm of light and shade, which I try to give forth in correct tones so as to give as nearly as possible an exact illusion of reality
Clarice Beckett, 1923
Beckett depicted everyday views of her local environment including transient subjects such as moving cars, trams, lone figures, waves and shadows. Her misty paintings of modern Melbourne in the 1920s and 1930s captured the outdoors, including sea and beachscapes, and suburban street scenes, that often recorded the shifting effects of light– either in the quiet, early morning or in the stillness of the evening.
Her paintings of the local environment possess a sense of timelessness. No prior knowledge is required to appreciate Beckett’s paintings, anyone who has engaged with the outside world can relate to and experience a connection to these subtle and silent paintings of nature.
Australian artist Clarice Beckett received very little recognition during her lifetime and re-emerged from obscurity when thousands of her works were discovered in country Victoria. She is now considered one of Australia’s leading female artists of the early twentieth century.
NGV Australia
The reputation of this modernist painter has been successfully revived thanks largely to the lifelong work of art historian Dr Rosalind Hollindrake. But a biographer’s work is never done. Now aged 86 and the only person to interview those who knew Beckett, Rosalind is still uncovering things about the elusive, brilliant artist, lauded as the greatest female Australian artist we ever knew.
Waltzing With Matilda's 