The following excerpts are from Grishin, S., The Art of John Brack, vol. I, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1990, p. 160:

‘In 1981, at the instigation of his friend Tate Adams, Brack embarked upon a large series of nudes intended to be published as lithographs in an artist’s book by the Lyre Bird Press in Melbourne, which Adams had founded in 1978. In all, seventeen conté drawings were made in 1981 and served as studies for fifteen lithographs printed in 1982 as well as four oil paintings… Taken as a whole, these works are a culmination of Brack’s exploration of the nude since his earliest studies back in the forties. As an introduction to the series, Gordon Thomson wrote:

‘As for meanings, as I see it, these are all about how it is, the human predicament. There is nothing subjective about these observations. One may look in vain for private ciphers, personalised configurations or anything that suggests confession. Brack overlooks neither the delights nor the anxieties. There are always things of elating beauty, but they are always surrounded by restraints. The room is isolation. The space is ample, but not limitless. There are confining walls, at strange angles, and wiry restricting lines, rendezvous promised but evaded. There are always poignant contrasts between soft and hard, the yielding and the implacable. And as the eye slides along delicious arabesques, the shapely voids reveal themselves, we feel some consolation for the harsh juxtaposition of the apparently simple human form with the apparently much more complex design of the mat, and all that such antinomies imply.’¹

1. Thomson, G., ‘Introduction’ in John Brack Nudes: Fifteen original lithographs, Lyre Bird Press, Melbourne, 1982, n. p.