ROBERT DICKERSON

In the 1950s, art patron John Reed told Dickerson that he was “pierced by a new sense of beauty, a new truth” in Dickerson's work. Today, Frances Lindsay, the deputy director of the National Gallery of Victoria, says Dickerson, Ray Crooke and Charles Blackman, who belong to a generation that includes James Gleeson, Margaret Olley and Inge King, “continue to be productive and innovative after many decades of practice as leading Australian artists”.

Dickerson remembers drawing from the age of five. Like all little boys he liked aeroplanes and warships, and that's what he drew. Later, people and streetscapes became his subject matter. When war was declared, he joined the RAAF as a guard and sketched any spare time he had. It took him almost a year to be demobbed from Morotai (a Dutch island now part of Malaysia). During this time he read Somerset Maugham's novel, The Moon and Sixpence, which, inspired by the life of Paul Gauguin, centres on a London stockbroker who abandons his professional life to become a painter. He recalls thinking “what a great idea” and spent the next year painting the island's children - using tent canvas and camouflage paint.

But this period was an aberration and when he returned to Australia he returned to his life of poverty. By 30, he was married with three small children and shovelling coal to make ends meet. “For many years I never thought I'd earn a living from painting, so I just got things down for my own satisfaction,” he says.

So what was the turning point for this eccentric, blue-collar worker with no formal art training who turned professional painter when he was 35, Dickerson pinpoints a 1957 Australian Women's Weekly competition in which artists were invited to decorate a Kelvinator refrigerator. Dickerson picked up 100 pounds. “That was a fortune then and meant I could buy more art materials and extend my painting techniques.”

By the mid-'60s, Dickerson had remarried, and had two more children. In 1968, he separated from his second wife and later moved to Brisbane, and travelled - and exhibited - intermittently in London. He returned to Sydney, then to Nowra, in New South Wales.

He has, he says, always used everything around him as a springboard for his work. “You've got to go your own way, do what you want to do, believe in yourself. I hope I live forever. There are so many talented people; you have to have a go and keep going, or it's a waste.”

His work is represented in all major metropolitan and important regional collections in Australia.