Jeff Rigby was born in Australia in 1948. A painter and printmaker with a quiet but consistent commitment to the Australian landscape, he worked within a realist tradition that valued close observation, honest craft, and a genuine feeling for the particular qualities of place. Known for his meticulous, atmospheric landscapes and urban scenes across New South Wales, his work was drawn especially to historical and industrial architecture — the structures that speak most directly of how Australians have worked and lived on the land.
His two prints produced in collaboration with Fred Genis at the Kenthurst studio capture two of Australia’s most distinctive regional landscapes. Barossa Landscape (1981) turns its attention to South Australia’s famous wine country — the rolling hills and particular golden light of the Barossa rendered with economy and precision. Cowra Silo (1982) takes as its subject one of the great vernacular structures of rural Australia — the grain silo rising from the flat plains of inland New South Wales with an almost architectural grandeur. That Rigby chose such an unassuming subject and treated it with such seriousness is characteristic of the best Australian realist tradition — finding the monumental in the ordinary.
Jeff Rigby died in August 2012 at the age of 64.
