Real Life Portrait

by Roderic Anderson

Overview

Real life Portrait is a literary novel ─ the compelling story of the author's father, Wallace Anderson, a noted Australian sculptor from the 1920s to the 1950s. It focuses on art in war and in peace, following Wallace's struggle to balance family responsibilities and creative fulfillment.

While serving a reluctant apprenticeship in his uncle's engineering works he studied art at night school and became an art teacher before enlisting in the AIF infantry. He rose through the ranks to lieutenant and served on the Western Front before being appointed an Official War Artist, collecting relics and making sketches for dioramas and sculptures which he later worked on in the Australian War Museum studios and he was largely responsible for choosing and arranging the entire World War 1 art and relics collection in the Australian War Memorial.

Some of Wallace's best-known works are Simpson and his Donkey at Melbourne's Shrine of Remembrance, the Ararat War Memorial, the King George V Memorial in Geelong, and busts of the first 14 Australian prime ministers in Ballarat Botanical Gardens.

Part biography, part social history, part military history and part fiction, Real Life Portrait is an insight to the fascinating life of an accomplished artist, respected contributor to Australia's art and military history, war veteran and a devoted husband and father in turbulent times.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940033062249
Publisher:	Roderic Anderson
Publication date:	02/19/2012
Sold by:	Smashwords
Format:	eBook
File size:	613 KB

About the Author

Roderic Anderson's writing career started in Nigeria in 1978, when with Joyce Dafe he wrote a children's story book which Joyce illustrated. It was later published by African Universities Press as Omaka to the Rescue in the same series as books by Chinua Achebe, Cyprian Ekwenzi and Michael Crowder.

AUP also accepted for publishing a series of chemistry text-books he wrote, Understanding Chemistry : a student's book and a teachers' guide for each year, Nine to Eleven, but 'due to the political situation and financial constraints' they have never been printed. He is currently working on the last of a series of books. The first, Trailblazer, a novel based on the lives of his great grandparents, has been published in 2008 by Zeus Publications.

The second, another novel, Real Life Portrait , based on the lives of his parents was published as a hard-back in October 2010 by Big Sky Publishing, and the third, Well of Life, is a memoir up to age 18, The fourth, Free Radical, another memoir up to age 36, he self published in 2006. All of these works are now available as ebooks. Besides writing, reading and listening to chamber music, being a long-term Marxist and socialist, he is interested in TV documentaries and current affairs and regrets that he is too old to participate in the Australian extension of the Arab Spring, hastening the end of capitalism.