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Boyd's sense of art as a kind of tribal wisdom, an inheritance ceaselessly modified, extended into his dealings with the larger tradition that geography prevented him from joining. He knew the Old Masters only at second hand: reproductions of Bruegel and Bosch, Rembrandt and Tintoretto in the Melbourne Public Library, and in the National Gallery of Victoria some of William Blake's original watercolor illustrations for Dante's Divine Comedy. All this predisposed him to narrative. Sometimes the stories in his paintings are explicit -- illustrations of the Bible, for instance, into which Boyd (like Blake) injected his own obsessions.
The vision of love as vulnerable, menaced by authority, entered his work early -- and was fixed there, apparently, by an alarming moment when the Australian military police burst in on him and his future wife Yvonne after he went AWOL from army camp. It finds its most complete form in Boyd's painting of Adam and Eve, 1947-48, their bodies like a pair of white tubers, embracing in an Eden that is also the Australian bush, while a huge patriarchal angel glares inquisitively at them from behind a tree and a curly horned ram -- the libido in Boyd's iconography -- stares back.
It's difficult for a contemporary American to imagine the lack of information about art that was the common lot of any artist who wanted to be "modern" in Australia a half-century ago. German Expressionism was known only through a pitiful smattering of black-and-white reproductions, messages in a bottle from a Europe that seemed almost inconceivably distant -- 14,000 miles away and shrouded in another kind of cultural space. But when the sources of advanced style are meager, as they were in Australia in the '40s, beautiful deformities can arise -- if there's enough naked psychic pressure behind them to compensate, at least in part, for a thin diet of other art.
Almost from the start, once he had got past his adolescent prewar exercises in Impressionist landscape, Boyd let his fear and yearning run with startling freedom. "Seek those images/ That constitute the Wild": Blake's exhortation was seldom better fulfilled by a young artist than it was by Boyd. In paintings like The Gargoyles, 1944, the Melbourne beach suburb of St. Kilda, where he lived, became a theater of freaks and demonic hybrids, as real in its way as Mikhail Bulgakov's fantastic Moscow, because grounded in memory. Thus the blond cripple in The Gargoyles is a fellow artist who had polio; and one of Boyd's recurrent images, a person walking (or copulating) with an animal like a wheelbarrow, was based on the sight of a woman walking her ancient dog along St. Kilda beach, holding up its paralyzed hind legs. One felt he believed in his images (or at least entertained their possibility) as wholeheartedly as medieval artists believed in imps and sirens.
Boyd would tend, in later life, to work in narrative series. In his homeland, probably the best known of them is a set of paintings mostly from 1957-58, done after visiting the squalid aboriginal encampments in central Australia made for people exiled within their own country and between two cultures. Known as the Love, Marriage and Death of a Half-Caste series, these Chagall-like images may be flawed by sentimentality but they achieve at times a tragic gravity, and are virtually the first effort by a white Australian artist to express the guilt of racism.