Dick Watkins won his reputation in Australia in the 1960s with his large-scale, hard-edge color-field paintings. He was probably the first artist to exhibit works in this idiom in Australia, and he became a mainstay of the Central Street Gallery, then a by-word for tough, ambitious avant-garde art. This association extended between 1966 and 1969, and in 1969 Watkins was given a retrospective exhibition at Central Street, the only artist to be accorded such an honor.

Watkins had spent the years 1959-62 in London, where he lived in share-houses in West Hampstead and Ladbroke Grove with other young Australian painters, notably Michael Johnson and Brett Whiteley. All three became the great white hope...