Clifton Pugh - "Wetlands with Blue Bird" in COODANUP, Western Australia for sale

Make me an offer...what do you think this piece of art is worth. This bloke is one of Australia's greatest atists.
Clifton Pugh
Wetlands with Blue Bird, 1963, Oil on Board
Art 68cm x 90cm; Frame 85cm x 108cm - Newly Framed.
Born in Melbourne in 1924, Clifton Pugh studied at the Melbourne National Gallery under William Dargie from 1947 to 1950. He spent the next four years in the bush; in a house he built himself some fifty kilometres from Melbourne. As Pugh established himself as a painter he was much in demand as a portraitist. He developed an independent style of portraiture based on informality and empathy with his subject.
Pugh was a member of “The Antipodeans”, who maintained an expressive edge to their art. The personal statement remained important to them, as Clifton Pugh’s angular and more violent views of the landscape made clear. A passionate environmentalist, he saw the bush, and bushlife threatened by urbanism, its effects ironically demonstrated in “Wetlands with Blue Bird” which highlights the influence of Dieback in a natural swamp environment.
Pugh in his landscapes approaches some of the abstract manners and styles of the day. He once remarked that a hidden influence behind his paintings of the period was the early influence of Wassily Kandinsky of “disguised symbols”. Pughs’ attacks on the surface have much in common with the aspects of the all-over quality of American Abstract Expressionism. There is an absurd distinction between abstract and figurative painting.
(Paraphrased from Patrick McCaughey; “Strange Country: Why Australian Painting Counts.” 2014
His skill as a portrait painter is underlined by the fact that he won the Archibald Prize in 1965, in 1971 and again in 1972 with his portrait of Gough Whitlam. This portrait hangs in Parliament House.
Clifton Pugh died in 1990.
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