Even in his 90s, as he continued to search for new ideas through art, Robert Dickerson admitted that the work didn't become easier over time.
"All painting is a terrible thing, really, if you're really serious about it," he said last year ahead of a new show in Brisbane. "You paint a painting and you think it's marvellous, and lo and behold you go back and see it and it looks lousy." The death of Dickerson on Friday night in Nowra, aged 91, brings to an end the story of one of the -nation's most distinctive creative talents. 
Self-taught and modest, unsentimental and hard-working, Dickerson was a member of the notorious 1959 Antipodeans alongside the likes of Arthur Boyd and Charles Blackman. His paintings were scenes of solitude and contemplation in their stylised, often solemn depictions of the human condition.
He was also a horse racing enthusiast and philanthropist, and spent his final years living on a property on the NSW south coast.
His friend and dealer, Brisbane gallerist Philip Bacon, said Dickerson's death brought "one of the greatest eras of Australian art" to an end.
"Part of the seminal Antipodean movement, his direct and powerful figurative expressionism was immediately recognisable, and it became part of the canon of Australian art from the 1950s onwards," Bacon said.
"The first exhibition in my brand new gallery in 1974 featured Robert Dickerson, and he remained a valued friend, supporter and mentor for the next 40 years. I will miss him." Dickerson was a child of the Depression, working in various jobs while pursuing art on the side and taking part in boxing matches to earn extra cash. He was in his 30s when he decided to pursue painting full time.
He joined the 1959 Antipodean exhibition, staged in opposition to abstraction, but later distanced himself from its objectives.
Deborah Hart, senior curator of Australian paintings and sculptures, post 1920, at the National Gallery of Australia, described Dickerson as one of the nation's most distinctive artists, a man who worked with "great sincerity and unflinching dedication".
"Although he had little encouragement and no formal art training, Dickerson's dedication to being an artist from his teenage years through to his 90s when he was still practising was extraordinary," she said.
OBITUARY P13