Victor Rubin has been the ‘enfant terrible’ of the Australian Art world for over four decades. He is a non-conformist, a radical thinker and a genuine artistic genius. As Rubin’s childhood of the 50s faded into the turbulence of his teenage years he grounded himself in painting, drawing, poetry and music from folk to Stockhausan, Rauchenberg to Cage, Elliot to Dylan.

Ken Unsworth, his art teacher at VBH School, told him ‘if all my students where like you I wouldn’t be leaving’ 1964/5. By the end of 1967, at 17, Jean Stuart recommended he enroll at John Olsen Bakery Art School. There he was also tutored by Bill Rose and Janet Dawson, meeting Aspen, Friend and Powditch. In 2002 from owls wood, Olsen wrote ‘At my Bakery Art School, Victor had an immense capacity for work - sheets of paper falling into parcels below his easel, paint trickling everywhere was his signature. A delight for me to see where in art nothing is so sweet as young youth’s dreams’.

In 1969 he won a teachers college scholarship, in 1971, in his second year at East Sydney Technical College he dared to show his work at the radical Yellow House venue on Macleay St Potts Point. Carole Symonds reviewed the show in the Sydney Jewish times December 1971 saying he ‘Is an example of a raw, evolving nucleus of creativity.’

In 1974 he held a solo show at the then prestigious Macquarie Galleries. Ellien Channon lived on the same floor of a block of flats overlooking Cooper Park where he lived and painted – of which Bruce Adams (Feb Herald 1974) wrote ‘The Macquarie Galleries, usually given over to 1920s decorative charm and sedate pencil studies by equally sedate women artists, has been dealt a mighty and timely blow by a certain Victor Rubin’ concluding ‘I hope the gallery will indulge in artists of this breed more often.’ Amongst the people who bought work from this show was the Australian writer Patrick White. The unseen paintings have been selected from this period - like a good wine they have been in storage over the decades and have to be appreciated for their age, terrain and body of insights into the human condition. Rubin remains a unique breed and one has to engage in looking to appreciate the genius on offer.