A brief note 

MAC BETTS was born in London, England, in 1932. In 1953 he studied Fine Art at Kingston-on-Thames, and in 1957 he enrolled at Goldsmith’s School of Art at London University. After graduating in 1958 he spent 8 years in Nigeria, painting and lecturing at Ahmudu Bello University. He then travelled and painted for two years in Spain and Morocco.

Mac migrated to Australia and for the next ten or so years was the Senior Lecturer in Painting and Drawing at the Western Institute of Technology, which is now Curtin University.

Mac retired from academia in 1981 and became a full-time painter.  However, he had many solo and group exhibitions in England, Nigeria, and Perth prior to his retirement. He also had at least six one-man shows with Delaney Galleries in the twelve years from 1980 to 1992.

Elywn Lynn on Betts: “Almost every painting by Betts is a wondrous array of technical devices, sometimes so crowded with stunning effects that the grace notes cannot be separated from the central theme.”

Murray Mason:” Betts has produced, in artistic terms, a marriage between the actuality of physical sites and the visual, aesthetic and spiritual reactions to them”.

Betts on Betts: On being asked if it bothered him that he was a landscape painter.  “…the point is that I don’t have any choice, that’s what I do. No one, if they have any integrity really has any choice about what they produce”.

Mac Betts died in tragic circumstances in 2010.