Nolan’s distinctive artistic imagery and vision are deeply rooted in his boyhood in St Kilda. A famous painting completed while he was living in St Kilda is Boy and the Moon – commonly known as Moonboy – a simple, luminous head-shaped moon, painted against an inky blue-green sky. The title of the painting refers to what Sidney Nolan says was the initial impulse for the work: the sight of a friend’s head silhouetted against a full moon-rise over St Kilda. By conflating these two images Nolan has created a simple and memorable painting that negotiates the territory between representation and abstraction. When Boy and the moon was first exhibited in 1940, the extreme simplicity of its composition challenged conventional ideas about painting and polarised the debate about modernism (ref. National Gallery of Australia).

Summary of submitter’s request: It is easy to see how Nolan’s Ned Kelly iconography developed from this work – Kelly’s iconic black, square, eye-slotted head not far removed from the elemental geometry of the Moonboy. The Moonboy image relates directly to Nolan’s emergence as an artist in St Kilda. It is tempting to see in it an autobiographical link with his own remembered past as a boy in Pakington Street. Though at first obscure, the word Moonboy invites curiosity, and a sense of enchantment. Once its secret is known, the name connects Nolan uniquely, directly and evocatively to the place. A local curiosity to be ‘discovered’, and, from then on, not forgotten.