This Review was written by Donald Brook for the annual exhibition at Daramalan College September 1966. In this group exhibition by local Canberra artists I exhibited the silkscreen print Study in Purple.
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Three exhibitions Daramalan 1966
Review by a Donald Brook (exerpt)
The fourth annual exhibition and Daramalan College Friday Saturday and Sunday only 10 AM to 5 pm
EACH year the
Daramalan exhibition looks a little more stylish, and the prices creep a bit higher. Gone, or almost gone, are the days when one could pick up a very striking work (although of a very personal, unprofessional kind) for a guinea or two.
But in spite of that; it is still a good exhibition in which to shop for one's first work of art. Prices generally seem to be based on a modest labourand-materials calculation, and they are for the most part well within reach of an enterprising home-furnisher who can afford only pictures, not reputations. They are not prices that would keep a professional artist alive, but they are high enough now to maintain an amateur's self-esteem and to keep him in paint.
The mixture is much as usual. There is the so called "traditional" paint log (although it is never explained very carefully which tradition is in question, or why rigor mortis set in around 1900) and there is the so-called "experimental" work (although nobody ever collects the results of the experiments or explains what theories they tend to confirm or disprove).
There are, in fact, pictures and sculptures and pots and jewellery to suit every taste except the more recondite and the most exacting; and even a blase buyer accustomed to the world's Bond Streets will pause (at least) in front of Arthur Wicks' serigraph Study in Purple which, surely, is worth every cent of thirty dollars. whether the artist is "bound to appreciate" as they say in the trade, or not.
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The Canberra Times, Thursday, 15 September 1966
