EXHIBITION OF PRINTS AND SCULPTURES b y Arthur Wicks, and Prints by Eleven Japanese Artists. Australian Sculpture Gallery, 1 Finnis Crescent, Narrabundah.

SILKSCREENING is usually a most un­hand-done system of producing prints.
Arthur Wicks uses it in a non - hand - done manner.
He produces flat areas of colour with crisp edges, even, arrangements of dots; in one print he incorporates a blow-up of a half­tone photo reproduction. Not the sort of stuff to delight followers of the hand-done print.
But Wicks seems to make most of his prints at home with moderately limited equipment. Beneath the bland machine-made exterior are signs, here and there, of the human touch and of human error. The slight streaking of a colour, imperfect edges and so on.
Economic limitations are, I suspect, the main reason for this degree of deviation, from the `perfect, mechanically produced product. It is difficult to imagine a critic attacking an artist because his work reveals that he does not have unlimited resources to spend on its production.
Art quite clearly reflects and is influenced by technological developments.
But sociologically the artist stands, at present anyway, outside the circle of the machine and technology. Because of the kind of training an artist receives he is usually ignorant of technologically advanced processes and systems. He seldom finds the money to be able to investigate and experiment with brilliant, complex machines.
Painters are safe
The motion picture has been supposed from time to time over the last half century to put an end to easel painting as well as the novel. Expense has so far, however, limited the number of people who are able to experiment with it, and judging from the qual­ity of shoestring cost movies produced in Austra­lia easel painters are safe for some time to come.
Finance limits the direct effect of technology on the forms of art, so Arthur Wicks, being under-mechanised, retains certain hand-done qualities though these do not appear in­tended.
His sculptures, there are three of them. none of which I like very much, all seem to suffer from a lack of money for materials. It costs a lot to produce art these days.
Back to the prints. It does not worry me very much, hardly at all in fact, that there are few signs of them being hand done. They are, I think, very good; 12 screen prints and two etchings. For each screen print, Wicks appears to have pegged out an area for investigation and, in a number, the invention involved in their making is quite brilliant.
A number of pieces re­work ground that has already proved over-produc­tive. 'Pink Gothic' for instance seems good of its kind but of fairly limited interest; it involves a game, variations of which have already been heavily worked.
‘Homage to a Bullet' is again good but of its kind not surprising. `Assassination' however is very good indeed, inventive, involving disparate elements that he has managed through that ruleless thing, placement, to rest within the frame.
A number of these prints display a fine control of depth and juxtaposition of colour, thinned pinks and greys and, in 'Siesta', an extraordinarily bold use of a rainbow of primary col­our, a pink fleshy shape and a large area of green.
Arthur Wicks, it seems to me, gets better and better.

The Japanese prints at the same gallery do not look to be the finest of their type. `Epitaph E' by Hiroyuki Tajima, like a surface of rusted iron, is the best print in the group.
Deserve to be seen the subtlety of surface and the form-image inven­tion seen in the work of Hagiwaru (not represented) give way here to a rather forced play.
Though leaving a lot to be desired, these prints de­serve to be seen by people interested in developing a knowledge of how prints are made and what can be done with the process.

Robin Wallace-Crabbe. Published the Canberra Times Tuesday, 15 April 1969