camel-whale

Nigel Murray-Harvey

Paintings and Prints by ARTHUR WICKS. The Australian Sculpture Gallery, I Finniss Crescent, Narrabundah.
Paintings by LOLA DEM A R.  Macquarie House, 23 Furneaux Street; Forrest.
Batik by FASSET BURNETT and Silver Jewellery by ROSE­MARY GREENWELL and DIANA PRYOR. Narek Craft Gallery, 66
Carnegie Crescent, Narrabundah.
Australian Landscapes by G. D. DAVIS. Nundah Gallery, 4 Mac­arthur Avenue, O'Connor.

THREE Canberra artists are currently showing their work, two working in a colour-field manner, one sticking gamely to what is known as the 'traditional' land­scape approach.

At the Sculpture Gallery Arthur Wicks has a strong show mainly involving directional, dividing and divided wedges, while at Macquarie House Lola de Mar is drawn by fastidiously handled grading and a feeling of space; both are aware of what has been happening lately and are making paintings per se without content nor communication of a literary sort. At Nundah G. D. Davis has captured pieces of landscape with the same enthusiasm and ultimate effect as, the lepidopterist and pinned but fading butterflies.

Arthur Wicks' wedges are sometimes broad suggesting a limited space such as that contained by a coffin, 'Double Light' and 'Afterglow', sometimes made up of a series of increasing or diminishing lines, 'Third Day' and sometimes divided by fissures, 'Between Red and Green' and 'Blue Intrusion' which might also be construed as anatomical somewhat in the manner of 'camel-whale'.
As I have said they are powerful paintings, usually dark in tone, which with their strength communi­cate a feeling of latent, even malevolent force, particularly in 'Green
Thaw' but also in the lighter toned 'Birdman I', which although yellow conveys this feeling through the depth achieved in that colour. Often shaped, so creating a fourth kind of wedge, they employ a hard-edge technique with under-bleeding, pur­posely allowed to happen and remain, they sit just beyond the mechanical and stray towards the human where things are once again happening.
Literary content might be absent but in the silk-screened poems of R. F. Brissenden it is of course evident. The poems and their surrounds donot easily marry, probably due more to the tightness and self-consciousness , of the calligraphy, which makes its own statement, and
intruding betrays the feeling of the poetry. Using type this danger is almost non-existent, but in this case an urgent scrawl would have suited the 'Lec­ture on Ecology' and per­haps an exuberant one the 'Australian Native'.

LOLA DE MAR'S paint­ings divide into those conrned with depth induced by perspective and those with depth achieved by grading, both varieties re­lying on limited analogous colour ranges or the juxta­position of 'singing' colour: Perfectly executed as state­ments which stand for themselves, the titles might be thought of as redundant, although the singing pipes and stripes are probably rather more descriptive than emotive.
The use of line is strongly evident both in crisp hard-edge form and in the soft graded bands. In the large and impressive 'Space Suspension II' the lines are tight and resolved, safe from the role of an­choring floating colour. As a whole it is a collection of optimism, the clean, bright colour masking no brooding nor hesitant depth.

G. D. DAVIS' paintings at Nundah collect and deploy the stipulated quantity of shadows, reflections, unending lengths of calm sky, eucalypts, pop­lars, willows, rivers, hills and the inevitable Ayer's Rock to make a group of paintings which cover about as much new ground as a well-worn piston within the confines of its cylinder. This sort of painting must afford a lot of people a lot of pleasure: to be content to repeat a well-worn formula without reaching for something more must be very relaxing.

THE silver jewellery at the Narek Craft Gallery would appear to be very good value. The batik while remaining batik is well done, but when the craftsman concerned, Fas­set Burnett, tries his hand at something beyond the reach of the basic tech­nique he is immediately in trouble.

 

The Canberra Times November 1970