Daniel Thomas : Newspaper writings

"TELEGRAPH" Sydney, N.S.W. FEW PAINTINGS !HAD REAL MERIT THE Art Gallery of New South Wales's annual endowed prize exhibitions for 1969- the Archibald, Wynne, Sulman and associated prizes - are at the Lower Town Hall, Druitt Street, this year because of the rebuild- , mg program at the 2 Art Gallery. As usual the 200 or so paintings on view (none of the figure sculptures entered for the Wayne is exhibited) are mostly mediocre or commercial - only about 20 have real merit. But as usual there's a lot of nonart enjoy- ment available from the Archibald section, which is for portraiture. Recognise the famous, recognise your friends, note the degree of flat- tery, or vulgarity, or decide that there's been a misrepresentation of character. The prize for flattery would go to Robert Juniper for a portrait of the Perth art dealer Rose Skinner, who is charming and beauti- ful, but not young. She looks about 18 In the portrait and is seated casually and elegantly on the floor The prize for vulgar- ity would go to Jo Caddy for portraits of an Adelaide professor and an Adelaide priest, both large -scaled and turbulent, the professor as a revolutionary, the priest as a hard drinker. Several subjects ap- pear more than once. Kenneth Jaek, a Mel- bourne palm _at*, appears in versions by Mary Courier (quite nice) and by Donald Cameron, and you wouldn't know they were the same person. Likeness is a problem for Charles Billich, whose Mungo McCal- lum I didn't recognise, and for Michael Kmit, whose Wallace Thorn- ton wears a bald -top, tuft -sided clown-wig and a chunky necklace. There are four very interesting portraits, and as always the best ones are of fellow art- ists, people whose char- acter a painter can penetrate better than businessmen, politicians, or bishops. Ray Crooke, who won with a portrait of the writer George John- ston, perhaps has an idea of putting his figure into a time - machine, hoarding memory and past ex- perience, a figure Darr - in its own space. its autumn brown world with it. The other three are flatter and thus more like pictures in today's terms. John Brack paints Barry Humphries as Mrs. Everage, in (took- , beaked squatting profile, colored lurid gladioli and linoleum pink and green. Andrew Sibley paints John Brack, with a re- > ART with Daniel Thomas ference to Brack's own hard - outline style, standing uprig h,t frontal, and a little tor- tured. Sam P'ullbrook paints Kenneth Pirrie, a Mel- bourne clothes designer, also simple, upright, and frontal, and with extra emphasis on careful cuff and color to symbolise the buttoned up role, but it goes beyond this to become a beautiful surface, relaxed in handling, rich in color and in soft, airy space. Unlike the Archibald, the Wynne and the Sulman are not quite as they always used to be. Ten years ago the better younger artists were often landscape abstractionists, and they could make the Wynne look very strong (for it is only they who can help a competition look good; the better older artists don't often enter competitions). There's no longer much abstract land- scape being done, though the Wynne winner, John Olsen, has an outstanding picture in that style that often gave the exhibition strength, although never winning in the 'sixties. John Firth -Smith's astract landscape is as assured, dignified and cheerful as Olsen's There is a typically fine Michael Shannon, a pleasant naive paint- ing by Lorna Chick, and watercolors by Brian Dunlop, Weaver Haw- kins, Frank McNamara (Trustees Watercolor Prize) and Nornie Gude (Pring Prize, for a watercolor by a woman). It is the Seidman which now gives some opportunity for the young in the way the Wynne used to. Its sub- ject is vague. It is for "a subject painting," an idealised or dramatised subject, originally in- tended for a figure com- position, but now ac- ceptable in abstraction. Weaver Hawkins and Michael Kmit keep to the old figure -composi- tion Inter p retation, Robert Williams gives it a morbid modern twist, but Andrew Nott and I Tim Johnson, two very promtsing young artists, feel free to offer their own speculations about spaces and objects and relationships as modern "subject painting". The winner, Louis James's "Spy -hole" is an excellent example of his familiar abstrac- tions on the quality of urban life.