Daniel Thomas : Newspaper writings

"TELEGRAPH" Sydney, N.S.W. '15 MAR 1970 Art with Daniel Thomas, A VISIT TO THE FESTIVAL THERE'S a festival on in Melbourne as well as Adelaide, but you'd hardly know that Moomba was there if it weren't for the kiddy-toy decorations suspended above Collins Street. Ostoja-Kotkowski's street bimners in Adelaide are properly festive, bright, and big, and they do build to a climax in that city's central square when Mel- bourne's decorat:ons Just dissipate. Adelaide's art exhibitions aren't too easy to see. If you've only got u weekend the first plane in doesn't land till 10.30, and the best exhibition is in a depart- ment store which closes at 11.90. This is 23 smallish paint- ings of 1942-44 done by Sidney Nolan when he was a young soldier guarding food in Victoria's wheat belt. Half a dozen of them were seen in the retro- spective exhibition held three years ago, but this larger group tells us more. For example, there are schoolgirls, more frightened of their day's work than Blackman's, but oddly pro- phetic of the other painter. There are several dis- tinctly jagged expression- ist townscapes, buildings and silos falling about like the film sets for "Dr. Caligari." There is a much more German look to these, and to a cubistic landscape in Drysdale -red, than one has seen before. They relate to various elaborately structured later pictures of Glenrowan hotel as a burnt-out ruin. But there are others which prefigure his extra- ordinary sense of surface and of caressing touch. Screens of pale trees and ftrMsare stroked infln- lrelicately on to an un- usual gauze or cheesecloth painting support. And 'Lagoon, Wimmera" contains all his future Mrs. Fraser and billabong pic- tures. Tree trunks burn like flames before bluest backgrounds. And already he paints across his images with a plane to reinstate a surface which might other- wise develop too much re- cessive depth, and this bold pictorial rescue Job, which doubles as grassy landscape is given the most triumphant yellow gold color. A marvellous beginning to the festival exhibitions that were visible. all the exhibi- tions were visible. The Stuyvesant Foundation's "Recent British Painting" was still on the high seas. Other department store exhibitions were shut on weekends. A scheduled James Cant retrospective hadn't eventuated. Some galleries were simply closed. And, as usual, Adelaide had failed to put on what we would like to see, a sur- vey of its own current art. The nearest to it was the Contemperary Art Society's exhibition of 16 paintings, 6 sculptures, and one earthwork. Even this didn't include Bill Gregory or Robert Baynes, who should be the special pride of South Aus- tralia's newer artists, nor the well-known artists of an earlier generation, Syd- ney Ball (now in New York) and Ostoja-Kotkow- ski (too busy with festival decorations to paint, I suppose). Nevertheless it showed that draughtsmanlike, il- lustrative painting retains its strong hold on Adelaide (the tourist art of Ainslie Roberts shown elsewhere is the rock bottom of this Adelaide speciality). It showed that Adelaide has an interesting group of space-age, hard-edge, illusionist painters; for ex- ample, Barrie Goddard, Cecil Hardy, Ian Chandler. It showed an independent individual, Robin Wallace- Crabbe, of immense grace, in soft-edge color -space abstraction. And there are sculptors of great interest: Tony Bishop, Nigel Lendon and Bill Clements, who had all been on view at the Mil- dura sculpture triennial. Lendon's piece was an ex- treme example of feed - 'lack between the fringe and the centre of an art- ist's activities: a well -made box, in which a small domestic sculpture had travelled to Mildura, had returned to Adelaide nom- inated as a work of art it- self. Bill Clements, a potter - sculptor seen at Mildura, had made the CAB earth- work. Called "Dry Garden/ 80 miles," it was casual patterns of colored earths, gravels and crushed metal, scooped and heaped a little, occupying the back garden of the CAB building along with fig trees and olives. He has lived in Japan, so he l:nows their sand gar- dens, but it seemed an all- Australian-or all -Adelaide' -piece to me. Coining from Sydney one is amazed by the delicate color, and its variations to be seen in and around Adelaide-pink, terracotta, silver, grey, Bill Clement's earthwork was enough to make the trip worthwhile. The big exhibitions were just as enjoyable, but more predictable and familiar than the Nolan or the CAB -Mexican art, Charles Blackman's new work, Leonard Frenche's retro- spective.