Daniel Thomas : Newspaper writings

r "TELEGRAPH" Sydney, N.S.W. 2.2 Ili, R 19701 ART with Qan&I Thomas SEVEN AT THE SHOW THE Royal Easter Show has its annual confron tation between paintings, sculptures and pots and the world of decorated cakes and other folkcrafts. As usual, the great wolfs af fruit and vegetables in a nearby pavilion are more stimulating than the walls of the Arts and Crafts pavilion. There are seveh art com- petitions. The "traditional" style rural subject was won by Kenneth Jack's Tibooburra, a very remote town which these days must be as thick ,%ith artists as Hill End. Douglas Pratt and Ken- neth Green were second and third. Dora Toovey and Graeme Inson's respect- able quality was notice- able amongst the hard, aggressive commercialism of the majority, and Reinis Zusters was notice- able for a style change Into iridescent mosaics after years of loose green grids. Kenneth Jack also won the "traditional" water- color prize. Portrait painting was won by Eric Smith's "John Olsen," not one he's shown previously, but half a dozen of the others were old friends from the Archi- bald, including John Brack's brilliant Barry Humphries as Mrs. Ever - age, There was a new Garry Shead portrait of Michael Pearce. The "Human Image" prize went to one of Paul Beadle's small open-work bronze bell-cages; sculp- ture, distinctly better than last year, to Noel Hut- chison. Ian McKay was commended for a big stone bird; Plugelman and Robert Brown looked good. Tint Johnson's "Red EitSel" was, with John Brack's portrait . painting, almost the only chalIeng- krikallt, lYtlr* among e nines "connbercial hucksterism, competent' blandness, or amateur pleas for sympathy. It was a narrow, hori- zontal cinemascope of pink Perspex on rough timber legs. It might be claim- ing equal value for the other things in an artist's studio besides paint - you can get attached to the easels, 'the stretcher tim- bers, the workbench, the windows, the sound equip- ment., as well as the paint - marks - but it was good to come across something you couldn't really account for. Hector Gilliland won the contemporary pa in tin g (John Fisher and Terence O'Donnell were second and third) and he also had excellent work in the still- life section, won by William Salmon, Still life provided the only oasis of modest self- assurance among all the blackmail, with other good paintings by Kay Green- hill. Alison Rehfisch and. Michael John Taylor. BUCKLEY: Sue Buckley shows 10 years of linocuts. woodcuts, etchings and lithographs, at the Work- shop Arts Centre, Wil- loughby. She, too, offers an oasis of quiet modest sensitivity and self-assur- ance. Perhaps it's* an intense involvement with materials that makes her work so authentic, a bit like Tim Johnson's fondness for studio litter. You can tell, she laves the blocks of wood that have been carved and printed from, that she has careSsed them Pad eXplored them. You can tell that, besides textures she has also been delighted to isolate qualities of line in some prints (Stellar Trail), or of color In others (Rasy Red). It's good to find the most recent work, the best. MACQUARIE: At the lvfaequarie a mixed show of gallery artists, and 22 paintings of 1918 to 1965 by Roland Wakelin, also show the pleasures of humble and total absorption in one's craft, in this case in painting, Landscapes by Rupert Bunny. David Strachan and Grace Cossingion- Smith, homages to old stucco and timber houses by Helen Ogilvie, all share with Wakelin this honest dedication: they are works of art that will still look like art in the future. GALLERY A. - Gallery A's group of artists show- ing works on paper are younger than the Maq- quarie group and they look to be more interested in Invention on its own (Treweekel, than In feed- back from external reality and from craft Materials. But Powditch a n d Coleing are In the reality bag, Tim Johnson the materials, and so perhaps Is the color -band water- color by Peter Wright. PARAMOR. Wendy Pftramor (Central Street) shows .a small retrospective from 1960 to. 1970, Early :drawings, water- colors and large paintings cf.( -paper are generally romantic, . .1Inear-expres- sion!st, figure or laridstaliC abstractions, warm and earth -colored. In 1966 she changed to hard-edge field painting, but one can't call it color field for the color, though appropriate is not very relevant. I think that in both the early and the late work her chief concern has been with shape relations; the w a y forms emerge, approach, nudge, touch, withdraw. The only sculpture, two large symmetrical units which can touch to form an arch or be moved apart, seems to stand for all her art. I find it surprisingly humanist, signifying some- thing about the delicacy and fragility of personal relationships and affec- tions. KNIGHT. - Warren Knight (Watters Gallery) is an American now living in Australia who shows 10 large black and white up- right paintings covered in bands of undecipherable letters. You are not meant to read them, but they cer- tainly evoke the mysteries of alien civilisation as the Rosetta stones does. Beyond this they suggest the ultimate impossibility of any complete communi- cation between one indi- vidual and another. But these are paintings we are looking at and he might be saying that on the non-verbal level - the level of response to shape, texture and colors; _fora.-- munication la qq isfactory becaU tightly. sued& tillMtinicatftrIltin