Daniel Thomas : Newspaper writings

"TELEGRAPH" Sydney, N.S.W. t 9 AUG 19/n ART with Daniel Thontas ART has always been the product of cities, where students and professionals can meet, stimulate each other, exchange ideas. Places like Florence, Rome, Montmartre, Mont- parnasse, Greenwich Vil- lage, where art has blos- somed at times, have been very small, tight com- munities. Perhaps Sydney has had the same sense of being an art community. In the 1930s artists often lived and worked around George Street and the Quay. Grace Crowley still does; Geoff de Groen (now in Canada), Michael Taylor, are young artists who have moved there recently. In World War II it was King Cross, with Sydney Ure Smith, William Dobell, Elaine Haxton; and in the 1960s it was still a place where artists lived: Passmore, Drysdale, Thornton, O'Brien, Smart, Olsen, Klippel, Rose Up- ward, Rapoc, Meacimore, were all there at times. Now Peter Powditch is al- most the only resident. Today I think Surry Hills Darlinghurst - Pad- dington, strung along Ox- ford Street, near the Nat- ional Art School and near all the dealers' galleries, operates as a pretty good art community, Hugh Stretton's extra- ordinarily stimulating book, "Ideas for Australian Cities" thinks Sydney is too big and shapeless. He thinks it's glamorous in parts, but often grossly un- democratic (the rich get too much, the poor too little, compared with Can- berra or Adelaide). And he also thinks the usual justification for crowded cities-that they provide a growth point for creativity-is no longer true for Sydney. He says of New York: "Invention now comes from middle-sized, middle -west- ern industrial cities. Dis- covery comes front the out- skirts of the small or the sprawling cities irt New England or California. The best novels by New Yorkers are written in Paris. Tan- giors. or the New England nc oods." centre of artistic anti in- ventive production, but that "most of the novels discussed and pictures sold in Sydney are nowadays written in Sarsparillan suburbs or the bush." He knows that "Bohem- ian life has moved over the hill to Paddington," but thinks its rents will soon drive the arts away. He thinks there is "no central place with oheap land and cheap old build- ings on a main skein of good passenger transport and with plenty of cheap beds of its own, where the young and the arts and the ideas can rely on meeting one another." Well, I think &wry Hills/ Paddington provides exact- ly what he wants. I also think Stretton for- gets that, even if they live m cheap accommodation, artists will these days manage to own a motor- bike or a mini car so that they still visit Paddington easily from Newtown (Tim Johnson), Balmain (Cole- ing, Watkins), or North Sydney (Whiteley, Sohlicht. Filth -Smith Salkauskas) and until recently John Pearl and Michael John- son. But, for the visual arts, Stratton fails to mention that artists need to look at objects as well as to mix with people. They need museums and galleries, and they need them all their life, not only when they're students. An artist might become old enough and prosperous enough to leave for the comforts of the suburbs from the discomforts of the random centre, and Stretton doesn't mention this common pattern either. In Sydney it is mostly the older artists who live in the suburban bush. Like Sall Herman, Elaine Heston, Russell Drysdale, Carl Plate, WHERE SHOULD ARTISTS LIVE? Hugh Skelton thinks Margo Lowers, Lloyd Rees, Kings Cross was. once iv Frank Hinder. Australian bushland suburbia is wonderful, and Hugh Stretton loves it very much, but It is no place to start an art career, though it's fine to graddate to in middle age. The only young artists I can think of who have lived in Sydney's bush by choice are Vernon Tre- wceke, Richard Larter and Gerry ahead, though Ken Reinhard and Col Jordan, with good teaching jobs, have lived for some time in comfortable suburban circumstances. I think Hugh Stretton's book is marvellous on old people and women and children, but I think he's wrong about artists. He forgets that they need museums and galleries and will always need to con- centrate near them. He doesn't know that Sydney artists do, in fact, concentrate in a tight area from Stephen Earle. Ian Milliss, Ron Robertson Swann and David Aspen in Slurry Hills, through Paddington to Elwyn Lynn, Louis James. Tony Mc- Gilllck and Eric Smith in Woollahra. But read the book for the old, the women and the children. It's full of human kindness and it lifts the spirits. THE husband - and - wife team of Helge Larsen and Daranl Lewers (Gal- lery A) are very obviously the best of Australia's few silversmiths, jewellers, art - metalworkers, whatever they are called. They make pendants, brooches, rings, cuff-links, ear-rings, bowls, jugs, coffee-pots. Like all good art it has a look of great certainty and decisiveness, when most jewellery looks as formless and uncertain as pastrywork. This is a kind of mini- ature sculpture. They are antiques of the only because they are very good, and very durable, but also be- cause they are very 1970. The gallery hand-out says they are influenced by hard-edge painting. Certainly they no longer look like twigs and flowers, but the cylindrical forms which are so common in this exhibition don't have much to do with contem- porary painting, and not much more with contem- porary sculpture, It is contemporary furniture design and contemporary architecture that have been using cylindrical elements everywhere in recent years. So this jewellery is right in the main stream of what the future will re- cognise as most typical of 1970.