Daniel Thomas : Newspaper writings

Still life ROLAND WAKELIN died last month aged 84. Adrian Feint died a few weeks earlier. Sheila McDonald and David Strachan were killed in motor accidents in recent months. It has been a sad time for Sydney's artists, their friends, and their admirers. Yet it is not a sad time for their art Their pic- tures live. And new artists come forward with new art: the extraordinary handsome new paintings by young artists David Aspden at the Rudy Komon Gallery and the paintings and photo- graphs by Warren Knight at Watters Gallery are both cause for great re- joicing. However, it is the senior artists whose work has first claim. Sheila McDonald will be remembered as an early convert to abstract-expres- slonisin in the 1950s. She became one of 1.11," three or four interesting ;,..irtural abstractionists who evoked images of Australian earth and color. She will also be remem- bered as the creator of an art commune, where a number of artists had studios IL friendly proxim- ity. David Strachan w a a clearly the best of those Sydney artiste; in the 1940s who became de facia mem- bers of the School of Paris. He was our Derain, though perhaps better than Dera.n. Retrospective Next year the Art Gal- lery of New South Wales will show a retrospective exhibition of his work. Roland Wakelin had a major retrospective only four years ago. He was a pioneer post- impressionist, and his , generation came on the scene after World War 1. His modernist colleagues were Grace Cossington Smith and Roy de Maistre. Other artists of that veneration, less radical, hat no less talented, were Eltoth Gruner and Lloyd Rees. Lloyd Rees was given a large retrospective exhibit- ion two years ago, and this week he has an exhibition of new work at the Mac- quarie Galleries. Roy de Maistre's estate, at Rudy Kornon's last week amounted to a ret- rospective. We have never been able to know this generation so sell. l"oreover, although A(1..aii Feint is known chiefly by a book devoted to his later flowerpieces, something of the flavor of his earlier work, frOm the 1920s, can be recognised in the Chine Galleries' cur- rent exhibition of Thea Proctor's work from that eeriod. Drawing, design and docoration were tile pre- occupations of Thea Proc- tor and Adrian Feint. Elegance and taste were good qualities in their view tas of course they should be for everybody). The obvious elegance and taste of their work made them artists who could be easily embraced by fash- ionable society. The current Thea Proc- tor exhibition, which is most intelligently chosen and mounted, confines it- self to this aspect of her work. It is a brilliant evoca- tion of 1920s elegance in Sydney. Yet, one wonders, did Thea Proctor m :rely re- flect an elegant sooiety? Or, since there is noth- ing in art to indicate that Sydney had any elegance or sophistication in the nineteenth ere titry or early twentieth century, did Thea Proctor, virtually single-handed, give Sydney a sense of style? I suppose Eardy Wilson and Sydney Ure Smith contributed, but I suspect that without Thee Proctor we might have continued as provincial as before. Her elegance h a d strength. Her later work. not shown at Clune's. is no longer decorative. Even in the 'twenties she used her position as a tastemaker to help other modernists. like Wakelin and Coss 1 ng ton Smith, whose work she knew to have' its own ewe! taste. ART by daniel thomas but which then looked clumsy to the general pub- lic. She helped form an art society, the Contemporary Group. Adrion Feint, too, helped by putting on modernist exhibitions at the Grosvenor Gallery. which he then managed. There is no doubt that the "clumsy," e4ploratory look of Wakelin's work in the 'twenties must have been a handicap. Earlier he had carried out brief experiments in neo-impre.ssienign, t he n (with Roy de Maistrei "color music," then black - and -white Meldum-style tonalism, as theoretical as the color music. These were student experiments. Though in 1916 he had named his cottage "Cezanne," it was not till the 'twenties that he committed himself to a painterly Cezann coque manner of color planes. tilted, interlocked a n d "clumsy." Heavy skies The skies were given as much substance and weight E)kS t he headlands and buildings in his landscapes. Later, he returned to rich color, often darkly resonant and warmly romantic in mood, His planes became more fron- tal and serene, less shift- ing, These later works might have less significance as stepping - stones in the rivulet of Australian art history, but they are surely more individual than his earlier work and therefore better. And they correspond better with the calm and sweet -tempered old man I knew, than do the earlier and more troubled paint- ings. Loyd Rees, a close friend of Wahelin, was never a modernist, but his pictures have a similar warmth and eeneroslty. "TELEGRAPH" Sydney, N.S.W. 13 JUN 1971