Daniel Thomas : Newspaper writings

7Or FTOM "TELEGRAPH" 5 DEC 1971 Sydney, N.S.W. tcPrizes unearth the new talent ART PRIZES and competitions are despised by artists. They think it a very unsatisfactory and haphazard form of art patronage. No other country has as many as Australis, or sets such store by them. It's true that competitions pro- vide no opportunity for new forms of art. They are always geared to obso- lete categories of art that many artists have abandoned: for example, painting itself, or portraiture, or mythology. There are no prizes offered for conceptual art and not many for abstract painting. Yet the prize system does allow new talent its first showing as long as it can be fitted into tile tradi- tional categories. And the prize system also helps preserve old talents that the dealer system can't support, being more subservient to fashion. For example, when did a dealer last give Weaver Hawkins a one- man show? Yet recently in a com- petition this powerful senior painter was awarded the prize. I have judged a lot of competi- tions in the past few weeks, and it has been the greatest pleasure to encounter new artists of great excellence that I had never pre- viouslyt heard of. At Armldale, the local art society ambitiously decided upon a sculp- ture prize. They had never had one before, and were apprehensive whether any good entries would be sent at all. Yet excellent works by John Arm- strong, Col Jordan and Robert Parr arrived from Sydney. An excellent local artist was Wal- ter Placing, even better as a painter than a sculptor. There is in Armi. dale a most delightful whittler and metalworker, Dr. H. B. Pinson, who entered in the sculpture competi- tion a fine grandfather clock and a folk -art carving of a girl. But the greatest surprise was the sculpture to which I gave the prize. Called "Fresh Air," it was obvi- ously Of the Anthony Caro school: palest pink -painted welded steel, lightly floating changes of horizon- tal. level, dancing movement in the vertical plane. It was In, Paul Selwood, who is a Sydney artist, recently back from some years in England. Definitely One to be watched. At Ballarat the Art Gallery held an exhibition of drawings and prints from which I had to choose $800 of purchases. Most of it was familiar enough - Arthur Boyd, John Brack, George Baldessin. Guy Stuart, John Olsen. and so on. But Ballarat's surprise was Albert. Shomaly, a printmaker. When it was explained that he was a pupil of Bea Maddock at the National Gallery School in Melbourne one could see the influence. Yet he is already highly personal in his imagery, and a brilliant tech- nician with multiple photoscreens. He mostly shows you himself naked, with cows; and the cows lurch at the spectator just like the cows in Ballarat's own painting by Conder "An early taste for litera- ture." If you've got it (talent), why not flaunt it? The youthful exuberance was irresistible. The prize system also worked well this week in Sydney with the Trans - field Prize, though It was invita- tional, not open, at all. The winner was 21 -year -old Aleksander Danko. whose current one-man show at Watters I discussed last week, His model for a monumental out- door sculpture was entirely unlike his Watters pieces, unless the seven cheery conical forms derive from road furniture, as did his stop sign at Watters. If Danko's Transfield piece had the best possibilities for monumen- tal size, Noel Hutchison's seemed just right as it was, five complete sculptures of tossing rings. Besici....s the Transfield Prize, the Bonython Galleries have a selection of paintings from William Dobell's estate, pots by New Zealanders Len and Ruth Castle, and a selection of works by the gallery's artists. VIVIENNE BINNS has put to- gether a show of crumpled copper, richly enamelled. She has stuck on the wall help- ful notes about the technique of enamelling, its history, beauty and difficulty. There is an excellent notice "About this exhibition" explaining how she is trying to work on a razor's edge of bad taste. "The really funky ones are bad taste that people like." art by daniel thomas She's ahead of me. But I often find that what at first seems ugly, eventually begins to look like the beet art around. Meanwhile, Miss Binns' most famous piece, "Suggun." from her one-man show of three or four years ago, has been lrought out for the current installat ons at the Yellow House. It is a kind of tiou'hnut, made of hairnet or plastic shmping-bag, set on a board, and m 'torised so that it twitches. As ICHAEL NICHOLSON'S studio "v- exhibition at 29 Caledonia Street must have been generated by recent events in the neighbor- hood. Fresh asphalt has been laid along the whole length of nearby Paddington Street. (And better laid than the asphalt in Nicholson's own backyard.) When it was being done the Department of Main Roads street furniture in black, yellow, red and amber would have been a pretty sight. Especially under the full-blown plane trees that seem to be recover- ing from several years of mutila- tion. Nicholson has street furniture and a painted median line zooming through his tiny backyard. There are lightly elegant room - dividers which he calls "Anti -space intruders." And there is a sculpture, a revoked commission for a Mel- bourne shopping arcade called Artagen. Revoked commissions are not new for Nicholson. There are color theory exercises and art sereenprints resulting from them. There's a lot of theory, and thought, and one comes away invigorated. As a by-product, some of Nichol - son's students are producing a "Roadshow" at Barcom Lane, Pad- dington, nightly. VILLIERS new premises ("Bond ' Street Paddington") has an- other English painter for its second exhibition and a much more im- portant one than the first. William Brooker, represented in many museum collections, is like William Coldstream, the complete academic. Beautifully spaced geometries of white objects on timber tables in grey interiors. Also, sculptures and bronze medals by the Melbourne artists Andor and Michael Meszaros.