Daniel Thomas : Newspaper writings

.ctice/puzz i7A-orree4 "MORNING HERAOzejt,r20,0 Sydney, N.S.W? - n7c 1972 SERIOUS, AMBITIOUS AND GIFTED ARTIST By DANIEL THOMAS Dick Watkins for a dozen years has been a very good painter, as serious, ambitious and as gifted as any working in Sydney. There was always the worry whether he would achieve an individual style; he was clearly wor- ried about it too, and after years of exploring Robert Rauschenberg, Kenneth Noland, Victor Pasmore, Jasper Johns, Seurat and Matisse, it began to seem that Watkins had made a despairing decision for ec- lecticism, like Marcel Duchamp. What did indi- viduality matter? It was perhaps better and braver to chiltisisge the greatest masters of your own time. Nobody really serious wa's'te his energy by taking on the lesser paint- ers. In fact, Watkins's work has always been individ- ual, in its immediacy of handling and its beautiful colour; his paintings are instantly recognisable even when they most openly acknowledge or challenge the modern masters. However, now, at 38 Hargrave Street, he shows his third exhibition of paintings derived from Jackson Pollock's. Maybe if you keep to the one influence for long enough - and Watkins has stayed longer with Pollock than with anyone else - eclecticism ceases to be an issue. Maybe Watkins is now putting himself through a normal apprenticeship with a master that at last is the right one for him. The great thing about art is you can choose your parents, your starting points, and Jackson Pol- lock, the world's greatest painter of the recent past, is a pretty good choice. This time the debt to Pollock is more technical than formal. There are no direct structural quotes like the repeated diagonals from "Blue Poles" that were ia Watkins's first Pollock show, though there are a number of looping curves that almost become heads and limbs like Pollock's final phase. The,_,,,,tista I matter whichta, age to Po! lock is the, use of car 4111isatiriel (including silver)gaa, "A as acrylic, Who tieslt wad enamels - - since the Mir The car ena- mel , lies on the face, and rapidity of . t the *nom, actions; the acrylic is matt, soaks into the canvas, and records the slower staining of the paint acting on its own. Watkins has found a much heavier canvas than usual, and it has presented its own new challenge. It stretches and shrinks une- venly under Watkins's ac- tion-painting. These are the bumpiest paintings anyone has ever seen. When the bump -and - shine surfaces are so tur- bulent as to cover the whole canvas densely, as in "Depolition" then there is success of a kind. Otherwise the balance is unresolved, and the pic- tures with less of the new car enamel are best, for example "Untitled No 9," which, like many, has an orderly diagonal grid substructure, and the always miraculous beauty of a lovely colour harmony - blue with to- mato and loganberry on the white canvas. Bryan Westwood, at Bonython Gallery, is just as eclectic as Dick Wat- kins, just as much struggl- ing with old masters, even though his super-realist style might deceive you into thinking he is struggl- ing with nature. He is open enough about it. He puts all the paintings into black gloss frames like the Dutch sev- enteenth century. There is a "Self portrait with Van Eyck's hat (which the art- ist is wearing clownishly) and Winslow Homer's 'Long , Branch' " (a post - ca: of which the artist is holding up to the specta- tor). Vaditybk, in the fif- teenth century, was the first and greatest Nether- landish realist; his paint- ings make you gasp at the physical and psychological actuality of a face speak- ing to you across the cen- turies. Winslow Homer, in the nineteenth century, was an American illustra- tor, not as interesting as his realist contemporary, Thomas Eakins, also quoted by Westwood. pre 4. Westwood does not make you gasp like Van Eyck. Instead his portraits - Katie, Edwina - are not very good likenesses. Nor does he seem to have understood the main point of interest in American nineteenth-century realism, namely that Eakins was painting from photo- graphs. Eakins's colour is a strange, muddy sepia monotone; Westwood's copy of an Eakins con- verts it to technicolour. Refreshing as it is to see the Australian landscape converted for the first time into' the austere re - autism of Andrew Wyeth, pleasant as it is to see how much Westwood has improved over his dis- jointed compositions of some years ago, it is dis- appointing that he has not followed up Eakins's inter- est in painting based on the photograph. This season's .art fashion it America was not realism, 'but photo -realism, and we still haven't seen it here. Richard Dunn, at Gal- lery A, is a young artist holding his first one-man show. He won the 1966 NSW Government trav- elling art scholarship, since when he has studied and worked in London and Paris. He is very good. The paintings run from 1969 to 1972, their titles usually indicating where he was - Holland Park, Trocadero, the Etoile - or what he was listening to -Al Bowily, Charles Tre- net. Glover, who is the most important of all Australian colonial painters. CRAFTS: f recommend the pottery of Thancoupil Fletcher, to be seen at " o ,"" IeXandra Lane, at Glebe. nt, on Satur- day aoir ify. She is an Aboriginalul *st frpm Que n dwt COILS, arPtudyeinntgarinia hydra. 111 Joan Grouncklhd'*r pots are d o w n -to" poems about mud, clay, water, ripples, skies, sunsets and mangroves. I also recommend the tapestries of Margaret Grafton, at One Central Street until tomorrow. And until Christmas there are funky glass objects by Stephen Skillitzi at the Macqua :e Galleries, and refined ceramics from Australia arid Asia, an- cient and modern, at the David Jones Art Gallery, in their Christmas shows. The two earliest paint- Prints: Student print- ings are "Sea" and makers from the National "Ripple," and I think they art School are showing at are key works: I think that the Bonython Gallery. Australians are unique in Theyarem uchmoereihn: our universal awareness of ventive than what it is like to be in the lished "Sydney Print - surf, the experience of the makers" recently at the relentless thrust of ocean eMarcyri quayeea.r theB But school nearly Tian art in an unforced, gets into a lot of Austra- throws up some inventive unobvious way. student printmakers who Unlike the impersonal, then sink without trace. pressionism and West - of Watkins's abstract -ex- onThthee to specialise in tempo- neNwortSho plans o Gallery, intelligence wood's realism, Dunn'srarY EurgRegiLus abstracts are highly ro- MirPSIMPOI, Pi - mantic and personal, with important subject matter casso and oo. 'tap -location , means to be that must be sensed, as Barnett Newman's heroic reviewed. there sublimities must be sensed. are many t degrees of origin ty "t thin the His subject matter is category ofd`' a "original something to do with the prints, ' and I strati try to ecstasy of being carried by report soon on the status a wave, either an ocean of their offerings. wave, or a sound wave of I would like to record musical notes. my great admiration for At last the Mitchell and the beautifully written and Dixson Galleries have very intelligent art criti- reopened after the fire in cism of my predecessor, the upper floor of the Donald Brook. He is a Library of NSW a couple hard act to follow and my of years ago. pieces will be different They have always been from his - more a con - a necessary complement to sumer's guide (to objects or the Australian collections exhibitions) than a pro - in the Ar: Gallery of NSW Posal for a new life-style. on the other side of the After all I am a mu - Domain, fpr the Art Gal- scum curator, whose job is levy owns little colonial to study works of art, painting from Australia's existing members of a first 100 years, family of objects - often. Go to the Library for indeed, outmoded and the convict painter misunderstood objects: he Thomas Watling, the is a teacher, whose job is scientific voyager William to lead people into the Westall, the free-lance future. wanderers Janssons for Curators are perpetually ( landscape, Earle fpr por- amazed and delighted by traiture (the big group what artists can do, but protrait of Mrs Piper and they would never presume her children has been re- to suggest what an artist called from Vaucluse should do, nor how we House), and above all the could all be mote like art- ! compassionate observer of ists; teachers on the other the passing of the Tasma- hand can and should, i n an Aborigines. John I