Daniel Thomas : Newspaper writings

Staying properties in his art field MICLOR is now 4IIincl, although his new show at Wat- ters' isn't exactly a new beginning, it is a demonstration of re- markable staying pow- er. Most of his fellow abstract - expressionists of 10 and 15 years ago have sunk without trace, r.r else changed style. To say he is Australia's best abstract-expressionist *minter isn't saying much, unless one can also say he is a good painter (yes, he is very good, indeed, and always has been) and unless one can say it's a good thing to make abstract - expressionist paintings. Everybody would agree, if asked, that an artist can do anything he wishes, and all we want is that he do it supremely well. YLi, unconsciously, many people are more r ntric- tive; they unthi;iktngly ex- pect art tr be in fashion, like clothes, and are unable to notice the exist- ence, let alone the ex- cellence, of painting at a time, say, when sculpture is dominant, or of subtle, delicate, abstract, land- scape paintings (like Tay- lor's) at a time when vivid non-figurative painting is dominant. To be eccentric or anachronistic or out- moded, even to stick with the fashionable style of your youth, is to invite Invisibility. Yet surely the last is - wise course. If you attempt a new visual lan- guage every few years, will you ever handle one of them as masterfully as if you were to stick with the language of your up- bringing? Milton Resnick, a senior American at Gallery A, is one who has remained . triumphantly anachronis- tic, and so is Michael Tay- lor. One can say that they have found themselves, ' that they have a very close idea of what they want to do, and that they have found a way to do it. What, then, is it that j Michael Taylor is doing so well? He is covering a surface with the most ecstatically sensuous skins and froths of paint." Mt is adjusting large areas against tiny incidents. He is adjusting colour against colour and, although in the past he would paint layer over layer until the colour was usually grey, this exhibition has some quite bright blue and yel- low and pink paintings. It's because he is happy and because he is now liv- ing in a country landscape with a lot of blue sky, dry grass and pink earth. (The reasons for most changes are as simple as that. It's no accident that Jackson Pollock's subject matter changed from mythology to landscape when he moved from New York City to Long Island). But an artist's sensitivity to the life around him is of no interest unless it is images in work which is itself sensitive, tactful, ten- der. In Paris a few weeks ago, a young Australian artist told me nothing had prepared him for the extraordinary sensitivity of all the great masters when seen in the original; 70 years ago, Frederick McCubbin said the same in letters home to Mel- bourne: and the.majav whn scoffed at-Ifie idea of Gil- bpe asrtt and George in the week almost in- variably succumbed to the delicacy and effortless per- fectionism of the living - sculptures when seen in the original. One uses art constantly to refresh and refine ones own direct perceptions in the face of the muddled half-truths that inter- mediaries always provide. Michael Taylor had his student years with the European masters a decade ago and knows that sensitivity, precision and grace have always been essential to good art. His paintings help recon- cile one to living in Australia. They are -part of the civilising p what seems a very empty country. Colin Liselcy, whose new paintings, drawings and prints are at Bon- thon, says "a major pre- occupation is visual lan- guage, so that the work should be literate, without being literary." This doesn't mean that he wants to create a whole new visual language - that is, a style - of his own. His style is surreal- ism, with open homage to "MORNING HERALD" 23 (-1UG. 0373 Sydney, N.S.W. Miro, and to the "ex- quisite corpses." His statement apparent- ly means that he is using and re -using a number of visual symbols and images, so that we eventually begin to comprehend his highly individual voice speaking to us. A tree trunk, a mountain, a shell, a uterus and many other symbols recur throughout this large exhibition, and the largeness of the show, at first daunting, becomes a welcome immersion in the unfamiliar sea of sym- bols. Well, the symbols seem interesting, even if one can't read them fully, and one acknowledges the parallel he draws with poetry by his titles from Coleridge or T. S. Eliot. but in the end the visual language problem is some- thing that concerns him, not us. Without full com- prehension of the symbols, the spectator is fully able to recognise and admire the same sort of thing that all good art has: the de- licacy and precision of line, an astringent quality, a pleasure in surprise, unexpectedness and trans- formation. Most of the circular, diamond or polygonal, un- dulating-surfaced paint- ings, with their wooden appendages, are similar in style to those in his last exhibition at Bonython. Two seem to be simpler celebrations of the fresh- ness of water and ocean and sky, almost in a nau- tical, yachting style. One is "Mondriola," a kind of Mondrian done in colour- ed rope on masts. The other is a "Birth of Venus," rising from a re- petition of blue waves. I don't know if these are tokens of a future direc- tion, but I think they com- bine his ideas of poetic quest with concrete physic- al sensation in a highly satisfactory way, and I think they are more indi- vidual, more personal to Lanceley, than the more surrealist -looking pieces. Eric Smith shows 19 landscapes at Rudy Komon, but he thinks of it as only half an exhibition, whose second half will be 19 portraits at Walters' in mid -September. They are, as always with Smith, very direct and painterly and colouristically beautiful,