Daniel Thomas : Newspaper writings

r XaauteclAce-mebo laitAxio From "MORNING HERALD" Sydney, N.S.W. J Ravishing Nolan experience By DANIEL THOMAS SIDNEY NOLAN'S interest in poetry is well enough known. The first painting he ever exhibited was a head of the poet Rimbaud. His own poems, hardly known at all, are written on to the drawings being exhibited at the Bonython Gallery. There they face across the long galleries to the 1,320 small botanical subjects called "Paradise Garden" which were shown at the National Gallery of Victoria a few years ago, then as now joined like wallpaper, edge to edge and floor to ceiling, an extra- ordinary experience of fertility and profusion. more effective in the lower-ceilinged Bony- thon Gallen_ than in Mel- bourne. Although there is no ob- vious connection between the poem -drawings and the Para- dise Garden paintings, they must have some relationship for the book of the poems !which was published t%o years ago, by an obscure pub- lisher. at an extremely high price) is called "Paradise Gar- den," and it illustrates, togeth- er r nth some of the botanical paintings. simple versions of the same drawings that are now at Bonython. The connection is sexuality. human or animal in the poems and drawings. botanical in the paintings. Nolan's art uses images of physical procreation as symbols of artistic creativ- ity, its successes. failures and torments. At the Bonython read the poems and see the amazing tour de force of the thousand and more paintings, which begin and end with sexual series, all phallic pistils and stamens, then pass briefly through ferns, clotted with spores, then at the centre are several hundred yards of flowers in full, mature bloom. The exhibition is a ravishes; experience. * * * At the Hogarth Galleries the eroticism is more open than Sidney Nolan's. I don't mean the typical Salvador Dali images in the recent mixed - media engravings on colour photolithographs. Dali's sur- realism indeed draws heavily upon sexual psychology, per- versity, nostalgia for the lost dwelling in a mother's womb, but the images arc not clear. though they arc undeniably powerful. vastly yet ob- scurely attractive to a world- wide audience. It is the colour photographs by George Schwartz in the Decameron Room upstairs which are unique in my (not very great) experience of erot- ic art or of pornographic art. at least in photography. Most. pornographic photographs for a start are coldly black and white, and Lack the warmth of colour. And most are clini- cally, boringly, unimaginative. Schwartz is on the contrary an extreme romantic. Love is lovely. * * * Sali Herman's paintings fill all four levels of the large new wing of .the Holdsworth Gal- leries. where they have a lot of reproduction -antique furn- iture to compete with. One can see the idea: it might help a Woollahra-Bellevue Hill customer visualise a painting on the walls at home, but reproduction furniture is such a horrible thing in itself that it spoils the paintings. Since real antiques are probably out of the question, modern furniture would surely be better. Herman's paintings here go back through about 10 years, and although there are some of his finest recent slumscapes, the majority are the outback and mining subjects he also finds so strangely Australian. The most recent subjects are from Gove, in the Northern Territory. He has always been an un- even artist, but his best work can catch one's breath with simple. joyous discovery of the miraculous way colour juxtaposition - blue, red - can generate light, or the way solid layers of paint resting on a canvas can symbolise the solidity of buildings or hills resting on the earth. He has an intuitive intelligence about optical and tactile phenomena. * * * Gavin Crichton must be the exhibitor of the painted door- mats at the now -defunct Nth Degree Gallery a couple of years ago, and 1 must have missed his watercolours last year. His new drawings and paintings at the Arts Council Gallery will be most people's first proper sight of his work; those who like talent-spotting should rush it. He looks like a "natural.' painter. and it's the first time I've thought of that old form of praise for years. It means one senses an instinctive right- ness in his craftsmanship, in the handling of colours and shapes on a surface; but more than that, one -lenses his free- wheeling delight in the way in- vention leads him, and his pleasure in productiveness. These inventive, witty, ex- cellent works are $45 to $340. The New Zealand-born artist is 30. He lived a couple of years in London. studied in Sydney and mss teaches in Newcastle.