Wieneke Archive Book 3 : Moreton Galleries 1960-61 Presscuttings

PAINTINGS OF THE OUTBACK SAM FULLBROOK is showing at the Moreton Galleries his oils of the Outback. Fullbrook, a Sydney ' painter in his late thirties, has spent several years in the Outback. Ills imagery is based on landscape and people. Other well known Australian , sively with the same sub - painters have dealt exten- jects, but Fullbrook must be -",..714:". credited with a personal approach. A number of very tiny t paintings should not be overshadowed by his larger ones. The former, with their i. spontaneous, loose brush- work, give insight into the 1-, first warm impulse of a sensitive mind. Though small. they create an im- pact. Surrealtstic The large oils are handled differently. With crystalline, static forms (composed of flat -coloured planes) and with strange lights, Full - brook creates a typical sur- realistic atmosphere in which time and movement are arrested. The quality of those paintings lies very much In this, that in spite of the thought-out designs and the precise execution Full - brook was able to retain (and therefore to communi- cate) his prime emotion. They don't appear con- trived. Feelings of mystery, tragic loneliness and compassion felt at the stoic endurance of people (the latter without pointing an angry finger) are lyrically expressed and though the forms are ab- stracted, they are notsav- agely distorted. Considerable subtleties in changes of colour -tone and in the avoidance of too ob- vious form -relations will be revealed with patient study, Artist in fine return The Moreton Gal- leries, AMP Building, Edward Street, are pre- senting the works in oil of Sam Fullbrook. He held is show in Bris- bane some years ago. His comeback is welcome. In his work can be found a certain elusive- ness which is rather fas- cinating. Of painters who have endeavored to in- terpret the spirit of the outback he appeals to be the most poetic. UMW: a palette some- what sombre in key, he has succeeded in qualify- ing the natural harshness of extremes in color and contrasts in darks and lights. Pictures well worth considering include Sun- down. near Warrawagine, The Prospector, Filberts Hills, The Head Stock- man, Death in the After- noon and Man with Kan- garoo. e uncatalogued Red Hills. Ashburton, Is a most satisfying work with great powers of appeal. It could be the picture of the ex- hibition. Some very pleasing minting can be found in he smaller works such as tomance No. I. Strelly tomance and Romance 3.-MELVILLE HAY - 80M, ia . ar nara_sr - _ earning all about L art ART APPRECIATION holds the attention of (from Ic/i. standing) Josephine Derrick (Salisbury), Ka, Marianne (Si, Luria), Elisabeth Dickson (Coorparoo), Christine Tranberg (Waren Heights), and Joy Burleigh (West End), as Moreton Galleries director (Mr. James Trieneke) talks to them ti!mut Samuel Falb brook's painting "The Prospector." Others in the group are YOU ARE CORDIALLY (second row Jr left) Susie Addison (Norman Park), Eyed Drawn (Manly), Rhonda 3lorphail (Moorooka), and seated Irons left, Violet Teeth' (Manly), Lynette Laycock (Hendee), and Margaret Davie (Salisbury). The girls are members of a course designed to equip girls who have Just left school for a business and to help them develop testes in art, mule, end dome. SAM FULLBROOK Sum Fullbrook is showing 25 oils on canvas at Brisbane's Mss ton Galleries, a record of observatiurt,, in the Kim- berleys. Fullbrook has a virile and refined color sense. This desolate country of immense distances, of loneliness, of hostility that can kill a man in a day of thirst, supplies the raw material with a color range mainly in the red end of the spectrum. The artist has two ways of handling it INVITED TO AN EXHIBITION OF RECENT PAINTINGS an ; he puts it on in an individual fashion, broad slabs of paint, crimson, red - orange (a lovely warm tone), bright green, deep brown, fawn, grey and glaring white, using them in large mosaics with sharp contours and no merging or fusion, in wide bands, cubes and triangles, mostly in flat decorative patterns in glaring light. The designs are simple ; so smoothly painted that brushwork is unobtrusive. It is curious how the three- dimensional landscape of limitless dis- tance comes up out of this apparent flatness, as in "Sleeping Woman." In his alternative style Fullbrook is often too melodramatic ; of course, the temptation is there. But the hills at twilight bubble up volcanically as they did primevally at the birth of the land: "Red Hills" and a miniature of this apparently worked up form, the sketch, "Romance No. I," "Death in the After- noon," a rather moving thing. These are conventional in technique. Fullbrook's real and genuine sensuous experience is best expressed in the glaring light, the red plains, the crimson furnace of the sky in this dry desolate land, as in "The Prospector," a splendid picture, "Man with Kangaroo," a cleanly drawn, posterish but happy thing, "The Stock- man," striking in its simplicity and authority. To my mind the picture of the show is "Bamboo Creek," a very clever painting in the best sense because the apparently flat tones fill out into a clump of three-dimensional trees in perspective -a picture easy to live with. J. V. DUNI°