Time remembered
Anne Wallace | Australia b.1970 | Damage 1996 | Oil on canvas | 134 x 165cm | Purchased 1997 under the Contemporary Art Acquisition Program with funds from Alex and Kitty Mackay through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation and the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Grant
Time remembered: Much as our sensibilities at 20 can be saturated by reading the classic Russian, French and German writers, there are paintings we encounter in our youth that can have a lasting influence on the art we meet with later in life. I’m sure the strong component of landscape in my own work stems from these times.
In this exhibition, the first of an ongoing Artist’s Choice series at the Queensland Art Gallery, there are just such works from my own childhood, works from a mentor, works by fellow artists from art school days, and from artists I have met and admired during the following 60 years.
Hans Heysen and the works of Elioth Gruner, Arthur Streeton and Tom Roberts were early encounters. It was Heysen who steered me to the National Gallery Art School in Melbourne where Cliff Pugh, Donald Laycock and Janet Dawson were fellow students. A few years earlier Fred Williams and Sam Fullbrook were students there.
In 1959, I arrived in London for what, not realised at the time, would be a ten-year stay. Nolan was there and Arthur Boyd, and with the 1961 Whitechapel exhibition of Australian painting there was a big influx of Australian artists. Charles Blackman, Len French, Brett Whiteley, Colin Lanceley, Michael Johnson, Francis Lymburner, Donald Laycock. John Olsen and Robert Klippel were there briefly. Blackman, Whiteley and I had our first one-man shows there in 1962, and we saw a great deal of each other over the next few years. Whiteley rapidly unfolded an extraordinary body of work: the bathroom paintings, the series based on the Rillington Place murders by John Christie and the London Zoo paintings.
Returning to Australia in 1970, I settled on Bribie Island where my wife, Edit, and I soon met up with Ian Fairweather. We played chess, drank a lot and went on picnics. A number of painters visited Bribie. Margaret Olley, from whom I had acquired several New Guinea artefacts a year or two earlier after one of her more intrepid trips up the Sepik River, was particularly helpful when Fairweather was forced to have a small, more formal, building erected on the site. Margaret over the years has been most supportive of my own work acquiring, through her Foundation, many items for state and regional galleries.
In 1975, we moved to Owl Creek Farm in the Glasshouse Mountains. Over the next 30 years many artists came and stayed. Among the first were Brett and Wendy Whiteley. Brett never stopped drawing the whole time he was there.
He returned with Joel Elenberg who, although seriously ill with leukemia, was fine-tuning the exhibition of his work held at the Philip Bacon Galleries. Brett was just the best company. On subsequent visits he would often arrive fresh from a week in a Gold Coast health farm armed with cigarettes, whisky and LPs which he played so loudly they frequently blew out the JBL speakers. For some years now, I have been spending time at Port Willunga on the Fleurieu Peninsula near Adelaide. It was a favourite stamping ground for Horace Trenerry, Dorrit Black and Jeffrey Smart. It has a haunting beauty and I hope to spend much more time there.
We are fortunate to have amongst the Queensland painters, or those who have worked here, Fairweather, Fullbrook, Jon Molvig, Lloyd Rees, Blackman, and the creator of powerful primordial landscapes William Robinson. The work of my longtime friend Donald Laycock is not seen much these days; the few available examples do not reflect the solid body of work that a survey show might reveal. A similar situation exists with the paintings of contemporary Queensland artist Ian Smith.
In assembling such a collection, clearly a number of major works should not be pulled out of their central locations in the Gallery: Picasso’s La Belle Hollandaise 1905 and the large Fairweathers, for instance. Even some of the works that were available did not fit when I saw my selection assembled.
The most recent work I have selected, by contemporary Brisbane artist Anne Wallace, is confronting and difficult, but I hope you will enjoy the experience. Looking at the rich work of Anne Wallace is like looking through a stereoscope. Her paintings under one lens and, under the other — all those thoughts we have never given tongue to, or images not quite fleshed out, suddenly swim into focus with electrifying clarity. Very Proustian. Very time remembered.
Lawrence Daws, August 2009
This extract is taken from the exhibition brochure 'Artist's Choice: Lawrence Daws'. This 8-page exhibition brochure features, along with the essay by Daws, reproductions of a number of works in the Gallery’s collection selected by Daws for the exhibition. The brochure is available for purchase from the Gallery Store or online
