Painting a tempo of deception
By JOHN NEYLON

The Advertiser, Thursday 28th August 1986

Earth has nothing to show more fair than the Birkenhead Bridge opening up. As a piece of port-side action it still takes a lot of beating. The road opening up in a biblical gesture, daring cars to launch themselves across the widening gap, has all the tension of "It's A Knockout" final.

But life at the Port - our Port, at least - isn't all go. It has a languid air in S.T.Gill's 1846 watercolor depiction a flotilla of tall ships and two fellows in the foreground discussing football.

The mood is taken up by the most recent artistic assessments, paintings submitted to the ACTA Maritime Art Award Exhibition currently on tour around Australia. The foam flies in some romantic re-enactments of tall ships beating out of the Heads but the mood overall is one of gravity and repose.

Geoff Wilson sketching with Dave Dallwitz at the Port during 1985, and now exhibiting at the Beehive Gallery, found the tempo deceptive. Once committed to the time frame of a sketch or painting, things start to happen. Ships clear off. Tugs tug things in front of other things. Containers get pushed around. Even buildings disappear.

The romantic elements - the dockside clutter, spars and rigging against the sky, even the smells, are being pruned away or packed into containers. Wilson's Port is a mechanized orderly environment where the toilers are not dockside workers but cranes and conveyors. Water barely rates a mention. Ships are robbed of nautical associations. There's hardly a pointed or blunt end to be seen. They merge with the warehouses and ziggurats of containers, their superstructures peering over the top like exotic penthouses or corporate office towers.

The artist's eye for the absurd has singled out the cranes and associated paraphernalia s contemporary equivalents of sailing clipper rigging. In Loading Devices Across the River, they fill the sky like War of the Worlds predators. Two other works, Broken Windows, and particularly Disparate Elements, with their illustrations of industrial clutter and decay, have a more pronounced surrealist character. The sketches made on the spot as opposed to the studio paintings lay bare the artist's primary interests in spatial fabrications.

Ian Chandler's quest for personal statement has led him from the ethereal world of Op to the reality of a tree trunk outside the studio's window. In his current Anima Gallery Exhibition, subjects range from Flingers rock pools, the Marion Road gasometer and Council depot, plant close-ups and scenic landscapes. There is tension. The bright realist suburban images lack the enquiry and complexity to be found in the two sombre Flinders rock pool works.

Where the former works rely on viewpoints and dramatic compositional devices for effect, the Flinders group involve the eye in a consideration of relationships between the flow of water and the immobility of stone and between the textures and structures of the tow elements.

The watercolors provide the gentle surprises. While the artist continues to oscillate in style, selection and treatment of subject matter his audience will remain satisfied by the display of virtuosity and perplexed at the lack of consolidation.