Arts Nexus

[Eve]

Idyllic scenes paint a different picture of Lockhart River
Louise Martin-Chew

The Australian
March 10, 2006

Adrian King, Maureen Sandy and Phillip Sandy
Andrew Baker Art Dealer, Brisbane, until April 1.

WHAT we read and hear about Lockhart River in far north Queensland is almost invariably about the problems: alcohol abuse, violence and the associated social difficulties seemingly all too common in Aboriginal communities. These issues have had real impact on its young art stars; Rosella Namok and Samantha Hobson, for example, who have recently moved to Cairns to find stability.

These three exhibitions paint a very different picture. Adrian King, an early member of the Lockhart River Art Gang, depicts idyllic scenes of people fishing, hunting and gathering, and community gatherings such as a football match or shopping at the store.

King, a member of a minority language group at Lockhart, has spent much of his life outside the Lockhart River settlement proper, living with his adoptive parents at Wenlock Outstation. This has possibly protected him and allowed the retention of a genuinely guileless outlook.

His naive style, unusual within the Art Gang, is charming: colour is sensitively but not naturalistically used, and a flattened perspective shifts dramatically within the picture plane. The Store depicts a house on stumps and figures flanked with white plastic shopping bags on the veranda, overlooking grasses in sea colours. Vertical paths link them to cars (one bright pink, the other blue) parked out the front. A similar perspective shift with vertiginous effect is used in That Fishing Day, with a waterfall uniting a dark, broody sky through which a small plane flies, and people fishing down river.

These vignettes, painted from memory, are exuberant, celebratory of a traditional life enriched with elements of a new culture and consolidate King's developing reputation with this, his fourth commercial exhibition.

Maureen and Phillip Sandy, as older people, began working at the art centre last year - Maureen painting, her husband Phillip carving - with encouragement from visiting tutors Michael Leunig and Mike Nicholls. Both are showing their first works.

Maureen's canvases depict flattened shapes and landscapes featuring ant hills, birds, simple buildings and trees. It is a different type of naive painting from King's, but is unerring in its ability to capture the essence of the sea and distant islands, for example, with blocked-out shape and colour.

Phillip Sandy's carvings are similarly primitive and also capture something essential in the creatures he depicts.

His birds - a heron and a cassowary - are particularly strong, rendered in roughly blocked-out timber. It is a promising start for Maureen and Phillip Sandy, who have recorded the local animals and landscapes with verve.