Confronting Freud

Newcastle Herald

Saturday September 1, 2007

JILL STOWELL

Lucian Freud is a challenge.

Nothing could make us more aware of the gulf that still exists between art and life than the discomfort of the voyeur-like experience when looking at Lucian Freud's acutely observed gallery of human images.

His etchings at the Newcastle Region Art Gallery bring us a range of private male faces. But it is the studies of the male nude that make it clear just how far we've come from the ideal harmony of Greek Antiquity or the idealised gods and heroes of the Renaissance.

It seems that Lucian Freud only uses his friends and family as models. We are confronted by intimate portraits of real people with physical imperfections that both fascinate and repel.

Even a large and formal painting such as the celebrated After Cezanne from the collection of the National Gallery of Australia is difficult to look at. Freud takes the dreamlike sensuality of Cezanne's odd little work, Afternoon in Naples, also in Canberra, and by substituting real people for the anonymous couple and the servant he creates a new narrative. In place of the languid Orientalist orgy, the action now becomes an enacted plea for Viagra. The painting's odd, irregular shape and the perfunctory paint surface are a further challenge and so, too, are the references to the artist's bleak studio, which is at the same time a vast and empty landscape.

The exhibition consists for the most part of etchings on loan from Rex Irwin, the Sydney art dealer. Unlike the painting, they reveal an artist taking immense pains to capture details of hair and skin. The images are built up of innumerable tiny lines. The textures are the result of hours of patient drawing with the etching needle, rather than the application of aquatint. The sitters gaze out from the wall with aplomb, their lived-in faces as impassive as rocks.

It is this celebration of man's imperfection that has placed Lucian Freud among the greatest living figurative artists.

A Newcastle exhibition by John Morris is long overdue. One of the area's most prominent painters, a mentor to generations of students, he hasn't had a solo exhibition in his home town since the demise of the von Bertouch galleries.

He has shown regularly in Sydney, but this event at Newcastle Art Space until September 9 recognises a commitment to the local community.

John Morris is exhibiting a wide range of his landscape paintings, from different dates and in widely differing sizes. There are large, imposing paintings and tiny fragmentary works in a real studio clean-out, though the hang is harmoniously unified.

The subject for this rhapsodic painter is always the mysterious power of the landscape. Land dramatically meets sea. A dissolving vapour trail is as evocative as shifting clouds, or dusk on a snowy road. A large, green painting tracks a shaft of light on a steeply rising mountainside. The evening star often pierces the twilight blue.

This committed lyricism has surely set its mark on countless TAFE graduates, as well as creating visionary islands of contemplation on many domestic walls.

In the small adjacent room three former students, Amanda Reeves, Daniel Smith and gerant present an object lesson in art as fun in 92 works on paper.

The gallery on the Callaghan campus of the University of Newcastle has embarked on a program of thematic exhibitions, an initiative of the recently appointed art curator, Virna Rodriguez.

The present show, until September 28, brings together work by photographer Miranda Lawry and mixed-media painter Philip Schofield, both exploring mechanics of memory.

Before his present career as an artist, Philip Schofield was an eminent biochemist. His research into the chemical basis of disease fuels his artmaking with patterns created by DNA sequences and other medical imaging.

Much of his collage work concerns the basis of memory, with time-worn photographs, handwriting and genetic sequences creating new identity and ersatz memories for forgotten people; surprisingly poignant.

Less personal is a brilliantly coloured wall of small sheets based on mapping the genome, resolved little abstract compositions in their own right.

Memory is clouded with emotion in apparently formal photographs by Miranda Lawry. Many people will have seen similar works in the foyer of the new building at the John Hunter Hospital under the auspices of the hospital's Arts for Health program.

These are views from the windows of the now deserted Royal Newcastle Hospital. Simple seascapes become rich in nostalgia; dark frames and salt-encrusted glass suggesting gravity, even tears.

CHOICE VIEWING

Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery

Until September 9: Multiplicity: Prints and Multiples

Richard Tipping: Multiple Choice

Maitland Regional Art Gallery

Until September 23: Joe Furlonger: Circus

Robert Callander: Circus of Lost Soles

Egg Face, clown faces by children

Newcastle Region Art Gallery

Until October 28: Lucian Freud: About Men

Until October 21: Darren Siwes: Mum, I want to be Brown

Alun Leach Jones: Prints donated to the collection

Until October 14: Bruce Rowland: In the Artists Studio

Julie Rrap: Embodied

Newcastle Art Space

Until September 9: John Morris: A Second Life, paintings

© 2007 Newcastle Herald

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