Talent lines up for spring show
SPRING is lavishly celebrated in this city with many floral traditions.
Although this year the offerings are altered in their access and presentation, there are versions of the familiar readily available. The Toowoomba Art Society, 1 Godsall Street, is hosting its annual Members’ Spring Exhibition.
The award exhibition is a crowded but surprisingly cohesive display filling both the Culliford and Perinet galleries.
It illustrates the versatility of the artists, the diversity of interests, and an exploration of styles, and techniques.
The awards honour key figures in the Art Society’s history, and while the selected works are safe and perhaps predictable, the artists are fitting recipients of the awards.
The Anne and Fred Gardiner Prize was won by Catherine Ketton for her almost Surrealist oil, Love in the time of
COVID.
The Nancy Culliford Award was won by Diana Battle’s bright beach scene Happy Days.
The Harry Hart Experimental Art Award went to Gillian Frederick’s intriguing artist book, Transitions.
The winners are ‘firsts among equals’ as there are many rewarding pieces to engage the viewer.
Works of particular interest include Peter Fitzpatrick’s Selfie in a COVID-19 game, a social comment using self-portraits attached to pawns in a chess game incorporating a bricolage of art historical entities.
The elegant geometrical austerity in the pair of paintings by Charlie Boyle contrasts with the loosely expressed abstracts by Dierdre Rutherford.
The captured movement of horses and riders by William Church makes a bold statement, while the little doggie studies by Jenny Burgess have great appeal.
The charm of Carolyn Richardson’s Plumbago, with its painterly textures, finds rapport with the impasto technique in John Archibald’s old
shed.
Susanna Sanderson’s formal still life works, and Sarah Walker’s emphatic candy fruits emphasise the fluid spontaneity seen in the autumn impression by Brenda Richards and the concentrated patterns in Linda Hall’s Weeping willow.
Further visual interest is added by Katie Whyte’s smooth rhythms painted on glass and the cheeky ceramic Earth mother by Jacqui Rahley.
Gallery hours are TuesdayFriday, 9am-12, Saturdays and Sundays 10am-2pm. The Cam Robertson Gallery at the Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery is showing Deep in Conversation, an exhibition by Sue McMaster.
A portrait painter who has edged around photo realism and rendered paintings into stylised facsimiles of photographs, McMaster has explored cropping and has used a restrained palette to push and define the essence of portraiture.
This latest body of work further challenges the genre by reducing identity to mood generated by location and association. Backgrounds are diffused and modulated by “quick-fix” techniques as illustrated by the set of studies.
Figures and faces are blocked in with slabs of colour or rapid brushstrokes flattening the images and initiating ambiguous spatial relationships.
The concepts invite discussion and additional investigation to achieve a more refined resolution.