Art remembers boss drovers
ART exhibitions appeal on many levels.
Some cater to the connoisseur, some have political agendas, some carry messages of hope through a personal vision, others are purely decorative.
Two current local and regional exhibitions, however, engage and interact with the community in ways that are entertaining and informative.
The Warwick Art Gallery is hosting the touring exhibition, Boss Drovers, an installation by octogenarian artist Robert MacPherson.
The full title of this huge body of work is 1000 Frog Poems: 1000 Boss Drovers (Yellow Leaf Falling) For HS 1996-2014 which attests to MacPherson’s research and his playfulness-while the allusion to Haiku becomes a non sequitur that translates imagery and language into parallel thought processes.
The exhibition comprises a selection of portraits from the full collection owned by QAG/ GOMA.
The boss drovers depicted really existed although in many cases the likenesses are imaginary.
They are rendered on sheets of paper torn from Spirax sketchbooks, aged with tea, washed with a little colour, and decorated by school-like merit stamps.
There are some collaged images, but most are “scribbled” contour drawings full of presence and personality.
To add another layer of complexity, MacPherson attributes the portraits to his alter ego, a ten-year-old boy, Robert Pene, who attended St Joseph’s Convent in Nambour in the late 1940s.
The mosaic of many faces pays homage to the men and the women who moved sheep and cattle across vast landscapes.
Young Pene adds messages to the teaching Sister telling her the names, and sometimes the nicknames, of the drovers.
MacPherson combines humour and history; he introduces slang terms of a language and a lifestyle all but forgotten.
The interactive parts of the exhibition include word blocks to create sentences and the means to invent a personal boss drover.
The Orange Wall Gallery at The Warwick Art Gallery is featuring the work of Rose Czarine Albendia in her exhibition, “Conversations”.
Portraits of family, friends, and floral highlights are captured in quiet moments and thoughtfully composed presentations.
The annual Toowoomba Art Society and The Chronicle Junior Art Expo is split this year between two venues.
The Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery is showing the primary school entries while Culliford Gallery at the Toowoomba Art Society is presenting works by secondary school students.
Overall, the submissions lack the vitality and exploration seen in previous years.
The primary school work seems to have declined into prescriptive exercises while the secondary school entries would have benefited from exposure in the more sympathetic setting of the Regional Art
Gallery.
Despite the limitations of the Art Society space, entries from Fairholme College, and drawings by the impressive Kerenza Herndon shine with promise.
The Perrinet Gallery at the Art Society is showing “The Magic of Paperbark,” a selection of work by five members of the Art in Bark group.