Threshold and Palimpsest

Eva Schultz and Damon Bird Despard Gallery, Castray Esp Until April 13 Price range: $1250-$7750

Hobart artists Eva Schultz and Damon Bird vie for attention with their plenteous examples of oil painting skills. There are comparatively few figurative as opposed to landscape artists in Tasmania so the unusual vision of Schultz is an even more a valuable one. This is the person who ensnared both the sponsors’ and people’s choices at the 2014 RACT Youth Portraiture Prize for her compelling likeness of a young man morosely contemplating a road not yet taken.

Schultz takes us over the threshold and into the realm of highly theatrical, problematic situations that border on the macabre. She combines an impressive painterly finesse with a richly endowed imagination. She also consigns a kind of surrealism with fastidious realism to the canvases.

Wellspring shows a young man on a 1940s sofa. The meaning of his cross-legged, platform-heeled stance and flimsy voile attire is ambiguous although comparatively straightforward when certain pieces are reflected on.

Crocodile sees a nude young woman encircled by red cranes that bring Sydney Long or even Matisse to mind. Others with Freudian snakes, animals, weaponry and marked, diseased skin afford much speculation. Subject matter and the employment of techniques of chiaroscuro give no geographical base to her work.

Previously, Damon Bird was best known for his academic and artistic pursuit of the cider gum tree or eucalyptus gunnii. Furthering this interest he has depicted a part of one in its almost gnarled anguish under an azure sky in the Central Highlands. Several others that have been inspired by this indigenous species are shown in a slightly sinister way that brings to mind the Edwardian-era illustrator of folk tales, Arthur Rackham.