David Larwill

The artist
Private collection; purchased from the above circa 1985
Australian and International Paintings, Christie's, Sydney, 17 - 18 August 1999, lot 92
Private collection, New South Wales; purchased from the above
Scott Livesey Gallery, Melbourne
Private collection, Melbourne; purchased from the above in 2003

Cockatoo Gallery, Launceston, August - September 1985

Tears approximately 10cm long (horizontal) in the lower left hand side of the painting. This has been patched. There are drying cracks above the head (far right hand side) in the blue area and in the blue area near the patch (left hand side). Other areas of the blue do not have any drying cracks. There is some cracking in the black, in particular in the centre of the right hand side (edge). The red, yellow and white areas do not have drying cracks. The paint has been thinly applied and is not visually disturbing.
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David Larwill is well known and widely celebrated for his energetic, decorative funk-brut paintings of the 1990s and early 2000s, with their friezes of raw yet stylised figures and ideograms set in liquid monochrome fields. Perhaps less familiar are the earlier works, with which he first established his reputation in the 1980s.

A member of the legendary Melbourne artists' collective Roar Studios, Larwill's style was formed in that freewheeling Fitzroy environment of professional autonomy, expressionist energy, beer and dogs. With fellow Roar artists Wayne Eager and Peter Ferguson, Larwill travelled to Europe in 1981, where he obtained both broad artistic inspiration and a collection of books about the Cobra group, the radical late 1940s 'red Internationale of artists' that included Asger Jorn, Karel Appel and Pierre Alechinsky. The Cobra artists' world of fantastic creatures, bright colours and dynamic line had a significant influence on many of the young Roar painters, and various levels of Cobra wildness can be discerned in the work of Larwill, Ferguson, Judi Singleton, Mark Schaller and Mark Howson.

Writing in 1985, Jenny Brown described the Roar 'house style' in the following terms: 'Form is fractured. The line quivers and then falls away to dissolve at the edges. What are you looking at? Content? Colour? Whatever it is it refuses to be seen as a whole. It scatters the attention of the eye into specific sections and corners or along the course of one strong black line that becomes indistinct at the point where the paint ran out on the brush. If this art reflects the zeitgeist then it speaks of a great energy and zero concentration span. "Studied spontaneity " is what they offer.'¹

The present work, which dates from that key mid-1980s period, is typical Roarery. The hectic, haptic drawing, with its dashes, sweeps and squiggles, roughly describes three figures in animated interaction, with a boat (or two) between them and a bird flying above. The rough net of black brushstrokes sits over a ground structure of rougher patches of colour - a simple array of red, blue and yellow. This palette is at once reductive and descriptive. Not only are they the primary colours (possibly a nod to Barnet Newman's Who's afraid of red, yellow and blue?), but the red describes (sunburned) skin, the blue is sea, singlet and speedos, the sunny yellow a touch of the beach.

The painting is one of a small group of large works produced by the artist during a three-week residency at the Cockatoo Gallery, Launceston, another artist-run space, in August 1985. At he time, Larwill said: 'I don't usually paint to idea, but this display will be based on a two-week driving holiday I took to Cairns before arriving in Tasmania.'²  The title of the work parallels the larrikin wit of its style, connecting the holiday pleasures of a small tropical island off the coast of Cairns to the gritty inner city suburb where the Roar adventure began.

1.  Jenny Brown, '"It hits people in the guts'', Age (Entertainment guide), 25 October 1985
2.  David Larwill, quoted in 'Melbourne "guest artist" is not a man for express labels', Launceston Examiner, 21 August 1985