CRICKART I

There are two or three things on my plate, none of which is especially topical except in my own lunchbox, but I figure anything already on the sports page is ugly enough look after itself – who will look after the below but me?

1. Shehan Karunatilaka’s Chinaman: the Legend of Pradeep Mathew.

2. Other recently purchased cricket books.

3. The Cricket Art (& Poetry) Prize.

I’m going to start at the end and work backwards.

3. The Cricket Art (& Poetry) Prize.

I went to the exhibition opening/award-giving ceremony of the Cricket Art and Poetry Prize on 6 October at the SCG. I always like an opportunity to sneak into the members enclosure after hours.

Sometimes I think it's the sheer amount of breathing space built into cricket that makes it amenable to various forms of artistic contemplation. The big green reflecting-pool of a field, the players scattered like clouds or sheep, the balls punctuating some sort of virtual noosphere where the action is really taking place, the sigh of late afternoon... These are the elements that make up a recognisable cricket aesthetic, a sort of "village green" iconography. There was a great variety of styles in the exhibition, but there was also a distinct group of “genre” pieces in this sense.

This aesthetic is really made up of two or three subgenres:

- Flat-Perspective Naïve
- an emphatic variety of Naïve not connected to perspective that I like to call High Mambo-Drysdale Naïve.

- Deep-Perspective Impressionism

Flat-Perspective Naïve

Top to bottom: Lizzy Newcomb: "Tactics", Bryan Bulley: "Dubois from the Cemetery End, gardens #2 Oval, Darwin", Wayne Elliott: "Wheat Town's Cricket Match", John Windus: "Facing Up in the Park".

[Nb. all images (c) the artists, and I have deliberately made these images low-res so as not to be of reproduction quality.]























High Mambo-Drysdale Naïve

Top to bottom: Jan Hynes: "Street Cricket, Late Afternoon, South Townsville", Elisabeth Lawrence: "The Call for Drinks", Bob Marchant: "Caught Out by Bluey Fielding in the Gully" 

(Presence of a Dog obviously a key feature of this subgenre.)

Deep-Perspective Impressionism

 

Top to bottom: Paul Collins: "Club Final", Christine Atkins: "Country Cricket", Luke Harvey: "The National Game", David Charlesworth: "The Maiden, Kolkata (Calcutta)".

Hybrids

And once you have types, you can identify hybrids:

1. Peter Campbell, Owzat
This one combines the naïve flat perspective with impressionistic brush-style. I like it a lot, those frozen floating poses of the players are like little Giotto angels. Plus when you think about the combination of flat perspective and realism, you realise that this framing and perspective is effectively that of a television screen and that gets big bonus points in my book. The television set is after all the village green for most of us.

And this one:

2. John Spooner, Last Wicket, Williamstown
This one combines Impressionist and Naïve elements in a way that is really Post-Impressionist: split scene, high colour and bloc colour, and those are some serious Post-Impressionist Trees (cf here and here).

The winner of the art prize, along with most of the paintings in the exhibition, didn’t belong to one of these genres, and I think it would be extra hard for a member of these genres to win the prize, because of the familiarity of the chord they strike.

My favourites were:

Suzanne Healy: "Test Pattern"

and

Tarli Glover: "Love"