the go-betweens paintings
The 'The Go-Betweens paintings', a recent series by Anne Wallace, resonate with themes that confound the separation of the personal and the 'persona'. These portraits of Robert Forster and Grant McLennan, founding members of the Brisbane band, may appear as painted tributes by a devoted fan-and undoubtedly they are. Even so, the significance of 'names' in these paintings essentially becomes absorbed by Wallace's distinctive style. As a consequence, that strange 'connection' or 'familiarity' which we identify with in Wallace's work, and which acts like a thread through her entire oeuvre, is amplified and even localised by these new paintings.
The largest image of this series, Robert Forster and Grant McLennan: The GoBetweens 2001, captures a slumbering domesticity, and in turn proposes a connection between these two local 'identities' and ourselves. Pictured is Grant McLennan reclining on a sofa with poetry book in hand. Robert Forster, who is sitting on the floor below, stares at the viewer, his sober expression doubled by a mirror. During his lecture at the exhibition's opening, Chris McAuliffe suggested that in general, the encounter between artist and musician usually assists in 'eliminating prop and strut'; moreover, that it 'humanises and equalises' the sitter.1 In Wallace's case, the 'everyday' air to this portrait draws a tangible relationship closer to our own experiences.
Forster sits in Showpeople wearing a robe and gesturing in a flamboyant pose typical of his musical 'persona'. Flanked by small souvenir photographs of actress Lee Remick and poet Anne Sexton, he is perhaps mimicking their own poses—magnetised by the allure of these 'stars' as he airs his own taste. Bringing the sitter closer to home, such images are signifiers that give perspective to our own