the art of lawrence daws
This exhibition comes some ten years after The University of Queensland Art Museum mounted its own survey of one of Australia’s most determinedly cerebral and enigmatic painters, Lawrence Daws.2 On several accounts the Caloundra enterprise is timely. Firstly, it celebrates ten years of the regional gallery’s existence while paying homage to a distinguished painter based in the area for many years. Secondly, this retrospective takes a different approach to an oeuvre covering six decades than that presented earlier in Brisbane. This time, there is a focus on the distinctive volcanic cones known as The Glasshouse Mountains that form a back-drop to the home Lawrence Daws and his wife Edit created in the Sunshine Coast’s hinterland at Owl Creek. It underlines that fact that without the nurturing and inspirational environment of this remote property, the artist may not have so successfully distilled the maelstrom of ideas and sensations emanating from his extensive travels abroad, nor achieved the quiet necessary for in-depth reading.
As a consequence, the exhibition quite rightly departs in numerous ways from the Queensland landscape per se and instead builds an overview of the inner workings of the mind as much as geography and human encounters. The assembly of images conveys the mystery and poetic charge (both brutal and redemptive) that has shaped Daws’s work from the 1950s to the present day. In this survey of fifty paintings, plus prints and drawings, sketchbooks and writings, we understand the absolute commitment of the artist to search for the meaning of human existence. Whatever the medium, his vision of man’s inhumanity towards his fellow travellers on earth and the wilful destruction of the natural world are themes present throughout the