Art

Lines for Birds: Poems and Paintings by Barry Hill and John Wolseley

Item: Lines for Birds
Author: Chris Wallace-crabbe

by Chris Wallace-Crabbe •

June 2011, no. 332

UWA Publishing, $59.95 pb, 256 pp

Art

Lines for Birds: Poems and Paintings by Barry Hill and John Wolseley

by Chris Wallace-Crabbe •

June 2011, no. 332

The painter and outdoor draughtsman John Wolseley is utterly unusual among artists in this country. Marvellously accomplished yet old-fashioned, he could be seen as an artist who cheekily leapt from traditional to postmodern without passing through any of the intermediate stages. His deeply natural pictures can’t be categorised easily, for all that they are entrancing. In Lines for Birds, they are reproduced side by side with the comparably responsive poems of Barry Hill.

Chris Wallace-Crabbe

Chris Wallace-Crabbe AM is the author of more than twenty collections of poetry. His most recent books of verse include The Universe Looks Down (2005), and Telling a Hawk from a Handsaw (2008). He is Professor Emeritus in Culture and Communication at Melbourne University. Also a public speaker and commentator on the visual arts, he specialises in ‘artists’ books’. Read It Again, a volume of critical essays, was published in 2005. Among other awards he has won the Dublin Prize for Arts and Sciences and the Christopher Brennan Award for Literature. His latest book is Rondo (2018).