Artist Michael Shannon's composition in a minor key

IT is part of the duty of regional galleries to present the work of minor artists, but the Michael Shannon exhibition is less than satisfactory.

Michael Shannon

WHEN Giorgio Vasari published his monumental Lives of the Artists in 1550, he explained that part of his motivation was to preserve the memory of the artists of the past two centuries from the encroachment of oblivion, and thanks to his efforts we know a great deal about some figures who would otherwise be almost forgotten, and a lot more than we would otherwise know about those who interest us the most.

It is certainly a laudable undertaking, and part of the duty of state and regional galleries, to gather and present the work of minor artists as well as well as to review that of the greater figures. But many individuals, of course, are destined to disappear from memory, winnowed by the passage of time, or at least to fall from the body of the text of history into its footnotes.

Such is probably the case with Michael Shannon, in spite of the comprehensive retrospective exhibition of his work mounted by the Ballarat Art Gallery, accompanied by a catalogue with several useful essays. It is a good exhibition, but most of the work is rather less than satisfactory.

Shannon was born in Adelaide and as a schoolboy came to the notice of Jeffrey Smart, whose art classes he had been attending. Some years later, he spent the winter of 1949-50 on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples with Smart and Jacqueline Hicks, and early drawings in the exhibition, especially of human figures, show Smart's influence very strongly. Smart mentions him several times in his autobiography Not Quite Straight, including recounting an incident in which he urged Shannon to admit that he was homosexual, which he denied at the time. They remained friends and correspondents until Shannon's death in 1993.

Other early drawings include attractive watercolours of Italian buildings, and then drawings and watercolours of buildings in London. They are evidence of talent and especially of a graphic sensibility that persists throughout his oeuvre; many of Shannon's later works, in fact, are more like coloured drawings than paintings. But the graphic ability he demonstrates in these works is the kind suited to artists for whom drawing is a means to an end rather than an end in itself, such as architects, theatre designers or interior designers. It is functional and elegant enough but not strong or incisive.

Similarly, his first paintings, produced in Australia in the early 50s, look like the sort of modernist design that rapidly became the staple of advertisements and graphic design at the time. In 1953 Shannon won the George Crouch Memorial Prize at the Ballarat Art Gallery with My Mabel Waits for Me, a picture which derives in part from Drysdale, but in a more decorative mode. There was a fuss at the time and outraged letters to the paper; certainly the tone of the complaints was intemperate and in one case absurd, but the picture is far from a distinguished work of art.

But there were worse influences to come. In the next few years we can see the baneful influence of Bernard Buffet, the Parisian purveyor of a modernist kitsch, which Shannon would have picked up from John Brack, with whom he was working at the time. Brack was also badly infected, but being a superior artist was capable of producing memorable work in spite of this handicap. In Shannon's case, the mannerisms of reductive, scratchy lines and heavy black contours blight all the production of the mid-50s up to about 1957.

In the course of 1957 he seems to make considerable progress. The Shot Tower, and then Flinders Lane and Six Little Tailors and the large Still Life, all of 1958, are effective images of modern cities in spite of the heavy outlines. The Pensioner, also of 1958, is less successful because dark contours that are acceptable in architectural views are too obtrusive in the human figure.

Then quite suddenly, at the end of the decade, the dark outlines overwhelm his world in aerial views of cities reduced to a grid patterning that has some affinities with the peculiarly Melburnian styles of Roger Kemp and Leonard French. This phase persists into the early 60s, with such works as The City (1961) and The City No 3 (1962), painted in a suffocating colour scheme of unrelieved reds and browns. The works are claustrophobic and correspond, apparently, to a crisis of confidence concerning his own direction and his position between the warring camps of abstraction and figuration.

By the mid-60s, he regains his composure and produces a series of interiors and shopfronts, including The Milk Bar (1965) and The Studio Window (1965). They are competent and sometimes interesting, but there is no sense he has found a painterly idiom that is really his own, that is to say, one that is properly founded in a sensibility or an understanding of the world. Without necessity or deep conviction, his work cannot evolve, but only drift into further unrelated stylistic variations.

In the following years there are paintings of Queensland houses, which again reveal Shannon's limitation as a painter. They are essentially drawings with colour, and the colour tends either to be arbitrary, as in Cane Cutter's House (1967), which is all blue and green, or else an odd mixture of literal and arbitrary, as in several other groups of houses painted in bright local hues and set against a brown earth and sky.

And what are these pictures about? Even more conspicuously than in the earlier cityscapes and shopfronts, there is an imaginative void at the heart of the work. The buildings are represented as vaguely picturesque, but there is no suggestion - as there is in Hopper or Smart - of any human interest attached to them. One can't help wondering, before these pictures, whether Shannon really had nothing to say, or whether he was being evasive.

The bathing pictures that come next suggest the latter explanation without excluding the former. They show boys swimming at public baths, but the indeterminacy of the figures is striking compared to the solidity of Smart's early paintings of bathing subjects. Such an indirect, reticent approach to the subject might still be effective if the pictures were better painted; but they are done in dreadful monochromes like the pictures one sometimes sees in furniture showrooms or motels, and the paint is brushed on in blurred streaks with similarly dubious associations.

Shannon returns to aerial views of cities in the late 60s, vast sweeps of roads and rooftops bounded by sky or sea. The scale and complexity speak ostensibly of energy, and this is the sort of work that can be made to sound impressive in writing, but the reality of the pictures, if you look at them at all seriously, is very different. They reveal an unfortunate combination of superficial hyperactivity with what one is tempted to call a kind of laziness; there is at any rate a striking want of the real energy that an artist needs to do something well. The very scale is like an excuse to paint everything quickly and nothing with attention or care. The skies and sea are again done in a flaccid, amorphous streaking.

A series of drawings and smaller studies demonstrate the same general weakness as well as a lack of the imagination that allows us to engage with what is beyond our own minds. A still life of shoes is symptomatic: again a lot of apparent energy, but the result is somehow lifeless, unable to get past a style that is self-conscious and yet facile. Shannon is not looking hard enough at the objects: the attention is too perfunctory.

It is partly the result of a determination to be artistic, for portraits of the same period show that he could draw quite well in a conventional way. Perhaps a more conventional study of the shoes would have looked too much like an academic exercise.

But it would also have revealed the banality of the subject even more starkly: why this pile of shoes, anyway? For even the most modest straightforward rendering reveals some kind of truth, while this kind of drawing, like so many that one sees in art schools, combines superficiality with a hollow claim to expressiveness.

Among all the works of this period there is one drawing that stands out for unexpectedly surreal qualities that almost remind one of George Baldessin. It is a strange surreal outline of an androgynous figure with its head trapped in a birdcage; the figure seems to have one breast and a female head but to carry the bust of a boy, like a spare head, between its legs. Obscure as the imagery is, it is imbued with a poignancy that is completely missing from the rest of Shannon's oeuvre, at least as it is displayed here.

The landscapes painted in the last decades of his life, as most people seem to agree, are by far the best work he did. Nature has an undeniable presence that draws even the most self-centred of us out of ourselves: out of our preoccupations, ambitions, fantasies, illusions and fears and into some kind of connection with a reality that transcends our own. So for the first time we feel Shannon is really looking, really reaching out to another world, instead of hastening to turn something too casually glimpsed into ill-digested style. Some of the pictures, especially the studies of rocks, are impressive and seem to reveal the influence of Lloyd Rees, except that Shannon never achieves the same acute scrutiny or graphic precision.

On the whole, although these late pictures are quite appealing, they still fall short of being completely convincing, beautiful or capable of bearing sustained attention. They are still too quickly painted in parts and unresolved in details, like the daubed-in foreground trees.

Shannon remains not only a minor painter but an illustration of weaknesses repeatedly encountered among Australian artists, and no doubt others as well. Too often, after showing some spark of early promise, they get worse instead of getting better: they copy the styles of more powerful contemporaries without making them their own; they become tangled in mannerisms that they are incapable of transcending.

The problem is not just an incapacity, but an unwillingness to improve, a reluctance to take greater care; there is a fear of venturing away from some stylistic formula they have happened upon, in case they lose their inspiration. It is like the fallacious idea, some decades ago, that if you taught children grammar you would crush their creativity; but in reality it is grammar that allows us to write, just as it is learning to play an instrument that allows us to make music.

Michael Shannon, Ballarat Art Gallery, Victoria, to February 12