Summertime 1994

LIN ONUS (1948-1996)

Yorta Yorta language group
Summertime 1994

synthetic polymer paint on card
20.0 x 63.0 cm; 48.0 x 68.5 cm (framed)

Provenance:
Private collection, Melbourne
Deutscher-Menzies, Sydney, 16 March 2005, lot 83A (as Summer Time)
Private collection, Sydney
Estate of the above

Related Works:
This is a preparatory work for the following paintings, formerly in the collection of Melbourne Airport:Fish, Ferns and Rocks 1995, gouache on card, 27.5 x 66.5 cmFish, Ferns and Rocks 1995, gouache on card, 28.0 x 66.5 cmFish at Dusk 1995, gouache on card, 27.5 x 66.5 cmFish at Dusk 1995, gouache on card, 27.0 x 63.0 cm

Estimate: $50000 - 70000

Result Hammer: $55000

Through his extensive practice as an urban Indigenous artist and activist, Lin Onus AM enacted his hope ‘that history might see me as some sort of bridge between cultures’.(1) He achieved this through his art, by inserting his Aboriginal cultural heritage into Western representational visual systems; and in his life, by tirelessly promoting Indigenous civil and land rights through board membership of various government agencies.

The inclusive cultural convergence in Onus’s work was directed ‘to unravel contradictions rather than intensify hidden meanings’(2) and, from the mid-1980s, produced a distinctive hybrid style that collapsed traditional cultural divides by partnering Western photorealist systems with Indigenous symbolism. It was a pictorial approach he described as belonging to the ‘“Bower Bird” school … picking up bits and pieces, here and there…’ but which enabled him to develop a contemporary urban Aboriginal vision about identity and place.(3) For Onus, ‘art was the tool, the weapon and the shelter – a very powerful medium.’(4)

Raised in suburban Melbourne, Onus was the only son of a Scottish-born mother and an aboriginal father, a Yorta Yorta man.  Both of his parents were ardent political activists.  Onus learned to paint by copying techniques employed in his father’s business, Aboriginal Enterprises, a training and commercial outlet for traditional artefact replicas established in 1952. Albert Namatjira (1902-1959) and Nyoongah artist Revel Cooper (1934-1983) were visitors, and Onus absorbed the assimilated European landscape painting style of these older artists which influenced the urban Aboriginal art movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Onus’s own early 1980s paintings drew on the local Dandenongs landscape to sharply invoke the lived legacy of colonialism.

In 1986, Onus visited the Maningrida community in the Northern Territory’s Arnhem Land, as the Victorian representative of the Aboriginal Arts Board.  The trip provided a ‘spiritual awakening’(5) that pivoted his painting towards a new style, fostered by his friendship with senior Yolngu bark artist Djiwul (Jack) Wunuwun (1930-1990) who adopted Onus into his Murrungun-Djinang clan and became his art mentor.

Over many subsequent road trips to Ramingining and the Maningrida Garmedi outstation, Onus was given permission to use the clan’s traditional storylines and its ceremonial rarrk design (a cross-hatching pattern) which appeared in his paintings from the late 1980s as part of his new visual vocabulary. Going back to Arnhem Land allowed Onus to regain ‘all the stuff that colonialism has taken away – language and ceremony.’(6)

Water and its reflected natural surrounds appeared in one of Onus’s first photorealist paintings of 1985 and his ancestral connection to the watery landscapes of his beloved Murray River region was enhanced by an artist residency in Yokohama, Japan, in 1989. Here Onus noted the refined aesthetic of the traditional Japanese garden which ‘isn’t complete without a pond and much less complete without fish.’(7) Imagery of fish in water became a recurring motif in Onus’s work, whether in outback wetlands or the seas of Antarctica, where he visited as an artist expeditioner in 1994.

Onus’s late water-and-reflection paintings of the 1990s drew on these experiences and conjure Wunuwun’s teaching of ‘seeing below the surface.’(8) Their serene contemplative tone, in contrast to his politically charged sculptures of this time, is most evident in four paintings commissioned in 1995 by Melbourne Airport.

Summer Time 1994 is one of Onus’s preparatory works on card for this major commission, considered among his most lyrical and complete bodies of work, followed as it was by Onus’s premature death in 1996. With this exploratory work, Onus divides the painted image into what lies beneath the water (traditional raark patterned fish) and what is reflected above on its surface (trees and sky); a limpid configuration of real versus illusory effects that embody the spiritual in the physical and an enfolding oneness of land, water and sky.  

Footnotes:

1. Lin Onus, quoted in Neale, M., Urban Dingo: The Art of Lin Onus 1948-1996, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2000, p.67
2. O’Ferrall, M., ‘Lin Onus,’ Australian Perspecta 1991, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1991, p.80
3. Lin Onus, quoted by Neale, M., op.cit., p.12
4. Eather, M., ‘“Under the Influence”: The Collaborative World of Lin Onus,’ in Neale, M., op. cit., p.55
5. Lin Onus, quoted in Leslie, D., ‘Earth, Spirit and Belonging in Australian Art,’ Spirit in the Land, McClelland Gallery + Sculpture Park, Victoria, 2010-2011, p.19
6. Lin Onus, quoted in Neale, M., op. cit., p.15
7. Lin Onus, quoted in ‘Australia’s Great Crossover Indigenous Artist Comes to London for a One-man Show at Messums,’ Artdaily, 29 June 2016, accessed October 2024: https://artdaily.cc/news/88448/Australias-
8. Neale, M., op. cit., p.19

Jenepher Duncan

Jenepher Duncan is an independent art consultant.  She was previously Curator of Contemporary Australian Art at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth and Director of the Monash University Museum of Art and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne.

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