Richard Read – Another reading of the America's Cup era

Thursday, 4 July 2024, 6–7.30pm

Experience some of the exhilaration and reflect on some of the ironies that flourished in the art world in Western Australia, particularly Fremantle, the epicentre of the America’s Cup defence in the late 1980s, through Richard Read’s talk at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery. This fully illustrated lecture complements the exhibition, THE END OF HISTORY currently at the gallery.

Having travelled from the Eastern States on the Indian Pacific, Emeritus Professor Richard Read commenced at UWA as a Lecturer at what was then the Department of Fine Arts on 1 January 1990. He was soon appointed to the Board of the LWAG, joining the inaugural Director Sandy Murray and Janet Holmes a Court amongst others. In Read’s words, “we bought some pictures and any enjoyed vigorous discussions”. 

Read brought a fresh eye to the local art scene. Taking in the energy and context, he was introduced to the work of Fremantle based Roger Leevers, whom he viewed as an ‘extremely original outsider artist,’ though Roger would not own the term.  Leevers now lives in Geraldton. Read comments: ‘His art is devoted to startlingly frank moments of elation set on land and sea where work or play has taken him. During the 1980s, while part of the Fremantle Arts scene, which, amongst others, included Giles Hohnen, Evelyn Kotai, George Haynes and Jane Martin - whose daughter Sally he worked with - he earned $10 an hour chalking off-beat blackboard ads for meals and the new boutique beers in Fremantle pubs.’

No trace of these intrinsically ephemeral works would have survived without the urgings of George Haynes to photograph them systematically, though city-slickers in the know would take the train from the CBD to sample his latest crop of hip productions.

Read notes that: ‘Spontaneously drawn under pressure of time, censorship and the artist’s colour-blindness, they present oblique but biting satires of the excesses, fads and fetishes of the ‘WA Inc. era.”

From copies and interviews provided by the artist for this modest survey of his work, Read attempts to recover something of the original context of this forgotten work and how it makes the recent and local past both intimately present and very, very strange.

Biography

Richard Read is Emeritus Professor and Senior Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia, Perth. He wrote the first book on British psychoanalytic art critic Adrian Stokes, which won a national book prize, and has published on the relationship between literature and the visual arts, Giotto, Rembrandt, the British Grand Tour of Italy, the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European art, art criticism and theory, and complex images in global contexts. Recent books include Colonisation, Wilderness and Other Spaces co-edited with Kenneth Haltman, University of Oklahoma (Terra Foundation for American Art, 2020; Yale E-Portal 2022) and Sensory Perception, History and Geology: the Afterlife of Molyneux’s Question in Nineteenth-century Landscape Painting and Cultural Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2023). He is under contract with Bloomsbury Visual Art to publish a book on The Reverse Canvas: Meta-Painting in Western Art on which he will work during a Fellowship at King’s College, Cambridge, later this year.

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Image: Roger Leevers, untitled, c1980s, chalk on black board