John Earle is one of this area's most senior artists. He made his reputation as part of a movement at least 30 years ago for expansive, highly detailed panoramas of our iconic beaches.
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These became so popular, both as paintings and in photographic prints, that they virtually became the defining images of the city.
After the end of steelmaking a new hedonistic lifestyle replaced, in the popular imagination, industrial grime and the hard gritty physical work at BHP, which for the rest of Australia had characterised this city.
Today you can drive around many suburbs in the evening and see into the illuminated living rooms with a John Earle or Rod Bathgate painting in pride of place.
Both had a surfer's eye for the waves curling along the sweep of sand south of Bar Beach, with multi-coloured umbrellas and happy family groups animating a sunlit coastline of blue and gold.
But artists can't stand still, and in more recent years John Earle has experimented with new subjects, beachscapes from further afield, Sydney Harbour, jaunty abstract interlocking shapes, even flower studies.
He seems now to be exploring a new and more intimate form of landscape, with the results on view at the Hunter Wetlands Centre until September 11.
The paintings are smaller; colour is muted. Subjects include waterways and tracks extending back into the trees, often mysteriously shadowy.
I can't remember John Earle ever painting trees before. They demand a whole new colour scheme as well as a more traditional, even historical, composition. I believe he spent many hours with an easel in the wetlands.
Of course there are also paintings of water birds and a selection of painted ceramics, some still featuring the beach.
There are also several paintings of the Hunter Valley. A bird's-eye view shows the flat landscape of crops and farms extending to the horizon, with some kind of puzzling divine visitation animating the scene.
It will be rewarding to see where his paintings will go next. His technical skill could be applied in many realistic subject areas, creating new challenges in works deploying both a new palette and new approaches to composition.
Maybe he will return to painting the figure, building on the beachgoers of earlier works. Perhaps in coming years we will find him a finalist in the Kilgour Prize.
Also on show are several large decorative hangings by Miranda Earle, John's daughter. She has regularly used flowers to create imposing, highly organised images, reminiscent of the patterns from the William Morris workshop of a century ago, where the vitality of living forms is tamed by flat patterning into textiles and wall papers.
Edward Milan at ASW
Another current exhibition tempting a visit is at Art Systems Wickham until tomorrow. Edward Milan is a familiar and instantly recognisable artist who can turn almost anything into a work of art.
Apart from the sinister submarine in the Newcastle Art Gallery sculpture garden, his most visible work is probably still the metal cut-out fleet of ships on the bridge over Throsby Creek on the Industrial Highway.
This location was a significant traditional site over many generations for local tribal groupings and the bridge project was the result of a commission in 1996 shared with Mini Heath, the Indigenous designer from Port Stephens. The orange-painted cut-out panels, featuring an abstract pattern based on the mangroves lining the creek, form the railings of the bridge. They still look basically as sharp and confident as Eddie's blue shipping, though a fresh coat of paint would certainly enhance one of the area's most important pieces of public art.
Edward Milan has not had the opportunity to work on this scale since that time nearly 25 years ago, nor is he still making cut-outs from sheet steel. However, the profile of a toy oceangoing bulk carrier appears again and again in the present exhibition in many small painted wall assemblages, along with aeroplanes and sedans and a newly developed three-lobed propeller, the stuff of modern-day fairy tales.
The works, many only hand-span sized, are built up from timber offcuts by an artist who is obviously always compulsively making things, creating art from discarded scraps, each piece an act of joy in creating something out of nothing.