Exploration.
It dawned on me in the months leading up to the exhibition this painting is from.
I had been revisiting the journals of the English explorer Edward John Eyre, a two volume set of books reproducing his captivating journal entries.
They detailed his party's 1840 attempt to cross the salt lakes in northern South Australia and an eventual/eventful crossing of King George Sound to Albany in Western Australia..some eight hundred and fifty miles of desert country.
I had first read the journals back in 2004, inspiring a large portrait painting of Eyre and although I had often thought of reinterpreting some of the journal passages since that time, nothing progressed past sketchbook notes and small rough drawings.
Until the opportunity to contribute to "Tougher Love" a couple of years ago.
It was through the revisitation of the journals that I also realised how much drawing and painting is in a way, a form of exploration.
I wouldn't suggest for a minute a similarity between Eyres journey and that of my own of course, but exploration in a literal sense, in my case exploring ideas on paper or canvas.. can similarly involve mixed feelings of discovery, disappointment, surprise and exaltation. Light and darkness.
Part of my compulsion to create art is the attraction of the unknown, the curiosity in where a piece of art might lead me and the element of risk (in my eyes) of failure. There is a continual challenging of oneself for the work to be fully realised and an importance to remain focused.
There is discipline, but there is discovery.
- Leith O'Malley
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O’Malley’s approach to the subject of Edward John Eyre (EJE) typifies the artist’s attitude to life and to the role of art in throwing up new ways of looking at things.
In many respects it resembles the strategies used by Sydney Nolan when creating his Ned Kelly series. In this series fact, fiction and fantasy combined to create iconic images that have endured.
Like Nolan, O’Malley treats incongruity as the only way to come to terms with the history of the man (EJE) and his arduous journey along the West Coast and across the Great Australian Bight.
Depicting EJE as a more disheveled character astride a kangaroo references the hybridity of Nolan’s Burke and Will series, man-camel.
Yet for all the mockumentary nature of O’Malley’s revisitation of Eyre’s journey the diaristic panels in particular, with their extracts from Eyre’s journal, offer insights into the testing nature and human dimensions of this risky adventure.
O’Malley attended a school in his youth named after Edward John Eyre and sees this as some kind of portent or sign that he is destined to tell the ‘real story’.
He has become a collector of sorts of all kinds of EJE material and has immersed himself in Eyre’s travel journal.
Like Eyre stumbling through the saltbush this looks like a never-ending journey. O’Malley once said, ‘creating art can somehow transport you to another world, and for my own part this has become a very addictive but rewarding ritual. I’m curious about where this will lead.’ - John Neylon
About John Neylon:
John Neylon is an Adelaide-based independent author, curator and formerly Head of Education, Art Gallery of South Australia (1988 – 2005). He has worked continuously as a media arts writer and art critic since the 1980s, writes for The Adelaide Review, lectures in contemporary art at the Adelaide Central School of Art, is a national tour lecturer for the Australian and Decorative Fine Arts Society (ADFAS) and a member of the International Art Critics Association (AICA). In 2005 he received the Ministers’ Award for Excellence in Arts Education and in 2014 The Lorne Sculpture Biennale Scarlett Award for critical writing (contemporary sculpture).