Don Driver's powerful wit drives inventive work

Don Driver's 'Ernie' possesses playful energy, but there is menace behind the cartoon facade.

Artists find their own ways to the skills they need to express their ideas. This week, the galleries of Parnell and Newmarket offer prime examples of the way skill and thought are matched.

Don Driver is a veteran artist famous enough to have been given the accolade of retrospective exhibitions in public galleries. Many years ago he had a stroke that left him unable to paint in any conventional way. His work is assemblage - he brings together found objects to express his view of the world. The element of skill is confined to the selection of the objects and the matching and interplay of colours.

Colour is one aspect of his work that is very effective. In his exhibition Play Time and Formal Dress, which is at Artis Gallery in Parnell until July 31, there is opposite the entrance a work called Door. It is large and very striking, notably because of two rich mahogany-red plastic panels that make a portal at the centre of the work. This closed entrance is flanked by a contrasting frame of tea-chests and enlivened by the bright, winking eyes of three CDs. It makes a powerful ensemble.

This work has a classical stillness but, by contrast, there is a raucous, playful energy in Ernie, a deflated doll equipped with the spiky menace of a bale-hook as penis to show that even the most innocent of cartoon characters can have dangers. The colour reflects the wit and satire of the idea.

Since manual skill is not in the frame, the assemblage method is inconsistent. Two works, both called Playtime, which employ grouping of CD cases, fail to spark.

The formal dress is a return to Driver's earliest abstract work, which used formal bands of colour. Here, in Chromatic, the bands are industrial vanes of aluminium enamelled in red and purple. The colour is neatly harmonious and the use of the ready-formed horizontals a neat trick that adds to a show that gives glimpses of the power Driver can command.

The match between ideas and skill as well as between painting and drawing are tellingly exemplified in two exhibitions at the Anna Bibby Gallery in Newmarket which run until July 30.

Sam Mitchell, in Kiss it Better, shows that life has presented her with plenty of ideas. Her drawings, most of which are obviously autobiographical, are done on title pages and end-papers of books and there are masses of them arranged in a grid pattern.

At first glance they look like unskilled, naive, awkward doodling. The awkwardness comes from a conscious denial of drawing skills in many of the works, although in others the drawing is impeccable, notably when the artist is drawing birds.

There are odd, unconvincing conventions, particularly for hair. Yet both the skill and the denial of it contribute to the sense of the immediate transfer of thought to the page.

As in the Driver show, there is a fair leavening of wit, often very sexual and sometimes very funny, like the image of the frog that has leapt on the princess before she has given him the obligatory kiss.

Many of the drawings are designs for tattoos, but given an ironic twist. Tigers lurk here and there and snakes are everywhere.

Sometimes they are very menacing, especially when they emerge instead of words from mouths choked with their horrible presence. These doodles are about what it is to be alive and in a relationship. The relationship aspect gives the best of them a sense of real tension.

Skill only is on display in the other part of this show - a series of budgies and canaries done on book covers and making neat little illustrations.

There are birds, as well as real skill in handling paint, in the second show at Anna Bibby, paintings by Emily Wolfe. She has made a speciality of painting surfaces. At the beginning of her career it was the shine of ceramic bowls. These days she specialises in the opaque translucency of net curtains. The curtains have patterns of birds in them, especially peacocks. There is even more skill in suggesting light beyond the curtains. Sometimes we are outside looking in, at other times we look out.

There is much more to these paintings than the simple skills of imitating appearances and the best - such as Interior - achieve a wonderful metaphorical level.

At the Studio of Contemporary Art in Newmarket, Rudy van der Pol in his show The Outside In has found the weaving and wiring skills to make his lively sculptures in copper. His ideas are fairly conventional except for two works that have an organic surface as varied as scales, yet have a geometric form. Leap, which is an arch, and Reach, a horned arc, are imaginative works that would make outstanding architectural features.