At the Artplace Gallery in Claremont, Rosa Della Torre explores the textures and colours of nature.  She appears to have peeled bark off trees before sticking it onto panels and then imitates its colours and textures in oil paint on adjacent panels.  The selection of barks, minus their tree curves and branches are enticing tactile surfaces.  To me these are skins reflecting not only the types of trees in the Helena Valley area but also their age and the direction they were facing.  These tree faces reflect their personality and type of lives lived, just like the faces of people on a train or plane.

Given the close proximity of the original and painted surfaces to each other, I ended up comparing the natural surfaces to their imitators, preferring the original in every case.  Colourscape Vertical No. 1 is a series of vertical panels of oil paints where the paint has been worked and reworked to produce the most convincing work in the exhibitions.  These spoke of process and of time in much the same way the original bark panels did.  To imitate the colour and texture of nature we must create our own processes which build up layers over time, just as the tree does.  Simply imitating colour and texture creates an illusion that becomes a pale shadow next to the original.  Similarly, the groups of panels were more convincing when smaller panels were used.

Also showing at Artplace unit 13 November are drawings and sculptures by Abraham Dunovits.  Along the wall was a row of forty self-portraits which reminded me of the drawings and prints of Mike Parr.  Walking along Donovits's drawings, individual faces jump out, the selection perhaps reflecting my own state of mind at the time.  Also on display were a number of painted MDF board sculptured animals.  Their method of construction reminded me of kitset dinosaurs available from the Australia Geographic Shop or Museum.  The individual pieces could possibly be pulled apart and packed flat enough to put under your arm.  There was a Picasso inspired bull (titled Pablo), a giraffe, a winged camel and a series of dogs, one of which reminded me of the imaginative sculpture of Susan Flavell.  I saw these animals as models for sculptures in sheet metal, particularly since they all appeared to be painted in the same undercoat like orange.