Barbie Kjar

Every turn and twist of shape
November & December 1992

Barbie Kjar has been drawing and painting since early childhood but it was only after qualifying as a teacher of English and History, followed by several years of travelling and teaching, that she decided to embark on a career as a printmaker. She began by experimenting with a range of techniques, including sugar-lift which she studied during a visit to the United States. Nowadays she has settled, for the time being at least, on dry-point etching with occasional hand-colouring.

Nearly everything in this exhibition has been produced by this method and yet, when one first sees the prints, one is struck at once by differences, by the enormous range in subject, mood, size, tone, texture and effect. At one end of the spectrum are the large, vivid portraits of the man in the red shirt patterned with fruit, an elegant clown with a Japanese white face and a harlequin's cap of hair who balances oranges and threatens to swallow goldfish while his spotted tie changes before our eyes into a snake. At the other extreme is the series of small, blue-tinted prints, sombre and mysterious, diverse as the experiences that inform the various sequences, begin to suggest themselves. Some work - the bull series, for instance, and certain of the portraits - are the product of a visit to Arenys de Mar, near Barcelona, earlier this year. Other figures have the solidity and strangeness of Easter island sculptures or Paleolithic cave paintings, while still others, like 'Marise with Artichoke' or 'Simon and Hourglass', have a kind of delicate brio that recalls Matisse's portrait prints from the nineteen-twenties.

Yet having recognised the variety in this collection, one sees that the different series, at first glance so unlike, are, in fact, linked by a whole spreading network of subtle connections. The people in the portraits, though strikingly individual, are also acts playing out roles, stylish mocking wearers of dead-pan masks, archetypes, emblems who, as such, are not, after all, so far as one might have thought from the  methylic figures of the 'Farewell' series. Their eyes are akin to the eye that drops tears on a mourning woman in 'The Sky is Crying'; more eyes swim like fish on the hide of a bull. Eyes and fish lie under the feet of the long-lost thylacine, riot over bulls then, roll in a dish, balance on a clown's skull, becoming, with every turn and shift of shape, stranger and more luminous in their meanings. In the end it is clear that these meanings are fashioned by a single gifted individual from a full life, a fecund wit, a quirky imagination and a loving, energetic engagement with her art.

Margaret Scott (Poet and Novelist)
Hobart, November 1992

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