Review by Karl James

At first glance, Leith O'Malley's “Red Dust Girl” series invokes his love of contemporary illustration with its simplicity of design and striking power to just jump at the viewer.

These large oil on canvas works are figuratively simple in composition but make no mistake, the paint work is delicious with luscious textures, tactile surfaces and collaged with natures discards. One wants to reach out and feel the very canvas.

Full of outback hues, rich magentas, cobalt skies and desert ochre applied in buttery layers, these paintings have an underlying Australianess about them as the title of the series suggests. They also follow the seasons.

Summer with its blazing, sizzling outback.. a sort of piercing Vincent heat, invigorating and maddening. Then there are the featherlike leaves of Autumn, falling about her and nesting at her feet. Thick and pillow soft, a season of calm reflection. Winter rain. Cleansing, ultramarine and diamonds, a cool tonic for the red raw earth. Finally Spring. All petals and newness, the simple joys of life, rebirth. A warm caress and motherly wonder.

But who is the girl, this doll like puppet? Zen like in her calm yet so poetic and mysterious? Leith often incorporates metaphor in his work. Is it the artist's daughter perhaps or could it be “Eratos”, the artists muse guiding the creative spirit. Nothing is certain, but maybe we really see the artist here with his thoughts floating as visions do, bound not by the earth. Maybe he is like many of us, wary of change yet accepting of it.

Of this new work Leith says “part of it is a reaction to living far from the city in a regional area. There is an underlying celebration of solitude and adaptation to my surroundings. That no matter what seasons bring we remain unchanged, and that isolation should be embraced. I believe in my own case it really is a stimulus for creativity”.

If one looks beyond this little red dust girl of ponytail innocence and into those piercing cornflower eyes there is a knowing, an accepting. She hovers above the ground not at one with nature but unfazed by the seasons change, and like the hand that holds the brush, she adapts.

Karl James (Soth Australian Artist)

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RED DUST GIRL- AN ENCOUNTER WITH LEITH O'MALLEY'S IMAGINATION..

  Review by Brian Chikwava

Brian Chikwava is a London based writer and art critic who won the 2004 Caine Prize for African Writing for his story “ Seventh Street Alchemy”. He is currently working on his debut novel, and recently gave a reading at the Oxford Literary Festival in the UK .

There is something about Leith O'Malley's world. It is hard to put a finger on it.

Maybe it is because the visual alchemy that gushes out of Leith 's mind seems to be the language of the marginalised, replete with visual metaphors that give a voice to fringe life.

Leith 's world is populated by characters that bend space around them in the Einsteinium way, carrying with them stories just begging for a painter's interpretation. His works live somewhere between a contemporary life where meaning is manufactured by familiar institutions of power, and another world which seldom enters the mass consciousness.

In that regard his latest “Red Dust Girl” series is no exception.

She's a wide eyed reticent enigma that floats above a red, scorched baron earth, hiding under her umbrella from a blue rain in winter or hanging onto flowers that are falling apart while surrounded by the blue shards of her chilly spring reality.

She endures the unforgiving Australian summer inferno and finally in autumn folds her hands behind her back, shoulders seductively inclined.

There is certain defiance about her, and there is beauty and innocence.

She hangs there in her red dress, her hair is unruffled and with the objects that she can control, she derides the motion of time.

In March 2003, Donald Rumsfeld found himself philosophising about the nature of knowledge.

He classified it into “known knowns” (things we know that we know), “known unknowns” (things that we know we don't know) and finally “unknown unknowns” (things we don't know we don't know).

What he forgot to add is that Slovenian thinker Slavoj Zizek pointed out a crucial fourth term: the “unknown knowns” (the things we don't know that we know) which is precisely the Freudian unconscious, the “knowledge which doesn't know itself,” as Lacan used to say.

There is certainly an element of this when one encounters these “Red Dust Girl” paintings.

You relate to her in a way that you can't fully comprehend, there are things you just can not put a finger on, and it is precisely because there is something that you don't know you know about this girl.

Her story lies at the back of your mind sprinkled with the red dust of her life.

This is a huge triumph for both Leith and the impasto technique that he employs to such overwhelming effect.

-Brian Chikwava