Reg Mombassa Artist talk at Frank Watters Gallery

An article I had published on the Art Month Blog.

Take yourself back to 1993. It’s Boxing day. A barbeque is ablaze, the bin is quickly filling up with empty bottles of VB and cheap white wine, a game of backyard cricket is in full swing. Chances are someone is wearing a Mambo t-shirt, and chances are Reg Mombassa designed it.

The New Zealander-cum-Australian has lived a double life of sorts; The name Chris O’Doherty appears on his birth certificate, but during his years of playing with Mental as Anything, designing for Mambo, and during the fine art career which has run concurrently with these “distractions”, he has been known as Reg.

I saw Reg speak last Tuesday at Frank Watters Gallery in Darlinghurst, where he has been represented since the mid-1970s when he was a student at the National Art School. As his presentation made abundantly clear, this is an artist who does not take his work, or indeed anything too seriously.

O’Doherty showed works dating back to his early years when his paintings depicted the fibro houses in the outer suburbs of Auckland. These works suggest a nostalgia bordering on melancholia, but as always with O’Doherty’s work, there are double meanings. These new houses pictured glowing in the afternoon sun also reflect the optimistic, prosperous time following the rigours of the Depression and war.

Most recent works are more directly humorous and even show Surrealist tendencies.

Works like the Hireronymous Bosch parody, The Road to Clovely (1977) include crucifix-like TV poles. Works like Poplars and copse near Oberon (2000) allow O’Doherty to reveal his affection for the landscape and for the small, fragile dwellings we erect so proudly in the most isolated locations, perhaps as a proof of our existence.

The works that really strike me are his small black and white drawings or ‘false etchings’ as he named them on Tuesday. Like in the work of Peter Booth, the landscapes are distorted and even border on the apocalyptic. But he did not dwell long on these works, instead highlighting his more satirical works, in which he takes an aggressive stance in relation to the ugliness and stupidity that he finds nestled in whatever passes for the Australian Dream. The familiar becomes vaguely sinister; barbeques look like visiting spacecraft; dogs and birds gambling near Lucas Heights wear the explosive belts of suicide bombers. Smartly dressed footballers (1993) shows two men in business suits engaged in murderous grappling on the football field.

It was a real joy to see one of Australia’s most understated icons discuss his varied career. O’Doherty has a way of playing down everything; the anecdotes of his time on the road with the Mentals took the form of band members entertaining one another by wearing ice-cream cones on their noses. There were no stories of wild and reckless drug and alcohol binges, just of quickly sketching with charcoal the vistas he saw out of the tour bus window. And the great sense of humour, which is on show in his work, is definitely apparent in his persona.

Images courtesy Watters Gallery.