Trevor Nickolls

1949–2012

Trevor Nickolls drew from an early age and was awarded a diploma in Fine Art (Painting) from the South Australian School of Art, Adelaide, in 1970. He held his first solo exhibition, From Dreamtime to Machinetime, at Canberra Theatre Centre Gallery in 1977. The exhibition title crystallised as a central preoccupation of his work the conflict between Dreamtime—his strong sense of Aboriginal identity, spirituality and affinity with land—and Machinetime, the ambivalent impact of the dominant culture, its giddying and enticing machines, materialism and technological advancement.

Third eye was painted in 1986, three years after Nickolls lived and worked in Darwin, where his direct encounter with Aboriginal art inspired him to move away from the dichotomous tension of the Dreamtime-Machinetime theme and to imagine a spare landscape suffused with spirituality. As he commented in 1985: ‘It is strange; I am sitting here in the city, dreaming of the vast northern landscape’.1 This led to a number of fluid and relaxed landscapes of an almost abstract cast, exemplified by Third eye, which, as Nickolls states, ‘is a theme that I come back to—the spiritual, the concept of the “third eye”, characteristic of the hippy culture and beatlemania of the mid 1980s’.2 The eye set within a pyramid refers to Egyptian art and also belongs to a universal alphabet of symbols, expressive of Nickolls’s aim to ‘bridge the gap between Western art and Aboriginal art’.3

Other details of the iconography reflect Nickolls’s intimate knowledge of Indigenous art. The hand stencil echoes its constant use in rock art as a signature and points up Nickolls’s Aboriginality. His use of blue for the handprint and throughout the composition occurred because he had seen blue paint in historical examples of Aboriginal art from south-east Australia. The freely painted cross-hatching reflects his fascination with herringbone line work found in Noongar art from South Australia and indirectly refers to the bark tradition. The loosely drawn, irregular border comes from a period when he was using borders to free his work from the constraints of hard, rectangular edges. The triangular subdivisions suggest topographical features of the landscape—here conceived without a horizon line.

1 Trevor Nickolls, quoted in Ulli Beier, Dream Time—Machine Time: The Art of Trevor Nickolls, Bathurst, NSW, 1992, p. 86.

2 Trevor Nickolls, discussion with author, 26 May 2004.

3 ibid.

Judith Ryan