LIN ONUS 1948 - 1996 | 24 Hours by the Billabong Late Morning

Fire-Works Gallery, Brisbane, 24 Hours by the Billabong, 1993
Private Collection, Queensland
Lawson-Menzies, Sydney, 14 November 2007, lot 22
Private Collection, Sydney
Menzies, Sydney, 13 September 2012, lot 28
Private Collection, USA, acquired from the above sale
Paul G. Allen Family Collection, Seattle, acquired from the above
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Brisbane, Fire-Works Gallery, 24 Hours by the Billabong, 1993

Please note, this work is spray paint and synthetic polymer paint on canvas, stretched, unlined and unframed. The work appears to be in excellent condition overall with no visible evidence of repair or restoration. Signed by the artist in the lower right hand corner.
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In the 1980s, Lin Onus was one of the pioneers of an Aboriginal art movement that originated in the cities. It saw the emergence of Indigenous artists who were either self-taught or who had studied at art school, and who were descendants of the original inhabitants of the lands, mainly along the eastern and southern seaboards, that were the first to feel the impact of colonization from the late eighteenth century. Onus had an apprenticeship in his father’s, Bill Onus, art and souvenir gallery that employed artists to create and decorate traditional Aboriginal artefacts and design textiles, furniture and ceramics.¹ Lin Onus’s early paintings from the 1970s were landscapes in which he gradually experimented with a variety of techniques and optical effects to render nature. His artistic mentor, the renowned Arnhem Land bark painter Jack Wunuwun (1930-1991), had encouraged Onus to look at the ground beneath his feet and through the surface of water when painting the landscape. One of the earliest resolved examples of painting water is Fences, fences, fences of 1985, which features a lake and forest at Barmah in his family’s traditional lands separated from the viewer by a mesh fence.² The image is an indictment of the official historic separation of Aboriginal people from their ancestrally inherited lands.

Onus had perfected the hyper-real technique of rendering the effect of light through and reflected off the surface water by the time in 1988 that he painted Jimmy’s Billabong, in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, a scene viewed through a cross-hatched Arnhem Land clan design;³ and Barmah Forest, 1994, in the collection of the Australian Heritage Commission.⁴ Various species of fish made their appearance in Onus’s water paintings with images such as Morumbeeja Pitoa (Floods and Moonlight), 1993, in the collection of the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation.⁵ 24 Hours by the Billabong Late Morning, 1993, is one of twelve paintings made of one site at different times of day: another in the series, Gathering Storm, 1993, is in the collection of the Seattle Art Museum in the USA.⁶

In 2000, a major retrospective of Lin Onus’s art, Urban Dingo: The Art and Life of Lin Onus 1946-1998, toured Australia.

WC

1 Bill Onus (1906-1968) was an activist for Aboriginal rights and an entrepreneur
2 Onus, L., M. Neale, M. Eather et. al., Urban Dingo: The Art and Life of Lin Onus, 1948-1996, Craftsman House in association with the Queensland Art Gallery, South Brisbane, 2000, Plate 11, p.65 (illus.)
3 ibid, Plate 22, pp.74-5.Jimmy’s Billabong, 1988, is also illustrated in McLean, I., Rattling Spears: A History of Indigenous Australian Art, Reaktion Books, London, 2016, Plate 67, p.143 (illus.)
4 ibid, Plate 23, p.76 (illus.)
5 ibid, Plate 52, p.104 (illus.)
6 see http://art.seattleartmuseum.org/objects/33432/gathering-storm?