Sam Byrne: Folk painter of the Silver City by Ross Moore

Before I came across this attractive and instructive book, I knew very little of the art of Sam Byrne, thinking of him merely as one of a group of outback ‘primitives’ based on Broken Hill, the Silver City, of whom the best known is Pro Hart. Because of its two-dimensional colour, naïve art is easier to reproduce in colour than more sophisticated or complex painting. Consequently one can assume that the brilliant colours in the book’s copious plates provide reasonable approximations to Byrne’s originals. Sam Byrne, the miner cum amateur inventor who took up brushes to teach himself to paint after his retirement from the Line of Lode in his sixties, was a very gifted man indeed. His good-natured wife, Florence, regarded Sam the painter, assisting him to sell his pictures from their home in Wolfram St. For three decades he poured out from a tin-shed studio a stream of vividly coloured, densely populated and animated pictorial memories of the Barrier: area and the Silver City. Ross Moore, himself a native of Broken Hill and a painter, successfully weaves together two histories in his illuminating text, that of the elderly folk artist and that of his life-long environment, Broken Hill, with its early hardships of strikes, the 1909 lock-out and police batonings, its booze, bare-fisted grudge fights, rabbit plagues and terrible dust storms. Sam painted them all from memory. Moore’s text is fortunately both anecdotal and socio&shy;historical. Sam painted with enormous zest and a refreshing spontaneity everything he saw and experienced. He combined a splendid feeling for rich colour with a strong sense of design and an untiring eye for significant detail, like an early Flemish painter. Ross Moore relates how the proverbial prophet neglected in his own land, Byrne was ignored by the community in Broken Hill until his worth was discovered and rewarded by professionals from the big cities. The painter, Leonard French, to his credit, awarded Sam first prize in the 1960 Broken Hill competition. French introduced Sam’s work to Rudy Komon who gave the unknown folk painter two one-man shows in his Sydney gallery, from which many sales were made. On the other hand, when Sam’s fellow naive painters in Broken Hill, Pro Han and others formed a group ‘The Brushmen of the Bush’ to promote their work, Sam, possible the best of them all, was not invited to join. Moore recounts how this betrayal hurt the old man. Sam Byrne was a true folk artist in the terms of contemporary Australian society and, to me, his art makes the calculated folksiness of Sir Nolan look pretty slick and glib. On the other hand, this book raises for me some questions concerning the naïve. For example, as one of the few Australian professional painters who has made studies of underground workings in both silver and lead and coal mines, the first in Broken Hill, the latter in Wonthaggi, I found to my surprise Sam Byrne’s underground scenes inadequate despite his intimate familiarity with the theme. It appears to me the explanation lies within the inbuilt limitations of the ‘child vision’ of the naïve painter who can depict or illustrate nature and life’s experience but cannot recreate reality in all its dimensions. Sam shows police batons raining down on miners’ heads but cannot convey the full horror of the violence. The many colour plates in this book are supported by an equal number of fascinating black and white photos of the Byrnes and of the Silver City itself. There is a selected bibliography and an index.

Noel Counihan

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