The Solitary Watcher; Rick Amor and his Art. (Books: Poets Of Brush And Pen).

 
The Solitary Watcher; Rick Amor and his 
Art, by Gary Catalano; Melbourne 
University Press/Miegunyah, 2001, 
$89.95. 

HOW ODD IT IS the way lives touch sometimes briefly and inconsequentially, only to rearrange themselves in a fresh, kaleidoscopic pattern later on.

I first met Rick Amor, who is the subject of this fine new book by Gary Catalano, in London in 1985 when Amor managed to recognise me somehow from a small photograph on the back of a book I had written on art. Amor had read my book some years earlier in Melbourne. I do not think either of us dreamt for a moment that just ten years later I would find myself as a stranger in Amor's country just as he was a stranger then in mine.

Rick Amor introduced me in turn to Clifton Pugh, who painted my portrait in London before he died. In honour of the two Australian artists, I arranged a lunch in London and also invited the English painter John Wonnacott to meet them. Another Australian painter, Adrianne Strampff, was also present. The careers of Wonnacott and Amor have taken major steps forward since that late summer day in London sixteen years ago.

These were just some of the musings prompted by the arrival of Gary Catalano's The Solitary Watcher: Rick Amor and his Art on my desk.

As a poet, Catalano attaches great importance himself to feelings prompted by recollections, and approaches his subject with a general lightness of touch I have seldom encountered since becoming embroiled at first hand myself in the unusual world of Australian art. Most appropriately, in view of his approach, Catalano opens his book with a quotation from Marcel Proust. What better way could anyone possibly begin a book which touches on the perennial difficulty of recapturing the rapture of first impressions?

Rick Amor was born in 1948 at Frankston, Victoria, and has spent much of his subsequent life living in broadly the same area. This has allowed the poetic power of his memories to throw down roots and flourish.