Arts Profile

Today : The West Australian Friday 23 April 2004 Page 6

Putting on the Blitz

RON BANKS

It might have been a long time ago but Doug Chambers still remembers the fear and excitement of the wartime bombing of London.

As an East Ender who lived near the docks, six-year-old Doug and his family would take to the Underground shelters every night when the sirens sounded.
With hundreds of other London families, they would spend the night in the comparative safety of these improvised shelters, emerging at dawn to survey the damage to their homes and shops.
"It was not uncommon for families to find their homes had become a pile of rubble overnight," the 69-year-old Chambers says.He recalls one incident when an incendiary bOmb went straight through the garage roof of the family home, and he relates how his father pushed the burning car out of the wreckage.
When the bombings became too intense Chambers and his siblings were evacuated to the countryside, where these East End-bred youngsters gained their first taste of rural life.
"We'd never seen sheep, or cows, or horses before," says Chambers, who was evacuated to a farm at Hereford in the Wey valley on the Welsh border.
Chambers' family managed to survive the German bombing raids
without too much damage, and as a young man Doug went on to become an artist.He trained at the Royal College of Art in London and after a couple of years teaching at Charterhouse school took an art teaching job in a school in Jamaica, where he lived for seven years.
By this time Jamaica was becoming a dangerous place, and Chambersthen with a young family - took them back to England.
Still with a wanderlust, he discovered there were art teaching jobs available in Canada or Australia. "It was a choice of a hot or a cold country," he says. "And I've never liked the cold. "
Chambers moved to Perth in 1970 to a post as an art teacher at the W A Institute of Technology, which was in transition from its former role as Perth Technical College to its new Bentley campus.
After working in fine arts at WAIT for a decade he moved to Darwin's Institute of Technology for several more years.
In 1986 he moved to Albany to set up an art annexe for Curtin University, where he continued his own art practice.
He has been exhibiting in Perth over the past three decades, first with
the Old Fire Station Gallery in 1974 and in more recent times at Galerie Dusseldorf in Mosman Park.
His career includes major prizes, from the Albany Art Competition to Matilda Bay Restaurant Prize, the
Holmes a Court Invitation Prize and the commission to design a poster for the 1991 Festival of Perth.
In his latest exhibition at Galerie Dusseldorf, Chambers returns to his childhood memories with a series of paintings of the images of war that excited his young imagination.
"I've painted them from the point of view of a very young boy," Chambers says. That accounts for the simple, even naive style of his depictions of planes, bombs, parachutists and explosions.
There are planes that fly down the canvas, or across it, and bombs that rain from darkened skies. These darker images are sometimes lightened by birds that bring a hint of the peace that would eventually come from the chaos of war.
Chambers' wartime recollections also extend to his time as an evacuee, with paintings of animals on farms and other aspects of country life more carefree images that provide a contrast to his storyboards of war through a child's eye.
He has also included a series of small landscapes of his current environment, the peaceful land around Balingup where he moved a
few years ago. The paintings include colourful impressions of seasonal change on the land.
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Then and Now is on show at Galerie Dusseldorf, 9 Glyde Street. Mosman Park, until May 9.