Barry Dickins
"Here's Luck"
2 - 11 May
2024
Barry Dickins’ long and continuous connection with the great Australian comic writer Lenny Lower may well have begun at birth – if not at birth – then certainly not too long afterwards – as Barry’s gifts as writer, wit and raconteur ripened early on, as did his innate understanding of the many layers of Lower’s life and written work.
In many ways Barry has been Melbourne’s own Lenny Lower, with a good helping of William Pigeon (aka WEP) - the illustrator of Lower’s stories – thrown in to boot – as Barry has always been the brilliantly inventive illustrator of his own narratives, commentaries and inventions.
Barry’s play “Lonely Lenny Lower” – first presented at Melbourne’s PlayboxTheatre in February 1982 was not only a tribute to Lower – the comic genius –but in many respects it may be read as a self-portrait, peeling back the layers of the palpitating pressures so often exerted on our great public entertainers.
Barry’s understanding of Lower has been so profound, that when in 2014 he set out to depict the Sydney writer’s novel “Here’s Luck” – the multitudinous images of rambunctious and uproarious Randwick, flowed from the Dickins’ hand in an incomparable torrent of pictorial poetry.
These drawings not only afford us immediate pleasure and delight – but in a boundless “Magic Pudding” sort of way, they offer an endless supply – an eternal gift of wonderment and amazement.
