Simon Gende was taught painting by his kinsman Mathias Kauage (1944–2003), a senior artist from his region who was based in Port Moresby for over 30 years, and who is also represented in the Queensland Art Gallery's Collection.

Gende's work has evolved from what author and curator Susan Cochrane has identified as 'the new Highlands art movement'.¹ His work has been influenced by Kauage's style and themes, exemplified by decorative qualities, saturated colours and technological subject matter. In the painting No 1 Kiap Australia Mr Jim Taylor I brukim bush long Highlands Papua Niugini (The first Australian Officer, Mr Jim Taylor, in an exploratory mission in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea), Gende represents the figure as a silhouette. At the time this was a new stylistic development not only in Gende's work but also in the context of new Highlands art. The dark figures of Jim Taylor and the indigenous carriers are almost floating in the mountain range, reminiscent of shadow theatre puppets. They are set against the strong sunlight that reduces the sky and distant landscape to bright yellow and deep orange colour fields. Although minimal in this work by Gende, the depiction of landscape was atypical of new Highlands art at the time.

Australia administered various regions of Papua New Guinea from 1906 until the country's independence in 1975. In March 1938 Sydney-born Police Officer Jim Taylor, Patrol Officer John Black, Medical Assistant CB Walsh, and their police and carriers left Mount Hagen, (the most westerly of the government's Highland bases), on an epic journey into the unexplored Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Along the way the patrol attracted a great deal of attention from locals and upon its return to Mount Hagen, in mid-1939, people came from far and wide to observe the foreigners.²

Endnotes

1. Susan Cochrane, Contemporary art in Papua New Guinea, Craftsman House, Roseville, 1997, p.55.
2. Hank Nelson, Masters in the tropics, in Australians 1938, Gammage, Bill and Spearritt, Peter (eds), Fairfax, Syme & Weldon Associates, Broadway, NSW, 1987, p.430 (Australians: A historical library).