Dick Frizzell is a popular and accomplished painter, print-maker and something of an art historian – as in the recent Me, According to the History of Art (2020) – but it is something of a surprise to discover he is also an amateur cosmologist.

He has such sufficient grasp of such relatively arcane territory as to author The Sun Is a Star - a popularising book on the subject with a professional in the field, Samantha Lord, and visual contributions from Frizzell himself and about 30 of the artist’s friends.

Being well-connected, Frizzell has been able to draw on the talents of a heap of well-known artists, including (to mention some of the better known), Mark Braunias, Judy Darragh, Max Gimblett, Virginia Leonard, Karl Maughan, Sam Mitchell, Reg Mombassa (who for some reason is omitted from the biographical notes), Gregory O’Brien, Ani O’Neill, Reuben Patterson, Martin Poppelwell, Patrick Pound, John Pule, John Reynolds, Graham Sydney, Denys Watkins and Wayne Youle – it’s quite a line-up.

Others are drawn from Frizzell’s friends and family and since the origin of the book was a remark by his 7-year-old granddaughter (preserved in the title), the whole enterprise has an appealingly personal and parochial flavour.

Looking at the dates on the art works it is evident that some artists offered an appropriate image drawn from their back catalogue (for example Sydney, O’Brien, Watkins) while others have responded with new images suited to the purpose (for example, Maughan, Mitchell and Pule). Some are represented by images easily recognisable as related to their regular practice (as in the case of Braunias and Gimblett) while others have accepted the challenge to strike out in a new direction.

For instance, Maughan, closely identified with paintings of gardens, has offered an incandescent orange circle, thick with juicy paint squeezed straight from the tube (or so it appears), against a jet-black background – a stunning image of the sun as a source of life. O’Neill, on the other hand, in a work entitled Creater-Creator, offers an image of the cratered surface of the moon constructed from scores of crocheted doilies of different sizes – a delightful and surprising image.

Frizzell’s and Lord’s text aims at combining scientific accuracy with homely and sometimes amusing explanations. For example, the existence of differing seasons in southern and northern hemispheres is described this way: “Very, very early in its life, the Earth got an almighty smack in the head from a massive meteorite. This knocked the Earth out of kilter and put it on the tilt that it’s still on today.”

The aim is to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, especially but not exclusively children – a thoroughly worthy aim successfully achieved for the most part (though adult readers may wince occasionally at forced folksiness).

Some of the concepts the authors are attempting to explain are mind-bendingly difficult (big bang, black holes, space-time, universal consciousness and the like) but most readers are likely to learn something new from the book as well as being entertained both verbally and visually. Production values are high.

Reviewed by Peter Simpson