Art Essays
Wendy Sharpe
Saturday, March 12th, 2011 Art Column, Australian Art,Delacroix is reputed to have quipped that if an artist could not draw a man who had jumped from a fourth storey window before he hit the ground, he could never go in for “the big stuff”. Wendy Sharpe, who once painted a large-scale copy of Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus, would be up to the […]
Erased / The Primacy of Drawing
Saturday, March 5th, 2011 Art Column, Australian Art,Since its re-establishment as a fully independent institution, the National Art School has distinguished itself from its rivals by putting an exceptional emphasis on drawing. Even if a student is specialising in photography or ceramics, drawing remains a fundamental part of the course. The reasoning is simple: nobody ever suffered from being asked to draw. […]
Paul Hopmeier
Tuesday, March 1st, 2011 Australian Art,“When we have said that sculpture is not sculptural, not an object, not a game, demonstration, machine, architecture or theatre – what is it? It is a figuration with a presence, a thing of modern lineage, learned about always from previous sculpture, and the idea so passed on to anyone who can get it.” Sidney […]
Jim Anderson / Phillip Juster
Saturday, February 26th, 2011 Art Column, Australian Art,“I have tried too in my time to be a philosopher,” said Dr. Johnson to his biographer, Boswell, “but I don’t know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.” Seeing the exhibition, Lampoon: An Art Historical Trajectory 1970-2010, I thought these lines were oddly appropriate for Jim Anderson. In a retrospective at Sydney University’s Tin Sheds […]
Anne Wallace / Fiona McMonagle / Sophie Cape
Saturday, February 19th, 2011 Art Column, Australian Art,As floods follow droughts, the art dealers are hoping a new year will bring clients rushing back through their doors. The previous twelve months were so quiet and visitation so poor, that 2011 simply has to be better. This may be an optimistic view, but only an optimist would ever open a commercial gallery. The […]
Jeff Carter
Saturday, February 12th, 2011 Art Column, Australian Art,Ideally we expect a steely detachment from our arts professionals, but Barry Pearce, the retiring Curator of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of NSW, recently admitted that he couldn’t be objective about the works of Justin O’Brien. At the State Library last week I had the same feeling about the late Jeff Carter, one […]
Monanism
Saturday, February 5th, 2011 Art Column, Australian Art,Until about twelve months ago Tasmanian millionaire, David Walsh was the most mysterious presence in Australian art. He was the invisible man, much talked about but rarely seen. All this has changed with the launch of his long-awaited Museum of Old and New Art. The phantom has materialised in the form of a middle-aged pub […]
Mary Tonkin
Tuesday, February 1st, 2011 Australian Art,At first glance Mary Tonkin’s new paintings make one think of the scorched and blackened residues after a bush fire has roared through a forest, but here appearances may be deceiving. The area of the Dandenongs where she has her studio on a family property has its share of scorched trees and undergrowth, but this […]
Justin O’Brien
Saturday, January 22nd, 2011 Art Column, Australian Art,Thinking of Justin O’Brien my memory flies back to a day in Rome when I was taking “Justin’s tour” with his old friend and fellow expatriate, Jeffrey Smart. As we approached the church of Sant’Agostino, which contains works by Caravaggio and Raphael, we were met with a blast of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue. A funeral […]
Gustave Moreau
Saturday, January 15th, 2011 Art Column, International Art,In Hollywood’s version of the past the critics were always hostile and blinkered, while the misunderstood genius struggled for a recognition that it is now given freely. We’d like to believe that a great artist is always ahead of his or her time, making work for future generations, but this romantic idea rarely survives close […]